Beauty from Ashes - A Continual Process

gives us true hope. We don’t have to have life figured out. We can’t figure it out.  We can find comfort in just breathing the next breath as a gift.  And then the next... I’ve recently been learning to build strength in my body and manage fibromyalgia through yoga.  This practice reminds me of the truth God taught me a long time ago...live in this very moment, live in the presence of our amazing God - right now.   One way we can be present with Him is to soak in His love letter to us.  That's what I'm sharing today, His Words to our hearts. I'm not sharing my specifics of my story today, only enough to say, God does redeem all the hard...and will be redeeming the hard until heaven. I know that each of us have a story.  My hope is to encourage you today. He is faithful to turn many sorrows into many strengths, each time building our faith muscle.  The strength often comes slowly.  Just like the muscles we b...

Why do I envy that old photo of me 27 years ago with long flowing hair and a waistline?  That girl was so afraid, so sick, so sad, so confused about her identity, so insecure.  She longed  for a million hurts of others to be gone. She longed for a strong connection with God.  She was not lost, but she felt very lost.  She couldn't comprehend that she was always in the palm of God's hand.   Acts 17:26 "God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us .  28 ‘For in him we live and move and have our being."   He was there with me.   So why let an old pic create a longing for what once was?  Or often a "do-over!" Each season of my life was teaching me to trust, to love, to ask for and receive.  Receive healing physically, emotionally and spiritually.  We all need that.  And from those places, those seasons, gro...

The sun is shining in Kentucky this Labor Day weekend.  But it doesn't feel like it to some.  Do you see them?  Are you that person? "Do you know someone who needs encouraging in their faith today?"   The reply  of  the unknown reader was "yes, me."    I froze for a moment. I have been there, have you?  That place where you can't encourage your own heart?  You are too numb to think.  You pray to God, you read His Word, you listen to worship, and yet it's so dark.  You're screaming, but it's silent..., you feel no one would want to hear it. It's just not true.  We care, there is someone ready to listen.  We are meant to be here for each other, to help share the load, better yet, to shift the load to God's shoulders. "Take care, brothers, lest there be in any of you an evil, unbelieving heart, leading you to fall away from the living God.   But exhort one another every day, as long as it is...

We all have seasons that take us to our knees in prayer.  But oh, to be steady there forever on my knees.  That is my prayer , and that is why I share.  Because I can never find peace on my own, with all my fixes and doubts.  "I’ve stood tall and I have crumbled in the same breath" are lyrics that jumped out at me yesterday from the song As You Find Me , by Hillsong United. It's by God's grace that I can look back and see the lengthening of seasons of peace as the seasons of despair shorten.  There is grace for that.  But there are things that come along that break my soul in pieces, and it is there that grace waits to catch me.  It's there for you too. Until our journey on earth takes us to Heaven, we will face mountains that seem to separate us from the love of our Heavenly Father.   But the truth is that He has the purest love a Father can have.  His love is strengthening His children during the hardest of times because  He...