A New Year Challenge

I was blessed with a very profound, beautifully written book for Christmas from my sister, called 'One Thousand Gifts' by Ann Voskamp. The message is meant to be life-changing, and one I intend to adopt for 2014!  Although it is a familiar lesson of becoming more grateful, much like Oprah Winfrey's Gratitude Journal, the challenge is to pay attention, record all the things you love, or perceive as gifts or blessings, and then to express your gratitude and thanks for them on a daily basis.  What this is meant to achieve is to make you realise that everything in your life is a blessing, whether good or bad. It has the power to change your perspective on things and erases all that whining, complaining and negativity from your life.  So much in our life we take for granted, expecting so much more than we often deserve, but when we focus our hearts on always being thankful, we will truly see God's grace in action. From a Biblical perspective, thankfulness precedes the miracles we hope for and is guaranteed to bring joy to your life. It is the means of living in the moment and experiencing a full, content life.

So in addition to wishing all my family and friends a Happy New Year, I also challenge you to start your own list of all the things you love...  I am excited to start this journey of developing the habit to become more thankful and I look forward to the joy it will bring to my life!

Christmas - Spend and Feast...

I hate this time of the year - not because I hate Christmas, but because I hate what it has become - A frantic, guilt trip of excessive present buying and the over-indulging of excessive amounts of food!  I wish Christmas could go back to being a time when it was all about spending time with family and remembering the birth of Jesus, when the presents that were given, were small, needed items or were often handmade with love.  I fear that Christmas has caused children to become greedy, 'want-some', spoilt brats, and whether it's Santa or the parents who get the thanks, it is seldom appreciated. 

Cooking the Christmas meal should be a joint affair, much like the Thanksgiving spreads we see displayed in Hollywood movies, where everyone brings a dish to contribute, thus making it less of a stressful ordeal for the host.  It should not be about how much food we should have, but possibly just a few luxury items that one doesn't normally eat.  And don't get me started on the Christmas crackers - why do we insist on buying them every year, when we know how lame the toys and jokes are.  Every year I promise myself to make some with better fillers, used with toilet roll inners and left over Christmas paper, but every year, I never do, and I doubt this year will be any different...

Sigh... If only Christmas could be more about Jesus, family, friends and fun, and less about the spend and feast!!

Consolidating your Compass & your Clock

As I prepare myself mentally for the coming New Year, I am acknowledging my problem in achieving my dreams is due to many things... The explanation of this title is bringing together where you want to go, in the limited time you have available. I know for myself, I love to procrastinate, so any tips I can learn about better time management, I'm all ears! Some of my other problems is a lack of time and a poor determination to achieve results.  David Jeremiah shared a wonderful illustration about our priorities and how to get more out of our day. He said that if you had a jar and put in all the big priorities (like God, family, friends, work etc) represented as rocks, you would have time for all the less important priorities (like entertainment, hobbies, cleaning, self etc), represented by sand.  But if you filled your day in reverse, you would find you don't have the space, hence time, for all the important things (rocks) that really do matter! So next time I find myself complaining that I have no time, or I am too busy, I intend to analyse my rocks and my sand... David also suggests carrying around a rock as a visual reminder, which I will also be doing!

Possessions

Having recently sold all our material possessions and given our stuff, not to the poor, but to our family and friends, it has made me re-evaluate my hold on 'stuff'!  So much of what we own are material comforts that so we often take for granted until we are forced to live without it. Sitting on a couch or sleeping in a bed are two luxuries I have a new found respect and appreciation for. Other possessions which held memorable attachments to the giver of the item were harder to let go of, but I believe that everything sentimental are memories to be held in your heart and not towards the item itself. When we get too attached to things, we become bound to them.  I can testify that releasing our lives from possessions is an extremely liberating experience.  When I watch these TV programs about people who have problems with hoarding, I realise how fortunate I am not to have that addiction. Our value and worth should never be put on what we own, wear, drive or live in.  Our identity is in who we are on the inside, and that includes our memories.  Yes, it is great to enjoy comfortable possessions, but our freedom lies in being able to easily say goodbye to them when we need to...

My Confirming God

As my family prepares for a new adventure in our lives in returning home, my prayer has always been that God will lead us into making right decisions that will keep us in His will for our lives.  As if that wasn't good enough, in my sad insecurity, I have also asked that God would confirm to me that we have made the right decisions. So you can imagine my excited surprise when I discovered, what I believe are signs from God, that we had indeed! I was told the other day that there was a French restaurant being opened a block away from where we live, in an old building called 'Brittania'. This was after we had purchased our flight tickets with 'Air France' and had already chosen 'Brittania' as our removal company! Also, when we gave notice to our tenant who rents our flat back home, it turned out that he was just about to give notice himself! Another hard decision we had to make was deciding whether to sell or rent out our current home. This again was confirmed to me when we received our Landlords Registration number which starts off with 376869. There are 3 of us in our family, we have lived in Scotland for 7 years and 68 and 69 are the abbreviated years that my husband and I were born. And if that wasn't amazing enough, for added measure that further shows what an amazing God we have, shopping for a new suitcase, lo and behold, there sitting in a local charity shop was the perfect one for only £4-50! And wouldn't you know it, it was even in my favourite colour purple!! God is SO good and to think that He would do this just for me, when I asked, just makes me love Him even more! God has always been faithful to give me signs when my limited faith has needed it, and I am grateful that I have been able to recognise them all! You may call them mere co-incidences, but to me they will always be proof of my all-confirming God!

