Honesty time. I’ve never been good at setting aside time in my mornings to spend in God’s Word. I’m not a morning person. I used to sleep in until 9 or 10. I’d roll out of bed and go straight to my computer, losing hours on work or, more often than not, social media and other sites that were adding nothing to my life.

Oh, I had good intentions … sometimes. I would tell myself that tomorrow I’d stop and have quiet time before I turned on the computer. There was definitely a longing in my soul to dig into His Word, and I knew my spiritual life was suffering because of the constant distractions, pulling my attention away to things that didn’t do anything to nurture my heart and soul.

Not that I wasn’t finding positive things along the way – Christian friends online, encouraging blogs and websites I subscribed to, Bible quotes on Instagram. The good is there, too. But it’s so easy to skim on the internet. A glance at a quote. A few sentences of a post read because I knew I had other things to do. Never really staying on anything long enough to let it truly sink in and have an impact on me. Very much on the surface.

Sometimes I think I have the attention span of a three year old.

I shared here last fall about how I’d lost some weight after changing my eating habits. By year’s end, I had lost almost thirty pounds, which was awesome and made me feel so much better overall. But I still felt like I needed more of a change … on the inside.

For Christmas, my mom got me the She Reads Truth Bible and Matthew study book. They were things I had put on my wish list for her, but I had no idea if she would choose them for me or not. I love She Reads Truth, a wonderful online community I’ve mentioned here before that focuses on women getting into the Word daily, and I’ve done a few of their studies in the past on different books of the Bible. But many times I would just read the verses quickly and only read the daily emails they send that go along with the study. I wouldn’t sit with the verses and take time with them. I’d rush through.

But I don’t want to rush when it comes to what God wants to teach me through His Word.

The world is so much about hustle these days. Go, go, go. Got lots of work to do. And I get swept away in that. Wanting to succeed, to release more books, to make a little more income and help contribute financially to my little family. That can cause desperation and anxiety and that feeling that I need to hustle.

On Monday, January 1, I got up and cracked open my brand new Matthew study guide and my new Bible and began what has been a month of mornings started in God’s Word. That and reading through the Bible In A Year guide in the back of my new Bible.

They say it takes 21 days to form a habit. I’d say that’s pretty accurate.

In the beginning, I had to be very intentional about reading through the verses, slow myself down and really think on what the verses were saying, rather than my old habit of reading quickly/skimming. I had to try to clear my mind and not think about the list of things I needed to accomplish. Because I just knew in my heart that this was WAY more important than anything on that list.

Each day, it’s gotten easier, and I’m happy to report that this wonderful new habit is one that I’m so excited about when I get up every morning. I get out my notebook and Bible, open up the She Reads Truth site to the day’s study, read through the verses slowly, then read the daily post that goes along with them and jot down any thoughts I have or verses or quotes that stood out to me.

I only wish I’d stopped just thinking about doing this and actually done it a long time ago.

So many of these verses and stories I have heard throughout my life in Sunday School and Sunday sermons and church camp and college and beyond. But reading through them again, slowing down, focusing on what I’m reading, sitting with it for a bit as I start my day, asking God to show me what He wants me to learn, makes every chapter and verse seem brand new.

Sunday ended the study on Matthew and now we’re on to I & II Thessalonians. I’m also reading the book “One Thousand Gifts” by Ann Voskamp and listening to the podcast “The Next Right Thing” by Emily P. Freeman. I’m finding that so many of the themes in the things I’m reading and listening to are directly coinciding with the scripture I’m studying that day or week, which seems like it was perfectly timed by God just for me.

The remedy for my fallow heart is the Word.

– She Reads Truth study

This is a quote from the Matthew study regarding The Parable of the Sower on the She Reads Truth website. I liked it and jotted it down in my notebook because it felt like me. My heart has been like a fallow field, plowed and ready, but left unseeded for a season.

Time to do some planting. 😉

It’s been a while since I wrote an actual post here. Mostly, I’ve been taking all the words I’ve got and pouring them into my books. But this blog started out as a place to share my thoughts, my pictures, things I was going through, in the hope of connecting with family and friends and others who came across my blog. So my hope is to get back to that a little more from now on and share a little more of me.

A few weeks ago, I went to a Christmas musical with my parents at the church where I grew up. It was lovely, the message wonderful – Jesus is the reason we celebrate Christmas! If not for Him, there would be nothing to celebrate. Toward the end, I felt a little like a few tears might escape, but I held them in.

