Changing stubbornness into something positive

Over the last year or so I have really been trying to work on some of the big issues in my life, like anger, stubbornness, gossip, jealousy and negativity.  All of these are not found to be traits that people run after to get and keep but are more known for their bad sides.
This last month I have been doing a devotional by Joyce Meyers regarding dealing with issues of a negative heart.  She does a great way of summing up ideas of how to deal with negativity and where it comes from in short order. Last night she was explaining how Satan is said to be the "father of lies." he is super good at helping you hear and think about bad stuff and stuff that isn't even true and letting it grow and fester in your heart and mind to bring on negativity. Satan is full of many traits that are terrible but, at the end of the devotional her last few words really spoke to me, "Satan's strong point is patience." Wow! It sunk in like a brick wall. I have often ask myself how I can keep going back to old ways of thinking that I have worked on for months on end. Satan is good at being patient and will patiently wait out my ability to fail as a human.
 So then I thought well there has to be something God has given me to fight this and it is true He has. I am one of the most stubborn people you'll ever meet. Stubbornness can be a sin if you allow yourself to destroy you so that you never change your ways. However, sometimes I think if we direct it in the right paths and ask God to use our stubbornness for us and not against us that He will find a way to help you use it. After all, it is a trait that He himself even has,He is stubborn enough to keep coming after us on a daily basis because He wants us and loves us. Why would he not allow my stubbornness traits to be used for good. I can be stubborn I can be down right hard to get through too, so why not put up that stubbornness factor when it comes to Satan so he can not win. Why not be a little stubborn, but in a good way.  I plan to be stubborn to keep on keeping on the path of righteousness. I plan to be stubborn and not let Satan's patience win out but let my stubbornness for the cause of Christ win every time.  Between my stubbornness and allowing God to lead me through every temptation I believe it's a winning situation that Satan can not ever break.

Sometimes God answers prayers with 'NO'

Often when talking to other people about prayer I often hear things about how awesome God is 'when' he answers our prayers. The other day I was discussing a personal issue which I have been praying about for a few weeks now and my friend has been also praying with me and she said, "I know God is going to answer our prayers.. He is a good and amazing God."  Now most of us know what was meant by that, she was saying she knows God is going to answer our prayers the way we have asked.  

But,  God answers our prayers even when we don't get what we ask for. Sometimes, and many times God's answer is, "No." Or other times he answers in his own way, still fulfilling our prayers with what we consider to be a good answer, however it is not in our way of thinking of how He should be doing it. Just because God doesn't answer our prayers how we ask does not mean he is not listening or that he does not care or that he is ignoring us all together. It just sometimes means he did not have that planned for us and He has it all planned out differently than we can see it. Just because God says 'no' to our prayers does not make him less good or less amazing of a God.

A great reminder for me is when I think about my little buddy Per. I use to be diligent in praying that God would heal his body and let him live through his third bout of cancer. But, God did not heal him to live a long life here on this earth, He healed him by taking him to heaven where he would never suffer again.  This to some means God didn't hear my prayers, but I believe he did, he just didn't answer the prayers I prayed in the way I had directly asked. God had a different plan in mind. 

Just as when Jesus is found praying in the Garden in Matthew Chapter 6 before his arrest asking;' my father if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.' God the Father didn't answer Jesus requests by finding a different sacrifice for us but continued with His will and His desire as scary and as humiliating and uncomfortable as it may have been.  His will is perfect and he has a perfect plan for us. 
Even if His answers are No to our prayers we have to trust that He has a perfect plan and and his will for us is perfect.  That doesn't just include us and our lives but the lives of the rest of the world around us. There is a perfect plan for every 'yes' and every 'no' God gives. We just need to remember to stay in peace knowing a yes or no He's got it all planned perfectly for us.

Womanly emotions are not as relaxing as trusting in God.

Proverbs 3: 5&6 "Trust in the LORD with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge Him and He shall direct your paths." (NKJ)
This morning while relaxing with a cup of coffee and just enjoying life I was reminded of these two verses. They are very familiar to me as they were the verses my parents always seemed to call our 'family verses.' I have heard a couple short messages on this passage in the past but today God really seemed to be working on my heart and not exactly in the way that a preacher might have implied it. After pondering on them for some time I started realizing what I believe God has been saying to me through them.
Lately with my pregnancy I have been letting my emotions and my thought processes of human reasoning dictate not only my actions but sometimes even my mood. As a woman, pregnant or not, I know we tend to lean more on trying to be logical but also basing our logical explanations on feelings, that are often times not always facts. God doesn't ask us to know or reason out everything. He is asking me to trust Him and to acknowledge him in everything I do and he will lead me exactly where I need to go. 
 I need to stop focusing on my womanly understanding of life and things going on around me and just relax and trust that everything will happen just as He sees fit.  Even though He doesn't promise bad things to never happen if I trust Him with it all he does promise to walk me through it and I can lean on Him for everything no matter how large or small they may be. So when bad things do happen I have to trust Him to know what is best, know His plan and wait on his timing. 
So I can sit back, relax a little more, enjoy more cups of coffee, stress less about my children and trust that God has a plan and will direct my path and my children's paths in exactly the direction He has planned out for us without fear or worry of wondering when the next bad thing might happen. I have a choice from here on out, to trust God with my whole life and that He has a plan for it, or I can choose to stay in my womanly nature of emotional reasoning and worry.  And I pray that I continue to learn to trust God with His plan more than try and control my situations with worry and emotional reasoning.

