The In's the Outs of womanhood

Life can be complex at times...as I reflect on my everyday life what I have struggled with as being a woman and a mother of 2 young children is "I want my body back, and energy back that I had when I was 26... you may think that is a strange age but if you knew me back then you would understand. I was training for a marathon and I was in the best shape of my life. or even a few years later...pre-pregnancy...

Granted back then I did not have a 2 1/2 year old and a 2 month old at the time and was not married (don't get me wrong I love being married and being a mother...I have the most amazing husband in the world and the most beautiful, smartest, funniest kids. I love my life....I just don't care for the shape my body is in). When I was 26 I was single, had plenty of time to run, exercise, my time was my own. It's no longer my own and it's spread out between my family and sleep. It's hard to get up early in the mornings when I have adorable little ones to snuggle with in the morning. Plus my body is trying to tell me I'm not as young as I use to be. My heart and mind tell me I'm still in my young 20's but my body says I'm definitely older then that. I'm not ancient, but my body has aches and pains where I use to not to have....What's up with that"?! =] lol

I only have 24 more pounds to get back down to pre-pregnancy weight (where I was at in the picture above). I know life isn't about what size you are but as a woman it does help you feel more comfortable in your own skin.

Just a little snip nip of my thought on life for today.

Knowing the love of God

Having kids have helped me understand the love God has for us. As a parent I fall in love with my children more each day. They are so much fun and with my little girl as she gets older her personality comes out more. She has a very intellegent side to her but she also has a very

goofy side to her as you can see below.

She brings so much joy and laughter into my everyday life. As a mom I'm so proud of her and I love to just hang out with her because she is so funny and entertaining.
My relationship and enjoyment of just being around my 2 1/2 year old daughter and my 6 week old son makes me heart sing and dance at just the thought of them. Now how much more God our Father who is perfect in love must enjoy us as His children. He must just love sitting back and watching us in our goofy silliness at times and smile. I wish all parents could see how beautiful and fun their kids are in who they are as little people.
To all parents "enjoy every moment you have with your kids because they grow up oh so quickly and before you know it they are off into living their own lives."
I try to remind myself to enjoy each season I have with them and to see how much I enjoy them how much more God enjoys us as His children.

Love is not proud or rude

God is all powerful, mighty and glorious, there's no other that can compare...

He has all the reason in the world to boast about Himself and be prideful...but pride is a sin and there is no sin found in God. He doesn't have to brag on Himself to prove how amazing He is, if we really look into how He moves in our lives everyday we can be absolutely awed by His abundance of love for us. From the simple little acts of kindness others do for us or even the simple little delay in traffic. We never know what is going on ahead of us but just maybe God uses that delay to help us avoid being in an accident.
(Historic Earthquakes

Klamath Falls, Oregon
1993 September 21 03:28:55 UTC Magnitude 6.0
1993 September 21 05:45:33 UTC Magnitude 6.0

The Klamath Falls earthquakes caused two deaths and approximately 7.5 million U.S. dollars in damage. One person was killed when the car he was driving was crushed by a boulder in an earthquake-induced rockfall and another person died of a heart attack. More than 1,000 homes and commercial buildings were damaged. Maximum intensity VII in downtown Klamath Falls and at the Oregon Institute of Technology about three kilometers north of downtown. Three highways leading to Klamath Falls were temporarily closed because of rockfalls or concern about possible damage to bridges. Rockfalls and rockslides occurred in roadcuts and on steep slopes throughout the epicentral region. Ground cracks in fill material were observed at several locations in the area. Felt in southern Oregon as far north as Eugene and in northern California as far south as Redding)

I remember back in 1993 I was driving with my mom back home from Klamath Falls, OR to Chilliquin, OR (about a 30 minute drive). While we were driving a rolling earthquake hit (which if you've ever been driving during a rolling earthquake you don't really know it's going on...we just thought the wind picked up and was blowing the car back and forth). We found out the next day that there was a couple who drove the same road we were driving on only 10 minutes behind us and a 14 foot boulder came down off the cliff and landed on their vehicle killing the driver and the passenger got a scratch on her finger. That made me sad for the wife's loss of her husband but grateful at the same time because that could have been my mother and I who could have been hit by that 14 foot boulder, killing me and sparing my mother but at the loss of her youngest daughter. God watches over us in so many different ways.
He loves us so much that He is never rude or demanding. Even though He just desires to be in relationship with us He would never force us to be in a relationship with us. He draws us to Himself and calls us oh, so gently.

He whispers to us that "He loves us and wants to be a part of our life"

Are you open & willing to answer that calling?!

