Record Low!

We set a record low of -24 last night!

SNOW!!

We have 18" of snow today, 2-9-2011!

Peace

Have you ever wanted your way so intensely that you were pushing yourself beyond your current limits? Maybe God has slowed your life down (personal illness, family illness, financial hardship etc.) for your own good, but you refuse to give it all over to God. You are determined to have what you want. Not that what you want is even bad. It seems so good, and so right, that you feel God must just be testing your endurance. You may think He is wanting you to push despite your current roadblocks. I wonder how often we fight against God even when we know deep down we are in the wrong.

Can we, as committed God seeking Christians, keep pushing until we get our way? How do we know if God is testing our endurance or telling us to slow down. Give something up. Go a different direction. Forgive and forget. Trust God when it doesn't make sense.

Philippians 4:6-7 says: Be anxious in nothing, but in everything, by prayer and supplication, let your requests be made known to God;
And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.

These verses have been heart verses for me for many years. I know it is the Peace that surpasses all understanding that will tell me if I'm headed in the right direction. I'm still surprised though, how quickly I forget the lessons God has taught me over the years. I can find myself back in that same mindset of wanting my way so much that I'm willing to sacrifice health, family, friends, whatever it takes to get what I want. In fact, I may think I'm doing these things for others, not myself. I need to be seeking God's will in my life daily, and really listen to hear what He is saying to me today.

Peace: a state of tranquillity or quiet:
freedom from disquieting or oppressive thoughts or emotions.

The Source of Stress

God wants His sheep to learn how to get quiet, to lie down in green pastures, and to drink from still waters. Do you know the reason why we are stressed? Because we think our needs are not going to be met.

Jesus said, "Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment? Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they? . . . But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and His righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you" (Matthew 6:25-26, 33).

What do people worry about? Food, clothing, shelter. Jesus said we're not to worry about these things. Now, He didn't say these things were not important. But He said these things don't take significance until your deepest needs are met. You are to find your satisfaction in Him. If you don't find your satisfaction in Him, you're going to be stressed.
Adrian Rogers

Where Poppies Grow

I love wildflowers. I stop to take pictures of wildflowers growing by the roadside and in fields. I even have a few wildflowers that grow in my own backyard. I love it! My husband doesn't really, but he will mow around a few of them because he loves me. :)

A year or two ago, not sure how long now, there was a wild poppy that appeared in our backyard. I was thrilled! I love wild poppies and I've never had one grow in my yard! It was growing in a place that had to be mowed though, so I decided I would transplant it into a flower pot and I would keep it. :) Well, it shriveled up and died in the pot. I was disappointed. A friend who worked at a local nursery told me you can't grow wild flowers in pots. The main problem being, we usually water them too much. They aren't used to being watered and weeded etc. I thought, wow, that's true. I see wildflowers growing on the side of the road and in fields, and no one is watering or weeding them or deadheading them....lol. I know God waters them with the rain, but they don't get watered and tended regularly like a flower bed does.

I forgot about the poppy I tried to grow in a flower pot.
Until, earlier this week when I noticed some color in a flower pot with nothing but weeds growing in it.
I have lots of big flower pots around here, and apparently this one had been neglected for awhile. I had noticed the weeds growing in it, in fact, my husband said he started to pull the weeds out of it just a day or two before. The color I saw in the weeds was a wild poppy blooming! I remembered planting the wild poppy in that pot, but I really couldn't remember if it was last year or the year before. The poppy is so beautiful, and it's growing like a weed....lol...which is great since I love this weed!

I can't count the times the Lord has blessed me through a flower popping up somewhere I didn't expect it. One time, when I was going through a very uncertain time in my life, one single pink lady bloomed in our front flower bed, and we had never planted pink ladies anywhere in our yard. We hadn't even planted anything that year because of health problems. When I walked out my front door that day, I needed some hope, and that flower was hope sent from the Lord above just when I needed it.

God wants a personal relationship with us. I believe He speaks to us everyday in many ways. All we have to do is look around. Go outside, take walk, look around. Ask God to speak to you. He will.

Our Daily Bread

Finding God In The Darkness

READ: Acts 17:24-31

The Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost. —Luke 19:10

When our boys were small, we played a game called "Sardines." We’d turn out all the lights in our home and I would hide in a closet or some other cramped place. The rest of the family groped about in the darkness to find my hiding place and then hide with me until we were squeezed together like sardines. Hence the name.

