Encouraging and Notable Voices

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The sun is shining so warm and bright, with sunbeams cascading through the windows. I’ve always loved sitting in a sunbeam.  When I was much younger, I would grab a big pillow, a blanket and a book…get comfortable on the carpet and soak up the sun shining through my bedroom window. I still enjoy doing that!  In fact, today afforded a surprising treat with time to soak in the simple pleasure of enjoying a sunbeam from an oversized plush chair.  This is just what I needed!  I brewed a cup of tea, grabbed a Bible, motivational books and my iPad to scroll through Twitter and to look through my photo collection.  I love rediscovering encouraging and notable voices!

Here are three fantastic passages of scripture that have encouraged me today, as well as a few notable voices that have inspired my faith, added fuel to a depleted “motivation tank,” and challenged me to have a right and correct attitude.

Here you go!

Photography by Donna Harris ❘ Remember the Year

This is the day that the LORD has made; let us REJOICE and be GLAD in it. Psalm 118:24

By God’s GRACE, I am…

A child of the Father. Forever forgiven. Completely supplied. GRACE.

Fully accepted. Indwelt by the Spirit. Friend of the Savior. GRACE.

Loved with no ending. Viewed now as righteous. Sin cleansed and covered. GRACE.

(Quoted from Paul David Tripp  Twitter feed ‏@PaulTripp)

Romans 8-38-39

For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. Romans 8:38-39

Roger Crawford, author of:  How High Can You Bounce ❘ Turn Setbacks Into Comebacks was sixteen years old before he could tie his shoes, even then Velcro made it possible. But he excelled in other areas such as sports, becoming a star tennis player. You can look at Roger and see that he has a disability. As Roger explains it, however, most people’s disabilities cannot be seen, but they’re just as real and in many cases more pronounced than his. [1]

“I think it’s important for every young person whether they have a physical challenge or not to find something in their life that they can become passionate about.”

“People often ask me if I ever speak to groups of disabled people. And my answer is ‘Yes, every talk I give.’ The point is that disabilities come in different forms, including emotional and intellectual, but the most disabling of all is attitudinal.”

“We can control what we dwell on, and I think that is a vitally important principle no matter who we are or what we do. Having a better attitude is a daily choice, and how we think creates the window through which we see our life experience.”

Roger Crawford : Turning the Pessimism of “I can’t” Into the Unstoppable Power of “I Can!”

 

2 Corinthians 12-9

My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness. 2 Corinthians 12:9

My wish for you is to take time to sit in a sunbeam. Enjoy a good book. Close your eyes and mediate on God’s truth. Be inspired and encouraged. More Grace!

[1] Something to Smile About: Encouragement and Inspiration for Life’s Ups and Downs; Zig Ziglar, Tying Your Shoes, p. 13, Thomas Nelson publishers

Sunday Stillness

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Psalm 18:1-2 ESV

            I love you, O LORD, my strength.

            The LORD is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer,

            my God, my rock, in whom I take refuge,

            my shield, and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold.

            For who is God, but the LORD?

Psalm 18:31-33 ESV

And who is a rock, except our God?—

the God who equipped me with strength

and made my way blameless.

He made my feet like the feet of a deer

and set me secure on the heights.

Quiet Talks on Power

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Quiet Talks

I recently discovered a book at my parent’s house. My mother and I shared a common love of reading and she often encouraged me to take a book from the shelf. I needed a step stool to investigate the treasures on the very top shelf of the bookcase. I spied a very small book, with its frayed and worn cover from years of turning pages beckoning me to notice it. It was oddly placed, wedged between newer and larger books and would have gone years unnoticed if not for my curiosity. I pulled out the book and thumbed through the pages. I realized that I had discovered a small treasure giving me another glimpse into the mind and heart of my mother.

On the inside of the jacket she had written a note, “To Myself…a gift from God to answer my plea for power. October 12, 1979.”  The margins of the pages are filled with her personal notes and quiet talks to God and nearly every page had a paragraph highlighted in pale yellow.

Quiet Talks

The book challenged her to not to be swept along with the crowd, but rather have a fixed purpose, resolutely settled upon, rooted away and down deep to follow Jesus absolutely, no matter what it may cost or where it may cut.

