So today I set down to read my Bible and the minute I picked it up I had a cat meowing in my face. I gave him some attention and then picked my Bible back up about the same time my phone dinged informing me that I had a text message. I answered the message and then in came another.
Half an hour later I was back with my Bible in hand, the sound turned off on my phone, and then into the room walks my husband telling me about some neighborhood excitement going on across the street. It seems that two work trucks were accidentally running over stuff and backing into trees. That for sure was something I had to go see.
About 15 minutes later I was back in my office with my Bible open just long enough for the other cat to jump into my lap and meow in my face just as the music I had been playing on Pandora stopped leaving a message across the screen that said, ‘Lost Connection’.
Lost Connection…
Suddenly those words seemed to have a whole new meaning.
Not only had I lost connection to music on Pandora but I also seemed to have lost connection with what I was really after this morning, my connection with Jesus.
This time was the time I had reserved for just Jesus and I and all the distractions were keeping me away from Him.
I know that Jesus is with me all day but this time is our special time. This is the time I reserve to study the Bible and just hang out with only Him.
Jesus is not only the person who leads my life, but he is also my best friend and without Him I can’t really do life very well and tend to flop around like a fish out of water.
It still amazes me that Jesus wants to hang out with me too. Actually, he wants to hang out with me so much that he will come find me if I am distracted. Like today when he gently reminded me of my lost connection with a message on my Pandora screen.
Have you lost connection with Jesus today? Well guess what?! It’s not lost! He’s been right there beside you all along, all you have to do is say hi.
I hope you have an awesome week! Oh and before you leave check out this awesome praise song – Waiting here for you by Christy Nockels. 🙂
Trust in the Lord with all your heart; do not depend on your own understanding. Seek his will in all you do, and he will show you which path to take.
Proverbs 3:5-6 NLT https://bible.com/bible/116/pro.3.5-6.NLT
This is the face you make when you are a cat and you are angry with your person for not warning you that they had changed up the morning routine.
Anyone who has a cat knows that cats are pretty routine and most of them don’t really like it when you mess with the schedule.
My cat Mr. KB loves routine and today I realized that he and I have a routine that I guess I never really thought much about until now.
The usual routine is that when I go into my office to work or study he runs ahead of me and jumps up on top of the desk. At precisely the exact moment that my rear end hits the chair is when his feet hit the desktop. He then usually settles in beside me until I’m finished with whatever I’m doing.
If it’s morning time I will bring a cup of coffee to my desk so when he sees me with the coffee he knows it time to go in the office.
But today what Mr. KB didn’t know was that I had already made a buttered and jellied bagel and had put it on the desk before I went for my coffee.
Seeing me with coffee in hand heading for the office he knew it was time but because I didn’t think about his routine of diving on to the desk, and Mr. KB wasn’t expecting me to change my routine and have breakfast waiting on the desk, Mr. KB to landed right in the middle of my bagel!
Needless to say, Mr. KB’s whole routine was immediately thrown out of whack.
If you want to see something funny and not so funny all rolled into one… just imagine a butter and jelly-covered cat and a woman with a cup of coffee in her hand trying to catch the butter and jelly-covered cat and a plate of food before any of them land on the carpet.
Success!! 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀
Mr. KB is all cleaned up now and my life is back to a normal routine, but from the way he’s been glaring at me all morning, I think this routine change thing may have totally ruined Mr. KB’s whole day.
I never went to church as a child or adult other than occasional visits. When I was in my late 20’s I had been attending a church for a few months and one day I found myself walking down the aisle during a church service because I had just given my life to Jesus. I didn’t really understand the whole, ‘give your life to Jesus’ thing other than I knew that I had just been ‘saved’ and I was excited and happy about it!
Shortly after I was saved I was informed that because I was now saved, I could also become a member of the church. I hadn’t even realized until that moment that I wasn’t already a ‘member’ of the church. I also soon found out that but there was a catch to being a member of the church.
To be a member of the church I had to be baptized.
I was still pretty new to all of this, and getting dunked underwater in front of everyone seemed horrifying to me. I really wanted to be a member of the church but did NOT want to get baptized!
And to make matters worse someone told me that if I didn’t get baptized then I couldn’t get into heaven!
Being saved by Jesus had somehow now turned into me freaking out about church membership, baptisms, and getting into Heaven. None of this stuff had even been on my mind when I had asked Jesus to come into my life.
If this was what being saved felt like, I didn’t want to be saved anymore. I had felt a whole lot safer before the whole saving ordeal had happened!
Oh and also now added to the pot was this — my 7-year-old daughter had also been saved in Sunday school and she was scheduled to get baptized with me. The pressure was on and there was no way I could back out!
So the baptism happened and the joy I had felt at the beginning about being saved by Jesus was now lost under a huge weight.
Not only was the robe they made me wear to be baptized in heavy material that when wet made me feel as if I were coming out of the water with a couple of bags of rocks attached to my back. But it added to the fact that I now felt weighed down with the overwhelming task I had in front of me to keep it together. I felt like a fake and knew I had to be good so as not disappoint God or anyone in the church.
After I was baptized I barely went church anymore. I felt like a huge failure and I eventually walked completely away from church.
The worst thing of all is that I also walked away from God. I felt like somehow I had been part of some crazy bate and switch scam and I decided that God wasn’t real.
I stayed that way many years but then I saw my father-in-law die and that was the day I met the real Jesus once again.
As my father-in-law took his last breath his face suddenly became peaceful, I can never begin to explain what happened, except that God let me see my father-in-law as he was entering his new home in heaven and the peace surrounding him felt as if it were surrounding me. There was this overwhelming feeling of peace and love and it felt like it was all put there just for me to grab hold of. I remember going home that night with the loss of a loved one, yet I felt like I had gained something huge –I knew at that moment that God was real and that He truly loved ME! Unconditionally.
