What are my priorities?

                  Commit your activities to the Lord and your plans will be achieved. Proverbs 16:3

I am determined and encouraged by the Lord and my husband to pray every day and to commit my activities to the Lord.

Maybe you are like me and you over- commit yourself sometimes. Maybe you like me have all kinds of creative ideas on what you would like to do and whom you would love to spend time with. 

I am a people person and I love to be around my friends.

In the book "A woman after God's own heart", the very wise and wonderful woman called Elizabeth George talks about making sure that your priorities are right before God. She offers a great outline on what is most important in our lives as wives and mom's.

1. Loving Jesus with all of your heart and following Him

2. Loving my husband, helping and serving him

3. Loving my children, raising and disciplining them

4. Loving my home and making sure that it offers them a place of rest and refreshment

5. Educating myself so as to pass something on to others

6. Loving God's people and serving them

I also found this great quote by Charles Ryrie who states, “We [must] say ‘no’ not only to things which are wrong and sinful, but to things pleasant, profitable, and good which would hinder and clog our grand duties and our chief work.” 

Lord, help us to commit our lives to you daily. Help us to submit our desires to you and empower us by your spirit to live for what is most important. Help us to be faithful where you have planted us.

In Jesus Name!

Sowing Seeds in Eternity

One of the things that strikes me the most in my walk with the Lord is how forgetful I truly am. I often have come to realizations in my walk with him, lived them out for a while by his grace, then stumbled back into my old sinful ways. 

May this devotional blog serve as a means to encourage you to not only realize things but to live them out. I want to devote my life to transparency and honesty. I want to share with others in what ways I struggle and in what ways I have come to know some freedom and joy. I pray and hope this will encourage you to go deeper and look for the only one who is called the "fountain of living waters" (Jeremiah 2:13) and who offers those living, satisfying waters for free!

Do you ever feel unsatisfied with your life? Do you feel hungry and craving for more?

Do you feel that simply being a wife and mother is not ALL that you are? (Don't get me wrong here, I am very happy to be both!) 

I have come to a place in my life that I realize that ALL that I Do in my day-to-day life needs to be birthed out of the desire to give Jesus all the glory He deserves. 

That does not mean that I will always feel like living for Him or that things will go the way that I want them to go. So often my motivation to DO good things is not for Him but for myself and for what I get out of it. And if we are honest with ourselves, we all can identify since we are sinful and selfish by nature. Will I get attention and praise out of serving my husband and kids? Do I get the honor of others by helping them out and spending time with them? Often I do but what if I don't? What if I am in the shade, in the dark and no one sees me and no one seems to care who I am and what I have accomplished? Am I frustrated, disappointed and depressed? I certainly know those feelings.

Thankfully, the Lord is a God who sees everything. He is El Roi (The God who sees me). He sees our every move and knows the very deeps longings and intents of our hearts. 

How very wonderful that is to me. He cares. He sees when you feel no one is watching that you cleaned up the dishes again and changed those dirty diapers. He sees that you are always being overlooked at school or your good intents are being misunderstood. 

He is the only one before Whom we will have to give an account one day. That is frightening too. 

It should move us to always be open for correction. A heart that is ready to repent (being sorry and turning away from sin) is one that is safe.

Whatever we do for our Lord will sow eternal seeds. Seeds that you may not always see bring fruit in this life but a reward that will certainly await you in the life to come!

Meat Balls

This was a delicious meatball dinner I made for my husband when we were back on one of our first dates after Olivia was born.

It is a joy surprising my husband with healthy, meat-rich, flavourful recipes :)

Here is the recipe

FOR MEATBALLS

1 lb ground grass-fed beef
1 cup italian seasoned bread crumbs
1 egg
1 cup of milk (approximately)
2 tbsp Montreal Jack Seasoning
1 tbsp Lawrys seasoning

FOR SAUCE

2 large jars of homemade tomatoe sauce
1 can tomatoe paste
Itaian seasoning


Mix all ingredients together by hand and form little balls and put them in the sauce in the slow cooker for 3 hours on high.

In need of His daily touch

And He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well. Go in peace, and be healed of your affliction.” Mark 5:34

I am in a constant need of my wonderful Savior Jesus! Without Him I am so helpless!
This morning in sunday school class my hubby talked about what it means to have Peace with God. Jesus encountered the woman with the issue of blood in Mark 5:21-33. After she touched him, Jesus told her to go in peace and be healed even though she had been healed the moment she touched Him. So why would he tell her to still be healed as she went?

I am grateful that all of us haven't arrived at perfections's level. All of us need to be touched in areas of our lives where we have not yet let the Lord take full control so He could touch, heal, correct and transform us into becoming more like Him.

He issued his command and healed them; he delivered them from their destruction.
Psalm 107:20

I am thankful to be on that journey with my brothers and sisters! Let us keep reaching out to our Lord as the woman did knowing he would answer and heal!

He is able to do above and beyond of what we can ask or think and He is continue to heal us!

Blessed to serve as queens of our homes*

"Thank God, O woman for the quietude of your home, that you are queen in it.
Men come at eventide to the home; but all day long you are there beautifying it, sanctifying it, adorning it and blessing it. Better be there than wearing a queen's coronet. Better be there than carry the purse of a princess. It may be a very humble home. There may be no carpet on the floor. There may be no pictures on the wall. There may be no silks in the wardrobe; but, by your faith in God, and your cheerful demeanor, you may garniture that place with more splendor than the upholsterer's hand ever kindled." - Rev. T. De Witt Talmage

Amazed

Amazed at the new life that God has given my husband and me in our beautiful daughter Olivia,
I want to share some quotes (slightly modified) from a devotional book for new moms -

O Lord, you have examined my heart
and known everything about me.
You know when I sit down or when I stand up.
You know my thoughts even when I am far away.
Psalm 139:1-2

"When my [daughter] was handed to me for the first time, I feel the sudden dissonance of greeting a stranger I thought I knew before...On the one level it seems perfectly normal to have this little body that I have been carrying for nine month now sharing my personal space. In fact handing [her] to someone else feels like cutting off my arm... On another level [she] is a totally different person, wholly separate from me. [She] makes movements I don't anticipate... I am the only world [she] has ever known, but we are still a long way from really knowing each other. In the meantime I am grateful for what is strange to me about my [daughter] - or about me to [her] - is not strange to God. He knows my [daughters] personality and the paths [she] will choose."
(Mommy Time by Sarah Arthur)