The little book is full of giant reminders that God is intimately aware of what we need for everyday common things. We need His power to be gracious, kind, to enjoy work, to be content, to be cheerful, to listen, to rest…and on and on.

Here is a one of those pale yellow highlighted paragraphs from the book:

“There is that mother, living in what would be reckoned a humble home, one of a thousand like it, but charged with the most sacred trust ever committed to human hands—the molding of precious lives. If there be hallowed ground anywhere surely it is there, in the life of that home. What patience and tirelessness, and love and tact and wisdom and wealth of resource does that woman not need?”

And this thought:

“I will send another Comforter, one who will be right by your side to help, sympathetic, experienced, strong; and he will stay with you all the time. In the kitchen, in the sitting room, the sick-room, with the children, when work piles up, when things jangle or threaten to, when the baby’s cross, and the patching and sweeping and baking…and all the rest of it seem endless, on the street, in the office, on the campus, in the store, when tempted—almost slipped, when opportunity opens for a quiet personal word, everywhere, every time…in every circumstance, one alongside to help…Is not that wonderful?”

I love reading the notes my mother wrote and discovering what was important to her. I may add my own quiet talks with God in the margins and begin to mark paragraphs with bright orange highlight. Perhaps one day, my children will discover it on my bookshelf.

Quiet Talks

I originally wrote this on June 1, 2010, two months following my mother’s homecoming on March 15, 2010.  This is a repost in memory and in honor of  my mom, Barbara Ann Newman Goodroe. 

Quiet Talks on Power by S. D. Gordon

Free Amazon Kindle Edition

Quiet Talks on Power
 
Linking up with everyone for Five Minute Friday, where a remarkably encouraging and loving community gathers to write for five minutes. This week’s prompt is: REST.
Five Minute Friday

How to Break Bad Habits

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Don’t you wish breaking bad habits would be as easy as digging in your heel to stop and never doing it again? Aristotle had this to share about habits: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act, but a habit. I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies, for the hardest victory is over self.”

Thank you Taryn and Bethany for the photo!

Yes, we are what we repeatedly do and the hardest victory is over self.  I wish it were simple, don’t you? Just stop doing whatever has repeatedly become a bad habit and victory over self is accomplished. Ta Da!

In our family, you will often hear us say to each other, “Stop It!”  You’ll appreciate this comical skit from MadTV with Bob Newhart as Dr. Switzer, a psychologist with a simple theory on human behavior.  The skit is hilarious and worth watching through the end!

For me, overcoming a bad habit is more complex than hearing the words, “Stop It!”  I must make the deliberate effort towards changing a wrong behavior or I will forever be stuck with a burdensome yoke around my neck as, “The Bad Habit.”

Changing behavior must be intentional. It will require you to be introspective regarding your behavior and lifestyle. Study yourself  in the fashion of looking through a binocular lens…but this lens is looking into your inner most being, studying what makes you tick, what brings you low or lifts you high. You want to get into your head and to know yourself really well!

Here are 4 ways I’ve found helpful to breaking a bad habit:

1. Identify the habit you want to change. (over eating, spending too much money, substance abuse, not exercising, etc.)

2.Use the binocular lens to identify the cue that triggers the behavior. (hungry, angry, lonely, tired, stress, insignificance, etc.)

3. Know yourself really well and understand the need the habit meets. (comfort, creativity, social stimulus, the high from spending cash, etc.)

4. Without changing the cue and reward, replace the routine with a new behavior.

Here are 3 ways I replace the routine with a new behavior:

1. A daily time with God. A lack of personal time with God will result in casualty! There are many options for you to use. I personally am using this method for a consistent time with God. (Four ways to make daily time with God a habit.) Currently, I am reading through the book of Nehemiah, a fascinating book detailing leadership, resolve, overcoming obstacles, trusting God, prayer…God’s Word is perfect at every stage of life and will meet the need at that moment.

2. Spending time with friends. I cannot possibly go for days without being with friends. The adage, “Laughter is the best medicine” is true. I need to laugh and I crave laughter! I need friends to keep me accountable. A good friend will encourage my soul to grow deeper into God’s truth while cheering me on to become the best at what  God created me to be. A good friend will stay with me in the messy places.