To change or Not to Change...

In every relationship there is bound to be a conflict of ideas and opinions - only because God deliberately made us all very different, for a reason!  Recently, I've discovered the TV program 'Being Erica' and I honestly feel that through watching it, I am being healed of some of my past baggage. The basic theme in these episodes are about dealing with the regrets in your life through the eyes of Erica, who is counseled by a therapist, someone I've come to relate in my own life as 'God'.  In last week's episode, the drama was about relationships and how we so often try to manipulate our partners into changing to become the person we have created a mold for. We want them to react and behave in a certain way, and when they don't, we get annoyed. The truth is that no matter how much we want them to change, our nagging or cohersions will not make it so.  We are powerless to attempt it and it is a pointless, frustrating endevour to think we can. I have come to learn that we can only change others by first changing ourselves. When we decide to change how we react in certain circumstances, being mindful in how we respond to them, we will soon see many favourable results. The only power we have to change ourselves is by controlling our reactions and to consistently seek God's help in prayer. I believe it is possible to heal all kinds of relationships in this way, even marriage, but only when we do the changing first. We also need to learn to love our spouses for who they are, warts and all! Only when we are able to focus on their good points, will their flaws seem less annoying!

Life isn't fair, but God is GOOD!

When I first became a Christian, I had this notion that my life would suddenly start running smoothly, as if God was some kind of wizard who would now wave a wand to fix all my problems and make me detour every bump in the road.   Even the church I was going to at the time preached that problems and diseases were ‘not my portion’, so I prayed fervently, rebuking Satan and soon began feeling like a failure as a Christian when my problems persisted.  

Thankfully, God soon taught me that even as Christian, life would not always be fair, but that in every difficult situation, He would give me the strength, the wisdom and the peace to see me through it.  I’ve also learnt that regardless of why God allows certain problems in our lives, they can and should always give us the opportunity to grow through them and be the catalyst in improving our attitudes and purifying our hearts.

The truth is that we live in a fallen world, where there are consequences for every action and unfortunately, bad things do still happen to us, even when we are praying for them not to…

However, in saying that, I do still believe that God does protect us from a lot of stuff and when we are tuned into the Holy Spirit, and seeking His wisdom, we can avoid a lot of unnecessary troubles.

The goodness of God is always present, no matter how dire the situation.  My greatest lesson has been to discover that as I face each new problem, I am able to react to them better, as I mature in my faith.  The success comes from how we handle our problems and what we are praying for during them and knowing that despite life’s bumps in the road, our faith can still remain steadfast in the midst of them. 

God's Hidden Treasures

 God has taught me that no matter how difficult life can be, there are always hidden treasures to discover, if we will just lift our heads, and open our eyes and ears to find them!  I cannot tell you how often a singing bird will appear when I am feeling down, or I find a coin on the ground when I’m feeling concerned about the finances.  

I like to think that God uses these hidden treasures to help encourage us when He knows we need it and to remind us that He cares for us.  Some may call these convenient coincidences, but for me, God’s timing is always too perfect to be considered that.

What I have learnt is that when we are not observant enough, we so often miss these treasures that God wants to share with us.  When we become so obsessed with ourselves and our problems, we lose sight of things like sunrises, sunsets and rainbows, those very treasures designed to lift our hope and make us smile.

So no matter what struggles you are going through today, be sure to seek out God’s little treasure surprises and I promise you, you will not be disappointed!

Truth is like a Mountain

 

Having recently reunited with someone from my past and trying to make sense of a difficult chapter in my life, I’ve come to learn that the truth of what happened is sometimes relative to a person’s perspective and memory.  

I believe that very often we embrace a certain version of the truth that makes it easier for us to live with.  The thing about ‘truth’ is that it has so many different versions and in reality, only God can see it from all angles. I like to think that truth is like a mountain and depending on what part of the mountain we can see, it is what we accept to be the truth.  Maybe that’s what has happened with all the different denominations of interpreting the Bible in their own way…  It is all the same truth, just a different angle of it. 

The Bible tells us that the truth will set us free, and I believe that’s true, but I’ve also learnt that when it comes to God’s truth, it’s the condition of our heart’s soil that determines the interpretation. And when it comes to the truth told by a person, we have to accept what they tell us at face value, because no matter how difficult it is to understand sometimes, people don’t always behave the way we expect them to and sometimes the assumed stories we make up in our mind can be very far from the truth.

Instead, let us trust God to be the judge of what is the honest truth and when it’s not, then all we can do is pray that the person’s own conscious will convict them…