Thanksgiving....

Today, I'm thankful for my niece and nephews...and to celebrate my brother's kids, we went out for a hike and photo shoot for a little while. :) Here are some of my favorites.

Spiritual Health Food

We all know that eating fruits and vegetables are good for us. Those leafy greens give us energy and those juicy plump grapes make us strong and healthy.

I once went to this health seminar a friend invited me to, and the woman speaking (I can't remember her name, or I would quote her) said one of the most interesting things about eating fruits and vegetables I'd ever heard. Now, I'm not a nutritionist, nor would I ever claim to be an expert on eating nutritiously, but what she said made sense.

She said that the reason we should eat vegetables is that they help protect us. The tomato, for example, sits out in the sun all day, yet it doesn't wither and burn. It takes the sun's energy, and instead of drying up, turns it into food in order to grow and ripen into something delicious.

So, her logic, and I'm sure she probably had some sort of science behind it, was that if we eat fruits and vegetables, we take on those characteristics. Her conclusion was that if we eat properly, we would be be able to better fight off the ill effects of our environment, i.e. being less susceptible to sunburn if we eat more tomatoes. For a fair-skinned blond who wears SPF 85 on a regular basis, this got my attention.

All I could think of was..."Interesting."

While, it didn't make me change my eating habits, I saw some spiritual truths there. In John 15:5 it says, "I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever abides in me and I in him it is he who bears much fruit much for apart from me nothing you can do."

While we can delve very deeply into why God compares Christian living to fruit, the most obvious is the more we partake of His goodness, the more we will be like Him. As we abide in Christ, the more we are able to show His love, fight off temptation and crave knowing Him more.

So, Lord, let me partake of You today, and bear your goodness.

Shouldn't I have this figured out by now?!?

For the life of me, I can't figure out how to balance working (more than) full-time, friends, church, and being the domestic engineer of my home. Inevitably, if I try and do one well, the others suffer.

Most of the time, it's my responsibilities at home. Right now, as I look around, I swear there's at least an inch of dust on everything, my belongings are scattered. And don't even get me started on my bathroom. It's just disgusting. And I have people coming over in five hours.

So, I'm doing what I always do at this time: scrambling and cleaning the fastest way possible. (Well, after I write this blog post anyway.)

Inevitably, I get my house as clean as I can for people to see it, and make my resolve to keep a schedule and be better. But there's one flaw in my plan: I fail. And my house within two weeks (or sooner) is in shambles again.

But, as I think about this problem as it relates to the rest of my life, I am startled by what a good analogy it is to how we view sin. Sometimes, I think I can just clean up my sin issues on my own. And to a certain extent I can. I can make the decision to be a better person. I can say to myself, "Hey, you know, you're hurting people by doing that."

In fact, if I had never prayed at a young age to receive Christ as my savior, and then later decided to dedicate my life to Christian service when I was a teen-ager, I would be a different person.  It's those decisions that sparked spiritual change in my life.

But the challenge comes when I try to continue carry out those decisions on my own day after day. The fatal flaw in that plan is that I'm leaving God out of the picture. And then, time after time, day after day,  I will most certainly fail. Because it's Christ who holds me up. On my own power I can do nothing. I can't conquer sin by just making decision. Just like I can't keep my house clean by just cleaning when I need to do it. It has to be a daily battle.

So today, I dig deep into God, and I pray: "Lord, hold me up where I fail. God, help me seek you as I make decisions for you. And selfishly, help me to clean my house!

Oh ye of little faith...

I was on Facebook today, and there was this picture of my friend's son, laying flat on the see-through floor in the Sear's Tower in Chicago, looking in amazement at the ground beneath him. If that floor broke, there would be certain death.

And as I looked at that picture, I was just amazed how he had no fear. None. He was just there chillin' on the floor.

I admired his brazen ability to look at the ground below in wonder, and thought "what a perfect analogy to how I should look at my future in Christ."

While God doesn't promise a life without hardships and struggle, He does promise a life with Him, and we can be secure in that. Too many times, I look at my future as a single woman in her 30s and I feel fear. Fear of the unknown. Fear of losing my job. Fear of losing my friends. Fear of heartbreak. Fear that all these floors of glass I have set my hopes and dream on, will break

So, today, I want to face my future like I'm just chillin' on a glass floor. Not scared, not fearful, without apprehension. Thanks Adlai for such a perfect picture of faith.