3. Exercise. When boredom strikes or if I become agitated or fidgety, I slip on my running shoes and go for a fast walk around the block or in the parking lot where I work. Taking regular and routine 5 minute breaks throughout the day helps me regain focus. I work at staying in the habit of daily exercise, whether it be walking, running, lifting weights or jumping rope.

Real change and real transformation will take work. You can’t do it on your own, and you shouldn’t try to.

You may enjoy reading:

Boasting in Weakness

The Unmaking of a Worship Disorder

Two Ways You can Become a Cheerful Person

 

The following are some resources that I’ve found helpful:

How to Change a Bad Habit Into a Good One

The worship of the living God gives us peace and equilibrium to face the troubles of life. -Tim Keller

How to break bad habits from biting your nails to running late. -Real Simple

What have you learned about breaking bad habits?  Does saying, “Stop It” make it easier?  What do you think?

A Love Bigger Than This

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There Is A Love Bigger Than This

There Is A Love Bigger Than This

I love this photo of my granddaughter with her Daddy! I can hear her laugh and squeal with delight when her Daddy grabs her close and lays a big smack of a kiss on her plump little cheek. She loves her Daddy so much!  He opens his arms wide when she runs toward him. He picks her up and lifts her high into the air, safely catching to cradle her close. Such a sweet image of magnificent love this little one has for her father. Love with abandon.

The father loves her more…so much more.

There is a love bigger than this.

God, the father, loves me, his child. I like what Francis Chan wrote in his book, Crazy Love…

All my life I’ve heard people say, “God loves you.” It’s probably the most insane statement you could make to say that the eternal Creator of this universe is in love with me. There is a response that ought to take place in believers, a crazy reaction to that love. Do you really understand what God has done for you? [1]

My granddaughter’s expression of love for her father and her immense joy to be with him is the most amazing thing. For him, nothing compares to being truly, exuberantly wanted by his child. He loves his daughter so much it hurts. [2]

There is a love bigger than this.

Open your eyes to how much God desires and loves us. A father’s love for his daughter is only a faint echo of God’s great love for me and every person He made.

John 3:16 says, God so loved the world He gave…

Salvation means that the Spirit of God has brought me into touch with God’s personality, and I am thrilled with something infinitely greater than myself, I am caught up into the abandonment of God. Abandonment never produces the consciousness of its own effort, because the whole life is taken up with the One to Whom we abandon. Beware of talking about abandonment if you know nothing about it, and you will never know anything about it until you have realized that John 3:16 means that God gave Himself absolutely. In our abandonment we give ourselves over to God just as God gave Himself for us. [3]

Live life experiencing a love bigger than you can possibly fathom!

Your love
Brighter than the sun
More beautiful than words could ever say
This endless light
Shining over all
It leads me to Your glory everlasting

–Hillsong United: Zion, Nothing Like Your Love

[1] Francis Chan, Crazy Love (Colorado, CO: David C. Cook, 2008), 179.

[2] Francis Chan, Crazy Love (Colorado, CO: David C. Cook, 2008), 55, a paraphrase.

[3] Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest, March 13

The Saturday Assortment #7

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The Saturday Assortment

The Saturday Assortment is a collection of unrelated and random things that I find interesting, challenging, motivating and sometimes quite out of the ordinary. It’s an assortment of things that caught my attention throughout the week. I bet you will find them equally engaging. Enjoy!

Family Devotion Ideas – threethirtyministries

Free! Easy! Fun! Family Devotion Ideas! You’ll find FUN theme ideas like Toothpaste Squeeze, Spoon Catapults and Izzy Dizzy Walking Wobble that will keep your kids wanting more family time! All devotions are based on a passage of scripture. You’ll discover clever ways to teach timeless truths in a relevant way.

Top 200 ministry blogs – Kent Shaffer 

Kent Shaffer and the team at Church Relevance has released their latest ranking of the Top 200 Ministry Blogs.

Self-Care or Self-Medication: Which path are you on? – Carey Nieuwhof 

When stress and life overwhelm you, you will either choose to respond to it in a healthy way (self-care) or an unhealthy way (self-medication).  Carey Nieuwhof shares five ways Christian leaders self-medicate and Ten healthy options for self-care.