Our smallest family member at times became frightened in the dark, so when he came close, I would whisper to him softly: "Here I am."

"I found you, Dad!" he would announce as he snuggled against me in the darkness, not realizing that I let myself be "found."

Likewise, we have been made to search for God—to "grope for Him," as Paul put it so vividly (Acts 17:27). But here’s the good news: He is not at all hard to find, for "He is not far from each one of us." He desires to make Himself known. "There is a property in God of thirst and longing. He hath longing to have us," wrote Dame Julian of Norwich centuries ago.

Before we come to know Christ, we grope for God in the darkness. But if we search for Him in earnest, He will make Himself known, for He rewards those who diligently seek Him (Heb. 11:6). He will call to us softly: "Here I am."

And He awaits our reply: "I found You!" —David H. Roper

Man gropes his way through life’s dark maze;
To gods unknown he often prays,
Until one day he meets God’s Son—
At last he’s found the Living One! —D. De Haan

Seek the Lord while He may be found, call upon Him while He is near. —Isaiah 55:6

The Fear of Man or Woman

A devotion from Elisabeth Elliot's book "Keep a Quiet Heart".

The majority of men have thought of women as sublime separately but horrible as a herd," noted the wise G.K. Chesterton. Alas. Are we so formidable? Robert Bly, in his best-selling Iron John, declares that men are petrified of female anger. Then there's a Time correspondent named Sam Allis who says "Women are often daunting obstacles to male peace of mind, and for all their brave talk, men remain utterly flummoxed by the situation."

"The fear of man bringeth a snare," according to God's Word. Meseemeth the fear of woman bringeth a worse one. These comments have set me thinking (again) about fear in general. If men and women were surer of their God there would be more genuine manliness, womanliness, and godliness in the world, and a whole lot less fear of each other.

Jesus told us not to fear those who can kill only the body, but rather to fear Him who can destroy both soul and body in hell-in other words, fear God and fear nothing else. Moses, by faith, "left Egypt, not fearing the king's anger; he persevered because he saw him who is invisible" (Hebrews 11:27, NIV). When Daniel learned of King Darius's decree forbidding prayer to any god or man except the king himself, he proceeded with his regular manner of worship, on his knees, windows open, "just as he had done before, and was caught in the act (Daniel 6). He feared God; therefore, he feared neither the king nor the lions. His three friends, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, faced with the choice between two evils, worshipping a golden image or burning to a crisp in a furnace, made an instant decision (Daniel 3). Fear of God made worship of an idol unthinkable. Fear of the fire was, by comparison, thinkable. That's manliness.

Uzziah, who became king of Judah when he was sixteen, was taught by Zechariah to fear God. A child who is not taught to fear wrongdoing when he is small will have great difficulty learning to fear God when he is a man. "Freedom from fear" is what Russell Kirk calls a "silly piece of demagogic sophistry," for we all have "a natural yearning for the challenge of the dreadful."

One of the nicest things any of the listeners to my broadcast, Gateway to Joy, has written to me came from a little girl: "You make me brave." Sometimes I wonder what has happened to words like courage and endurance. What reason is there in our feel-comfortable society ever to be brave? Very little, and, when you think about it, we miss it, don't we? To be really brave is to lay oneself open to charges of hypocrisy, of being "in denial," or out of touch with one's feelings. Moses charged Joshua to be strong and very courageous. Courage is not the absence of fear but the willingness to do the thing we fear. Go straight into the furnace or the lion's den. Were those men out of touch with their feelings or with reality? No. Nor was the psalmist who said, "When I am afraid, I will trust" (Psalm 56:3, NIV). There's a big difference between feeling and willing.

In George MacDonald's Sir Gibbie the boy (Gibbie) is up in the mountains in a storm. He hears the sound of the river in flood and realizes it is headed straight for the cottage. He shoots after it. "He is not terrified. One believing like him in the perfect Love and perfect Will of a Father of men, as the fact of facts, fears nothing. Fear is faithlessness... A perfect faith would lift us absolutely above fear. It is in the cracks, crannies, and gulfy faults of our belief, the gaps that are not faith, that the snow of apprehension settles and the ice of unkindness forms."

Do you feel, in spite of all the promises of God, as helpless as a worm today? There's a special word for you too: "Do not fear; I will help you. Do not be afraid, O worm Jacob, O little Israel, for I myself will help you" (Isaiah 41:14, NIV).