Difference between raising an individual and a replica

Just relax! If I've heard this once I've heard it a 1000 times since I have had my first child. I am not one prone to relaxing when it comes to my kids. I want to be on top of everything they do making sure they are safe, that their feelings aren't being hurt and that they also in turn are being purely gentle and nice to everyone they meet. I am sure part of it was how I was raised coming out in my parenting style. Hoping that my children don't embarrassed me and do something I don't like, basically asking them at such a young age to be perfect.
I have over the last couple months really been praying about my parenting style. I want my children to feel free to be who they are, not feel like they are being watched so closely that they are not allowed to screw up or make their own mistakes without being in trouble or making me mad.  I want my children happy and most of all I want to please God through my parenting as it is a huge job he has blessed me with. I have prayed several times for God to start showing me more and more how He would like me to parent these children He has blessed my husband and I with, after all they are not really mine but His.
Today as I was reading through Romans 12 I came across these verses: Just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ we who are many form one body and each member belongs to all the others. We have different gifts, according to the grace he has given us. (Romans 12: 4-6)
Now this is one of my favorite lines in the Bible to use regarding the fact that we are all individuals and we all have different talents and we should use them according to the purpose God designed them for.  However, how true would this be as well for applying to parenting. My children are different then me, they are part of the body in my individual home called my family. I did not enjoy my parents when it seemed like they wanted me to focus on growing up the way they wanted me too instead of letting me feel free to explore and find who I was created to be. God designed my children to not be me, but to be someone completely different than me. This means even to the point that I may not understand some of who they are or what they do. But my job is not to remove the parts of them that I don't understand but to embrace them and accept them and let them learn and grow.
When thinking about it do I really expect my children to be perfect?  No, but I do think I try many times to form them more to what I think they should be and should be acting like instead of letting them learn a little on their own, and learn to be themselves which is obviously going to be someone way different than I am.
Does this mean when they do something wrong that I shouldn't discipline them? Obviously not! It does mean that just because they do something I may not like, doesn't mean it's wrong. I have to sit back now before reacting, which is not the easiest thing to do, and evaluate in my brain is it wrong or just different from my way of thinking? The point with parenting isn't making sure we raise perfect little children, but to make sure we raise individuals free to be who God created them to be and encourage them, no matter how weird we think they may be at the time, to advance in who they are but still placing those safe boundaries for them so they know what is personality and being and individual and what is actually wrong. So the truth is yes, relax and enjoy the moments with the children I have been blessed with and enjoy the moments they feel free to express themselves and form to who they are suppose to be.

No longer cliche "I just pray I have a healthy baby"

When we find out we are expecting many of us can’t help but think how we would prefer one gender over the other. We often say, well I just hope it’s healthy, but deep down we don’t expect anything but healthy.  We still secretly inside wish for gender, though we mean what we say about healthy it’s almost become a cliché saying as the majority of us have nothing but purely healthy babies.

So we went in for our 20 week ultra sound with our third child expecting routine everything. The tech doing the ultra sound was nice and cheery letting us know that our stubborn little one would need another ultrasound because she wasn’t able to get baby to move enough to check the whole spinal cord to make sure it was covered and all in good health.  That seemed simple enough she just couldn’t see the whole spinal area. So as we sat and waited for doc to come in so we could just go home and have the routine check up part over with we talked about gender and this that and the other thing.

Doc walked in and started talking about how babies head measurements looked great, heart looked good but baby was not measuring correctly between where the kidney and bladder connect and the area in the kidney was slightly dilated. Ever have your world turned upside down? I did. I cried my eyes out. Though this is nothing too serious as baby’s life is not in jeopardy I was sitting there feeling so stupid because that whole morning all I was concerned with was should we find out gender or should we not.  When in truth what we should be concerned about is making sure our babies are healthy.  The cliché of saying “I just hope baby is healthy,” was no longer a cliché saying it was true 100% true and I didn’t care anymore if the baby was boy or girl just pray for healthy.