Page CXVI

Page CXVI is a project started with the idea to make hymns accessible and known again. To celebrate their 7 year anniversary of making music, Page CXVI is giving away their entire catalog of music for the month of March. 11 albums, 74 songs, 2 bands. Go to http://www.pagecxvi.com/jubilee and get your FREE music!

Another Front Door to Home

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Another Front Door Fall

The welcome mat, with faded hues of color from years of collecting sunshine and enduring the scuffing of shoes is there, in front of a threshold. Another front door to home. A new home. A wonderful home.

Whenever I think about “home,” I have a visual reminder of the many places we have lived and recall the hundreds of times we have opened the front door to our home to welcome new friends, first time guests, and family members that have traveled long distances to visit with us.

Home is here. This is where we are. wherever we live, we purposefully say the words, “This is home.”  It’s not a house where we live. We are home.

Do we miss the place where our family first began? Of course! Does my heart long to go back to that place where I feel most connected? Yes, I feel the tug.

But I don’t call the place that tugs on my heart as “home.” It is a place I visit.

Where I live now is home. This is the right place for us to find community.

Our home is filled with peace, love, security. A place to escape and retreat from the chaos of work and conflicts. Home is the place to meet Jesus. Home is a place to write memories and journal the adventures. This home is where God has us.

If only a welcome mat could talk!

I treasure home. I love thinking about the many times our front door has opened. I love experiencing a new community of friends and especially experiencing God’s love and His incredible plan for us to have another front door…to home!

Confessions of an Evernote Junkie

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I confess, I’m an Evernote junkie!  The more I learn how to use this productivity tool, the more I like it.  Here are a few reasons why:

Evernote is like a digital file drawer where I can store anything and find it almost instantly. I’m a creative thinker and a collector of information. With the “Evernote Web Clipper” I  can clip an article and  save it to a designated notebook (folder) and also tag the article into a category. For example, I often read web articles and a variety of blogs on the topic of  leadership. With the web clipper, I am able to save the entire article or a section of the post to my leadership notebook and use a tag that best describes the content of the article, such as team.

My family has the kitchen table back.  I am an “unorganized perfectionist” meaning I keep everything in order except the top of my desk and the kitchen table. There is a paper trail of meeting notes or copies of articles out of magazines and added to that are splashes of color from neon colored post-it notes. To help clear this paper trail,  I’m now scanning documents and saving as a PDF to Evernote. And for all of those ideas I’ve written on post-it-notes,  I grouped the notes in the shape of a square, I took a photo of the notes, dragged it from my desktop into Evernote and saved it to bright ideas. I’m amazed by the search function that even picks up words within pictures!

Important emails can be easily retrieved.  With the unique Evernote email address, I am able to forward important emails to my Evernote  account by adding the name of the notebook I want the email saved in and including a tag to the subject line of the email. To specify the destination notebook, append the subject line with the symbol “@” followed by the name of an existing notebook; to add a tag, include “#” followed by an existing tag.  This has been great to use, especially for saving flight reservations, hotel bookings, or receipts.

Keeping up with notes and reminders has never been easier. I am a note taker. I always write notes in meetings, or when I attend a conference plus I’m constantly writing reminders for myself.  I have always used the note pad on my iPhone or iPad. What has been frustrating is that I am unable to access the notes from my Mac.  There are times when I don’t have my iPad handy or it takes too long to find the notes on my iPhone. I now use the Evernote app for note taking and because Evernote syncs remotely in the “cloud,” I can access the same notes anywhere, regardless of the device I am using.

Having quick access to highlights and notes from books on Kindle. I recently discovered through my Amazon Kindle account that I can access all of the highlights and notes I’ve made while reading. I select the book, search for the highlighted notes, use the Evernote web clipper and save to the booknotes notebook with the name of the author as the tag.

I realize there is much more to learn about Evernote and I’ve just begun to scratch the surface of this amazing tool that will help me stay organized and more productive. What do you think? What have you discovered that helps you stay organized or more productive?

Helpful link:

Michael Hyatt (Intentional Leadership) provides a handy index to all of his Evernote posts.