Author: Living Simply With God

How to Overcome Negative Emotions

Despite currently communicating my thoughts in writing and for anyone to see, I used to be much more guarded.  I would only share if among my closest friends. Also, any number of other criteria needed to be checked off my self-created mental list of what would deem a situation safe enough to discuss what was on my heart. You may be thinking this girl has some trust issues.  You wouldn’t be wrong. God’s working on that, too, dear reader, but as I was saying…

I attended a women’s retreat and was placed in a small group with only two other individuals: one of my best friends and the retreat’s guest speaker, a woman who had gone to seminary with our pastor. In other words, all boxes in aforementioned mental checklist were checked to the Nth degree, and my brain told my heart it was safe enough to share (or did my heart tell my brain?). Leave it to God to create such a space at such a time when those listening could not only be trusted but offer life-changing counsel as well.  

Once in that safe little bubble, I shared that I had been feeling guilty about the life I used to lead and was trying to grow away from. I had been feeling guilty over all the time I wasted away. I even felt guilty for feeling guilty.  I knew better! Needless to say, I­­ was guilt-ridden about all the things, and I had dared not tell another soul about all this pent up guilt until then. 

How could I genuinely lead the life I was being called to live if I had such a negative thought pattern holding me captive to my past?

In typical pastor fashion, the guest speaker in my very small group tried to coax a solution out of me as opposed to just telling me what my issue was. I totally fell for it.  She asked where my guilt came from.  Not quite picking up what she was putting down, I guessed the source of my guilt was a nun who had taught me in Catholic school. Spoiler alert: that wasn’t it. 

She gently pushed a little more. “God doesn’t want you to feel this guilt. If it doesn’t come from God, where does it come from?”  Just like that, literal dots were being literally connected by literal lines all over the place…figuratively speaking…and I responded by blurting out, “It comes from Satan?!?!”

She knowingly smiled and explained how if something comes from the enemy it cannot come from God. She prompted me to call the guilt out by name and declare that it would not have a place in my life any longer. That was easy! If it wasn’t from God, and I knew it wasn’t (knowing is the hard part, sometimes), then I surely didn’t want any part of it!

I declared, “Guilt, you no longer have a hold on me.”  And guess what?  It didn’t.  From that moment on, I have been liberated to peacefully and simultaneously co-exist with the knowledge of who I once was and who God continually calls me to be. 

Bonus: You can apply the latter practice to anything at all which is not from Him: call it by name and declare its hold on you defeated. Once the emotion or fallacy from the enemy is recognized, called out and conquered, replace it with this truth:

For though we live in the world, we do not wage war as the world does. The weapons we fight with are not the weapons of the world. On the contrary, they have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ.

2 Corinthians 10:3-5

Pray: 

Father God, thank you for orchestrating moments in my life which can only be composed by your loving hands.  Thank you for the people you put in my path, whether for a lifetime, a season, or just a few hours.  Thank you for the ability to get to know you better through your Word and through fellow brothers and sisters in Christ.  It is in knowing you better that I can better know your voice and discern it from the enemy’s.  If something is not aligned with your will for my life, please awaken me to what that could be and remove whatever may be getting in my way. 

In Jesus’ Holy and Precious Name,

Amen.

How to be Intentional About Seeking Blessings Out

Can you imagine how refreshing it could be to pick up your phone and use it for something other than responding to text alerts, email notifications, and the pings of an app? To allow that device in your hand to contribute to your actual, overall well being as opposed to distracting you from the life unfolding all around it? It can be done!

A few years ago, especially in times of distress, I started writing down any blessings I noticed around me.  Sometimes, I would plot out these new-found treasures within the fresh, crisp pages of a newly purchased journal. However, more recently, for about the last 3 years or so, I’ve opted for the convenience of an app (just like what you might keep your grocery list or to-do list in).

Our device of choice can actually be our blessing if we use it in the right ways. The beauty of using an app as a “Blessing Tracker” is two-fold in its tremendous simplicity and accessibility. It just so happens to be perfect for jotting down the activities of a God who can literally make His move in any place, at any time, and through any person or situation.