I was a devastated mom and feeling terrible. Worried sick that my baby was not healthy and that there wasn’t a darn thing I can do about it!  I had the feeling in the pit of my stomach like that one you get when your kid falls down and gets hurt and you can’t do much for their pain just hold them and pray they end up being better. Of course the doc repeated over and over and over again that typically this type of a thing would usually clear up sometimes it doesn’t but just had to be aware of the situation, but usually all turns out fine.

The guilt that washed over me in the room was more than I could bear. I couldn't keep the tears in, partially because I am pregnant and emotional but mostly because I felt so guilty. The guilt just wouldn't subside it ate at me all the way home, all the way through making dinner. And then the worry hit me like a brick wall. I worried about my baby.  Asking God what we were going to do? What happened if the worst of the worst happened? And then there was this awkward moment of the question being repeated to me ever so gently, “What are you going to do?  What would you do if the worst that she mentioned did happen? Will you not still trust me? Have you not been saying that this baby either boy or girl has a purpose that I have in mind for them and you?”  The tears immediately stopped of course realizing that though the things the doc mentioned were not only out of my control but that if those things were going to come to pass once baby was born that I had to trust God to be in charge of it all. I didn't do anything to cause the problem with baby it was God’s choice to have anything that may happen to this little one occur.  

I was so glad that I had such a big God with big shoulders to go to. Even though things could have been spoken that were a lot worse than what the doc told us I was still saddened but felt so much comfort after going to him and being reassured over and over that He was in control and no matter what He was going to look after me and my family including the little on growing inside of me. There is peace in knowing that even if this baby comes out with issues and if they don’t go away, God is taking care of it all and is holding both me and my child through each step of the way. He will never give us more than He is willing to help us through and He will never ask me to go through it alone.

Though Matt and I are sure things will turn out fine, it was a hard lesson to have to go through in order to answer the one question I keep asking myself even before I got pregnant. “If something really bad happened to me, would I still really trust and rely on God believing he’ll take care of me?”  I can honestly answer that though this may seem minuet detailed to some it was the question I really had to find an answer too.  Is my faith and my trust in God conditional or will I trust that He is good even if bad happens in my life which is only under his control?

The answer, yes, yes! and I am totally 100% sure that I’ve never felt more reliant on Him or happy even if things aren’t perfect with my child. I know that God has a purpose for my child and for my life and that no matter if baby is born healthy or baby is born boy or girl there is a purpose that no one can stop and all will be fine and perfect like He designed and worry is not something He has asked of me to do. Knowing I can fully trust him has relieved me of literally all my worry and it is the BEST feeling I’ll ever have.

For every flaw there is something great

I think many times we as humans, but even more so as women, get caught up in glancing around us. We see the things that others have, don't have. We compare ourselves to others on all levels and at different times. We ask ourselves questions like, "do I measure up?" or "How did they do that?' We even go as far as too look around and focus even more on our flaws. We focus on how bad we think our flaws are or how imperfect we are as a human, wishing we had someone else's flaws because ours are much worse. No matter how we look at our flaws we can often time find ourselves judging our flaws according to what we see in others.

I personally have a huge HUGE problem with this on occasion.  I personally think I have the worst flaws in the world. When I read where Paul writes in scripture that he is the worst sinner of them all I often think that he hadn't met me yet! I mean honestly I have flaws I feel everyone can see, everyone finds crucial and critical that should be dealt with NOW! and get them gone like yesterday!

Yesterday I was talking with a good Godly friend of mine and she is always full of wisdom and wise counsel, she mentioned to me she thought it was strange how we are always focusing on our flaws and not on our good points. For every flaw you may have there is also something great about you.  This is not obviously an excuse to focus on only the good stuff and stop thinking about how to work on our flaws, but that we should focus less on them and if you focus on them make sure you spend as much time focusing on your positive personality traits.

I went home and had a lot on my mind yesterday but this was the main thought I had taken away with me. The truth is that I believe she is right. At least it's a correct statement in my own life. How many times do I focus on what I need to change or don't like about my personality and I focus on it to the point of probably obsessing over it a bit because I just don't like it. Truly I don't think anyone likes their flaws it's humiliating to even admit we have them. But each time we focus on a flaw how much more do we need to go in prayer and maybe ask God to help us deal with those flaws and then ask Him to gently show us some good qualities we have as well that we can focus on and maybe even grow more in to improve those good qualities and move them to great qualities.

God created us to be human, which means we are subject to error, subject to our flaws. He did not just make us solely to have flaws he made us to succeed in areas of our life as well and to use those areas we are good in to encourage and enlighten others around us.  Don't let Satan pull you down by focusing only on your flaws. It's time we start focusing on the beautiful parts inside of us as well that God created to have you shine through for Him.  Both our flaws and our great qualities were designed by God's creative mind to make us exactly the person we are.  Embrace them both and focus on the good of you as much as or even more so than you focus on your flaws.