Spiritwick

After the sadness of today's events, I was so emotionally weary as I headed upstairs to do the bedtime routine with my girls.  I didn't want to go up at all, but I went up.  I held one as she cried after a sibling spat.  I helped them pick up their toys.  I read them a Bible story...and a second one as they begged for more. Then, we started individual prayer times.  Melody was first tonight, and as I held her in my arms asking her what the best and worst parts of her day were, she looked up at me and said, "You're like Jesus in a way, Mama."  Quite surprised, I asked, "How's that?"  "You're wrapping your arms around me," she replied before starting her prayer.  Thank you, Jesus, for reminding me that that's exactly what You're doing today.  You're wrapping your arms around me, around us. He's been wrapping His arms around me gently, so gently for weeks now, but I couldn't quite recognize it through my own fears.  P...

God freed me from some of my internal traps through Phiippians 3, but I was still left with a big question.  If I'm not supposed to focus on being perfect at the plethora of things I could try to be perfect at, what should I be focusing on?  Fortunately, God was ready with an answer before I'd even realized I needed to ask the question, so He gave me a focus to address my energies toward in Philippians 4.  I turned it into a "to-do" list, and wrote it on my forearm to help me remember. Here is my simplified to-do list: 1) Rejoice. 2) Be gentle. 3) Pray with thanksgiving. I decided those would be my primary focus for the next day, and I've been trying to work on them for the days since. I knew that this was not a new list of things to try to be perfect at, but they were clear ways for me to fix my eyes on Jesus as I persevered on the path He's marked out for me.  I've already seen some benefits come from focusing on Jesus in these three ways. The...

Hello. I'm Amber, and I'm a perfectionist. (Hi, Amber!) I think when most people picture a perfectionist, they imagine a Type A personality who generally appears to have all her ducks in a row and/or to be in a tizzy if a duck gets out of line. I don't have a Type A personality, and I think some of my ducks may be lost under piles of laundry. In general, I tend to cope with my perfectionism by picking only a couple things to focus on at a time. "Sure, my house looks like a pack of hyenas came romping through here, but we made some progress today on Lily Beth's piano skills. I even managed to blog!" I tend to be more of a people-focused perfectionist. My environment may be pure chaos, but I'm focusing on the interactions and needs of the people around me. This means that a conflict with a loved one can rock me to the core. So, of course, a few days after our Uganda team met to talk about spiritual warfare and conflict resolution, I got in a fight with my...

I was planning to post about how hard it was for me to wait and rely on other people to provide the needed funds for me to go on the Uganda trip.  I was going to explain how I've seen God come through financially for me and my family countless times but how I somehow still had a hard time trusting His Body to come through for me. I'm not sure I can post about that anymore.  God seems to have placed me in a "Body Bootcamp."  It sort of started when He gave me these verses for my upcoming trip to Uganda:   “So Christ himself gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip his people for works of service, so that the body of Christ may be built up until we all reach unity in the faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ. From him the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does i...

A few weeks ago, I got the email announcing that I would be part of the PTCC team going to Uganda in the summer of 2013.  I think I stopped breathing for a few seconds when I saw that email.  It had suddenly become real rather than hypothetical, and I was terrified.  What had I done? Should I really be going to Uganda? Did God really want me to do this? After maybe a day or two of panic creeping in whenever I thought of it, I realized that either God had called me to do this, and I could rest in that, or He hadn't but He would still work everything for good somehow because I loved Him.  This conclusion calmed my nerves enough to attend the first team meeting--though not enough to keep my face from turning beet red whenever it was my turn to speak! The day after the first meeting, I left town for a family vacation.  Although I spent portions of my vacation time reading a team-recommended book, I by and large set all Uganda anxieties to the side until I got ho...