Originally, these lists served as a tangible proof of an intangible faith. The documented eyewitness accounts reinforced the notion that if God provided once before He could and would again.  Over time, these singular, bulleted testimonies could also be reviewed as a more concerted assemblage pointing to a larger tale being told. Isolated instances transformed into a cohesive, exquisite validation of an interwoven thread, revealing His sovereign hand at work throughout my life.

Eventually, the proclivity to remember blessings was enhanced by belief: a belief that beyond a shadow of a doubt our God is absolutely good, loyal to His promises, protective and restorative.  He was and is a deliverer who can use any circumstance for His glory.  I no longer need to remember the lists living in my phone as frequently as I did several years ago. Instead, there is a present and profound trust living inside of me.

The lists grow exponentially when I’m intentional about seeking His blessings out, especially when I’m still enough to notice. How else could I end up with a list of “Quarantine Blessings” showcasing 54 examples of His presence revealed in perfect timings and more-than-sufficient provisions during the beginning of 2020?…or another list of 76 blessings during the time immediately preceding, during, and after my mom’s unexpected passing in 2019? 

The blessings will yield blessings! They bless at the time of bestowing and yet again upon remembrance. If you share those testimonies, they have the potential to bless even still. Try keeping a list of your own! What can you notice today? Tomorrow? How will you choose track them? An App? A voice-recorded text? Do you have another idea? Drop it in the comments. I’d LOVE to hear about it, and I’m sure others will as well!

As I close this week’s post, let’s keep this key verse in mind:

Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.

Matthew 7:7

Pray:

Father God, thank you for all the ways you have provided for me in the past.  I know you are still at work today, even if I am too busy to notice.  I apologize for not noticing enough and for not praising you enough.   Open my eyes so that I may better see my circumstances as reflections of your handiwork. Help me to better notice the blessings that are all around me. Please help me to remember that anything good in my life is a gift from you.

In Jesus’ Holy and Precious Name,

Amen

Finding my Voice

Now, this is what I originally drafted to be my maiden blog post, but I decided to add some additional content last week at the last minute. So, here I am, stringing words together in hopes that they strike some chord with you.  That you can relate to something I’ve been through, how I dealt with this thing or that, or that I can offer new perspectives on an old problem.  But how? 

It’s one thing to sit around a kitchen table with friends and offer advice or lend an ear. It’s an entirely other matter to sit at a computer and rally enough thoughts together that they coherently blend into something substantive enough that someone else would want to read them.  Thus…here I am…finding my voice.  Do I focus on being a parent of three?  A spouse? Full-time professional in post-graduate school? Self-declared DIYer? 

Perhaps what’s so challenging about focusing on any one of these identities is that they are somewhat transient and incomplete.  By and large, they depend on other aspects subject to change and are still only a portion of who I am, even on a good day!  For example, although parenting and marriage are relatively permanent (until death do us part!), how those roles play out in my life will largely depend on the season of life I’m in, thus rendering them transitory; and the totality of these parts are still wildly lacking, thus leading me right into the present conundrum of finding my voice.

Nonetheless, do you know what doesn’t change? Christ’s love for me.  I was made in His image.  According to Psalm 139:14, I am fearfully and wonderfully made, regardless of how I may feel or which hat I have on.  I am His.  And so are you.  Every other role we are blessed with can be seen in light of our relationship to Him.  When doing so, we can more fully appreciate the roles temporarily assigned to us, better recognize the Lord’s provisions, and respond in love accordingly.  It’s in Him that I am finding my voice, or rather, more correctly, finding His voice inside of me.  How about you?  Do you yearn to hear His voice?  Go to Him. If you don’t know how, ask Him to show you. He will, and He’s been waiting for you to ask.

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Bonus Weekend Post! Coincidence? I Think Not!

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Welcome, back!  I’ve already told you how my youngest came up with the blog’s title.  Today, my other daughter had the insightful idea to add in an audio component to each post.  She was spot on with her constructive feedback, and I immediately backtracked to record my first two posts!

I love listening to my favorite devotions when I’m short on time while I get ready in the morning. How about you? Maybe you listen to a best seller on audible or a sermon on Spotify? However, as practical as her tip was, especially for the ever-multi-tasking human, I knew she suggested the feature out of necessity as opposed to preference or convenience. 