This is something I had been doing a lot over the past year since we found out my dad needed a liver transplant. Maybe longer, I don’t know. I’d been holding things in, trying to stay strong, and for whatever reason, I had turned off my emotions and felt a little numb. I’m not sure why I didn’t feel like it was OK to cry about this. I just couldn’t.

But that night after I got home, some little family drama unfolded here. Nothing major really in the grand scheme of things. Just bickering and such. Words were said. Doors were slammed. Teenage attitude reared its ugly head. And when everyone had retreated to their little corners of our house, I sat alone by the Christmas tree and started to cry. And cry. And cry. And cry.

I went to bed early and cried. Woke up crying. And then I sat down and started writing this post, totally weeping. So much so that I stopped writing, saved it for later, and stepped away from my computer.

This past year was difficult, and I really felt like I should’ve been celebrating rather than crying my eyes out. Because my dad got his liver on November 7th! He’s on the road to recovery. God answered our prayers. Dad was able to attend that Christmas musical with us and see many of the friends who had been praying him through all along.

There was a mishmash of reasons I was crying. But mostly I think it was tears of joy over all God brought us through. When my bout of crying ended, I felt so much better for having finally let it out after holding it all inside for a year.

I guess I just wanted to share this because it’s what I was going through. It’s real and honest and true. And because I know I’m not the only one who was crying at Christmastime, but I know it’s OK that I was.

For everything there is a season … a time to cry and a time to laugh.

Ecclesiastes 3

Something I’ve been dealing with the past week or two has been letting go of things I cannot control, which has always been a challenge for me. When I wrote Goodbye, Magnolia, I put a lot of myself into the character of Maggie, one of those characteristics being that she just can’t seem to let go and trust that God has a plan, that He sees the big picture when we can’t. It’s something I’m constantly re-learning in my life, something I fail at often. Because even though I know that God’s in control and truly believe it in my heart, I’m still human and I make mistakes and I’m not too proud to admit that. Every time I go through times like this, my mind returns to the verse that says “Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?” Nope! But I still do it.

My husband’s car broke down last week. I worry about it getting fixed so I don’t have to drive him back and forth to work.

Dad’s got a heart catheterization coming up to make sure his heart is all good and can handle liver transplant surgery. I worry about that, for sure.

My daughter is currently without a gym as we chose to leave the gymnastics team she competed with last season. I worry about finding a new gym for her for this year.

I’ve got a sale coming up on my 3-book set at the end of the week. I worry about promoting it well, whether it will be a successful sale, and if I will make the money back that I paid to advertise it.

These are only a few of the things weighing on my mind these past weeks, and everything kind of came to a head this weekend, leaving me feeling quite overwhelmed.

But when I step back and look at each of these things individually, I know they will all work out. One thing at a time. Jake will get his car fixed. Dad’s heart doctor will tell us if he finds anything troubling and it will get fixed. We will find a gym for Chloe. And even if only one person buys the book set during the sale, then that person was probably the only one that was meant to read it and that’s OK. 😉
So, I’m learning and growing (hopefully), and I’m praying that next time I feel the worry coming on, I’ll say, “Nope! Don’t need to worry about that. God’s brought you through a lot worse than this.”

I’m sure I’m not the only worrier out there, so here is the passage I mentioned in case you need to be reminded of this today, too:

Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life.

Matthew 6:25-27

Have a blessed week!

Many years ago, I wrote a song entitled “He Knows” based on one of my favorite verses, Jeremiah 29:11. Thanks to a wonderful friend at our church, we have a recorded version of the song from shortly after I wrote it, but I never wrote the music out. It was just in my head. And over the years, I played my piano less and less and when I would sit down and try to play it, it just wasn’t there.

It’s amazing how the mind works, though.

We recently moved my piano out of our house into my parents’ and after it was in place in mom and dad’s family room, I sat down and started playing around. Chloe told me to play my song and I told her that I didn’t remember it anymore. She has a copy of the recorded version on her phone and she sat it on top of the piano and hit play. I started to pick it out a bit at the beginning and then … my fingers suddenly took off. There were a couple places that I got stopped up and had to pick out the notes, but the whole thing came back to me. It was the most incredible thing. Mom and Chloe were cracking up at my face, because I was staring at them with wide eyes, mouth hanging open, not even looking at the keys as my fingers played the song completely from memory. Muscle memory.

I am in awe of the way God created our complex brains.

Maybe when I sat down at home to try to play it before, I was blocked for some reason. Maybe I just needed to let my mind and fingers find it at the right time. Whatever the reason, it was a fun moment to share with my mom and my daughter.