God's Love does not Envy or Boast

Just the thought of God ever envying us makes me Laugh Out Loud...what a joke. What would He envy us for?! There are so many others who may envy our lives or we may even envy their lives...I know so many who would love to have the kind of money Bill Gates has


or the fame of Tom Cruise, neither of those can buy happiness or true joy. Bill Gates is so wealthy he could buy anything he wanted. And it seems Tom Cruise has it all...money, fame, good looks, a beautiful wife, beautiful children (what more could a man want). But whose to say Bill Gates or Tom Cruise has a true joy deep down in their souls? The only ones who know the answer to that question, is themselves and God.
To be quite honest with you I don't envy either one....who would want the flip side to their fame> the paparazzi, news media up in your face all the time, no place to go to get your own privacy...definitely not a life for me. But to each his own, there's a cost for everything. God's been there, done that. He's came to us in human flesh and bone. Been tempted like all of us (but never sinned) Been persecuted, beaten beyond recognition, suffered even death on the cross through His son Jesus Christ. "For even I, the Son of Man (Jesus Christ), came here not to be served but to serve others, and to give My life as a ransom for many" Matthew 20;28. Now why would He ever envy doing that all over again. But you know the reason why He did all of that, was because He loves us so much that and doesn't want to have to spend eternity seperate from us and if He had to do it all over again He would. God doesn't boast of how powerful or majestic He is. Or brag of all that He has done

(we can just look around and see the vastness of His glory). All He desires is to whisper in our ears...

"I love you so very much"!!!

Never the Same

When we encounter God's love we are never the same!!! How big and vast is His love for us. How many of us have really taken a moment to contemplate how much God loves us? It's so amazing when we take time out of our busy lives to meditate on God's love for us...

John 3:16 says "for God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life."

He loves us so much that He gave up His one and only Son to come die on a cross, suffering a horrific death.To see how muchg Jesus loves us Check out "See His Love" by Kim Walker video

www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMoSyqMEbIk&feature=related

just think, how much Jesus, His Son loves us, that He would give up His place in heaven to come down and share His love with a condemned and dying world. God is perfect and therefore loves us perfectly.

1 Corinthians 13:4-8 tells us what perfect love looks like.

"love is Patient, love is kind, it does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails..."

WOW! that's how God loves us... Now, some of you maybe saying "yeah right...there's no such love as this"...because in this world filled with sin and our human nature we are not perfect and we have never experienced that kind of love from another human being but God is perfect and He is patient with us...I know, because I've made plenty of mistakes and tried to do things on my own and He waits so patiently for me to return to His open and loving arms, to just hold me as I cry out to Him repenting and turning from my sin. He is so kind in His actions toward His people even when He has to discipline us to get us to turn from our sins because He knows they only lead to our entrapment and hold us captive not being able to live a free life He has called us to.

The list goes on and on how He loves us but I will stop with the first two and come back to the rest of the list on how God loves us so perfectly. But I want to leave you with one of my favorite songs... go check out the video on youtube...

"Oh How He Loves us" by Kim Walker

How Great Is Our God!!!

"God is so GREAT, STRONG and so MIGHTY there's nothing my God cannot do, for you"!!!

It amazes me how true this Sunday School song rings...if you have had a relationship for any length of time getting to know Him and what His word says about Him then you would know that He is GREAT, STRONG and most definitely MIGHTY...that's there's nothing He cannot do...I feel that there's so many of us (me included) that with our feeble human minds that we try to shrink God down to our level

yet if we take a step back and look at all His creation and the vastness of the universe,

there has to be a Creator who made it all...

"When I consider your heavens,

the works of Your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
which You have set into place."Ps. 8:3

We didn't just "BANG" or explode into what we are today or even evolve into who we are as human beings...the intricate, little details of the mass cells we are made up of (there's no way we evolved to that)! Being pregnant and reading how we are put together as babies there's no way we evolved from monkeys or even a ghoulish piece of slime... He intricately forms and puts us together in our mother's wombs

Ps 139:13 "For you created my inmost being, You knit me in my mother's womb."

Ps 139:14
"....we are beautifully and wonderfully made..."

God's promises are so amazing about us!!!

He watches over us,

He loves us so much,

He desires to have a relationship with us.

Ps 8:4 "what is man that You are mindful of him,

the son of man that You care for him."

I love how much He loves us and how much He wants to be in an intimate relationship with us...oh how I hope everyone can grasp ahold of His love for us.=}

It's the small things!!!

"Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her..." Ephesians 5:25

It's definately the small, little acts of kindness that are the

glue that helps hold our marriages together.

My husband lately has been doing the small little things for me which in turn makes me want to serve him all the more. He's dropped what he was doing the other day and went to lunch with me. Then the very next day after going to a women's banquet he came out to carry the decorations I had to bring into the house from the car and brought them in for me and even grabbed the last box that was in my hands and carried it in for me. Then a few days after that it was freezer cold in the morning and I just asked him to bring the car seat in from the truck so I could put it in the car since I had another 2 year old I was picking up and he put the car seat in the car and buckled it in...which if you knew how cold it was here (it felt like 10 degrees that morning) now you can understand how much that meant to me=} And then I stopped at the store to pick up some dinner for us and our little one fell asleep before we even got there so I put her in a snugly pack and on our way back out of the store my husband surprised me by meeting me at the store and carried the groceries to his car and then carried them into the house for me so I could get our little girl to bed... Oh, if I could put it in a picture of how much I feel so loved and it's more then words can describe.

When the sun sets each and eveyday I love my husband more that day then the day before...he is so amazing and loves me in spite of my flaws=}

(thank God for that)!!!

Oh how lucky I do feel that God has blessed me with the husband that I have...there's no one else who would better fit for me...I thank God He brought us together.=}