My daughter has at least two reading disabilities, including dyslexia.  If there is too much content on a page, she must scrape together every ounce of energy to process what she is seeing, then remember which rules to apply to which letters and then sound it all out in a way that she can still comprehend what she is reading.  It’s exhausting, but she’s a trooper! 

While attending cyber school last year, she was introduced to a variety of apps and electronic modifications which optimized her ability to do talk-to-text, as well as, you guessed it, have text read aloud to her.  It was a game changer!  No wonder she was the child who suggested to add in audio, and I love her for it!

If I’m her mother and I so willing provided a perfectly tailored tool she needed to be more independent, how much more willing is our Father in heaven when it comes to meeting our specific need? Here are two of the most reassuring verses I’ve ever come across which make this very point:

 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?

Matthew 6:25-26

What’s one need you have that was met yesterday or today?  Can you think back to a time when everything aligned perfectly so that the quintessential coincidence unfolded before your very eyes?  That was God meeting your needs! Before you go to bed tonight, try thanking Him for these times and ask that He reveal another provision to you tomorrow.

The more we upwardly shift our focus, what we think we “need” begins to better align with what He also wills for us. By pressing into Him and His Word, we not only experience an alignment of wills, but we also deepen our relationship with Him, and He continues to fill a void in us that could only ever be satisfied by Him to begin with. 

Greetings!

Believe it or not, my 8-year-old came up with the blog’s title, “Living Simply with God”. While I was trying to make sense of themes, content specifications and everything else that comes with launching a new site, she plopped right down next to me and asked what I was doing.

As I write today it’s Monday, which mean’s yesterday’s sermon is still fresh in my mind. James 3:3-13 tells us that our words can be used to uplift or to discourage. The pastor practically applied to how we interact with the people in our homes, and how our words can have long-lasting effects on those we care about the most, for better or for worse. Remembering this, instead of impatiently asking her to leave mommy alone, we simply talked. So many probing questions came from her ever-expanding and inquisitive mind; I could hardly process them quickly enough.

“What was the blog about? Why are you doing it? Do you have time for this? Are you scared to do something new? Are you going to make make your own YouTube Channel?! What about vlogging?!”

We went back and forth, and I shared that I am doing this because I love Jesus, writing, processing what I learn (usually from reading, asking questions, or making mistakes) and encouraging others. “I can keep all the journals I want, but what good is that if I am the only one who knows the miracles it contains? Wouldn’t it be better to share how we experience small miracles in the every day, possibly giving hope to others so that they can persevere as well? Maybe someone can recognize that they are not alone. I want others to experience Him in the tangible ways that we have experienced Him.”

“Mama, what’s tangible?”

“It’s something that you can feel or touch. It’s something that you know is there. I want other people to know he is there, too. Our world can be scary right now, and it can be hard to know what to believe. I’d like to help with that and perhaps offer some new ways of looking at things, but I also feel led to do it simply. Understanding how He is at work doesn’t have to be complicated.”

“Mama, what are you calling it?”

“It still needs a title.” Nothing I had scribbled up was quite right.

At first, she strung along almost every Sunday school word you could think of. I said we needed something a tad bit shorter. I needed to capture how we can simplify our lives, how we can know Jesus, how He is enough.

Mama, how about, “Living Simply with Jesus”?

“Yes, you did it. That’s the name, and I’m so thankful that you had a part in this!”

And just like that, not only did I get a title and a fabulously challenging discourse with my youngest, but we also experienced the fruit of obeying His Word. The very fruit I’m longing to tell you about downright blossomed (does fruit blossom?) and fell right down into our laps as I chose patience and conversation over dismissal and solitude, all the while considering how to explain how God works. The irony is not lost on me.

For every tale of loss, addiction and uncertainty, I can counter with testimonies of provision, deliverance, and guidance.

Together, we are going to explore ways we can simplify our lives, create margin to notice blessings (even in the midst of extreme heartache), and focus on what really matters. Take what you can, and leave the rest. You do you, and I welcome you alongside me as I share what God has done and unfailingly continues to do in my life, my family’s life, and in the lives of others.

Let’s do some life together and find some blessings along the way. Shall we?

I’d love to share some more about how this blog came about. Take a look!