I had been told by well-meaning Christians my whole life that I should go to church and somehow I had grasped on to the idea that if I didn’t go to church I wasn’t good enough for God. I also thought I had to be goodwhen just being who I was was good enough.
A hospital room at one of the darkest times of my life is where Jesus came and got me. For no other reason than because, He loved me…just as I was. There wasn’t a church building or baptism required to be a member of his family and the only strings attached were for me to believe in him and come into his arms.
John 3:16says, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”
Being saved by Jesus means that Jesus loves me so much that he gave up his life for me so I don’t have to be perfect.
The gift of Salvation is a God’s gift to ALL of us.
His gift is for any of us to take no matter who we are or where we are in life. It doesn’t have to be opened in a church building and we don’t have to be a member of anything to receive it. Once we accept it we are part of the family and will live in Heaven with him one day
I did eventually find a church that I now call my church home and I did even get re-baptized when I felt led by Jesus to do it not because I was forced to do it.
I love Jesus and the family of believers he has placed in my life and it’s good to have those people in my life because they help make that connection to Him even stronger. We worship together and learn about him together. We even help lift each other up in our times of struggle. So a church family is a good thing to have.
I did not share this story to condemn any church or denomination, I shared it because I have met up with several people now who have had this same experience as me. I want others who read this to know that no matter who you are or where you are at you can come to Jesus just because He loves you and wants YOU right where you are.
If you already have accepted Jesus’ gift of salvation that is awesome! If you want to share it with others and you are attaching strings to it, please stop doing that!
‘For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.’John 3:17
Speaking of time flying by, sometimes I think its good to slow down not only during the moments we have right now but also to slow down and take a look back at how far we have come. I find it amazing at how things that once were hard have actually helped me to become the more secure in who I am today. Today before I share the song I want to share something I wrote in August of 2014.
Before we get started here is a little background on what was going on the day I wrote it –I was on vacation in Mexico and had suddenly discovered a black hole directly in the center of my vision in one of my eyes. At that time I also already had a blind spot in my other eye that hadn’t been very noticeable with both eyes open. Now with blindness in both eyes, I was in a full-blown panic. I was laying in a beach chair beside the ocean, real live storm clouds looming over the water but a larger storm was going on inside my mind. I could not bear to open my eyes because I didn’t want to see the blind spots. In the middle of it all God spoke peace to me.
Lately, I have been thinking a lot about the peace of God and how he can totally give peace in the middle of some of our hardest moments in life. This was one of my hardest moments and God made it peaceful. Sometimes in life we really can’t do anything about our situation except give it to God.
Okay so much for sharing an old blog post I seem to not be able to stop typing and it now looks as if I am writing a new one…
Here is the post form Aug. 2014…
I Still See
The wind is raging, storm clouds looming over the waves and in my mind.
I see where I don’t see and it frightens me.
The waves crash the shore and inside my mind they crash my sanity.
Fear overwhelming, the roar of the ocean matching the roar in my mind
Threatening dark clouds in the distance much like the dark blur obscuring my vision of the beauty before me.
The beauty…you are so big you created this
I feel so small right now,
I know you are so much bigger than me and even more bigger than the small blur.
I feel the breeze starting to cool as the storm in the distance calms the storm that is raging inside calms too.
The blur still threatens to get in the way but you won’t let it.
Even if what we are praying for isn’t seeming to end, our hope is still in Jesus. He will always be there for us and with Him we can move on. Even in the middle of the storm we can always find Jesus right beside us.
Thanks so much for coming by the blog today, I hope in some way what I’ve shared can inspire you or help you to find the peace you are looking for. Jesus is the only answer I really know of for perfect peace inside and I hope if that is what you are looking for you will know him too. If you want more info about knowing Jesus you can click -> here.
This is where I found my cat sleeping this morning.
Lately, I can’t seem to keep him off of my Bible. It seems to have become his favorite resting place.
When I saw him so peacefully resting in my Bible it made me think of how it makes me feel when I open this book each day and read the special messages God has tucked inside for me.
No, it doesn’t make me fall asleep like Bart, but instead, HIs words fill me with peace.
The Bible is the place where I know I will always find my Jesus and the peace that only comes when I rest in HIm.
Don’t you sometimes wish God would just talk out loud?
A few nights ago, my husband and I were supposed to volunteer for the Compassion table at The Roadshow concert. But I was thinking about not going.
I am 3 weeks post surgery and I’m not supposed to be standing for long periods of time plus I feel pretty wiped out every night by evening. Add to that it had been a dreary cloudy day and they were calling for a lot of rain that would make driving an hour and a half to and from the concert miserable.
I decided to tell my husband about my thoughts on not going but before I could speak he said, “I sure am looking forward to going to the concert tonight!”
So you guessed it, I kept my thoughts to myself and we went to the concert.
Upon arriving we were met by a lot of our friends we’ve made over the years who also work these events and suddenly I was happy to be there.
We then had training and prayer and we were soon off to our assigned table… A table on the floor inside the concert. Most people only visit the table during intermission so that means we pretty much got to watch the whole concert in what I would consider some of the best seats in the house!
Now I want to get off subject for just a minute…. Hopefully, this will all come together and make sense soon.
For quite some time now I have this odd feeling that God is stripping me down bringing me back to the basics. I’ve been a little mixed up about why when I follow His lead things don’t go like I thought they would go.
Now add this – Volunteering with Compassion has always been something I feel very passionate about but for about a year God had been leading me in a different direction which felt strange to me. And then this past December I started feeling Him pulling me back toward Compassion.
I am sitting there watching the concert (they gave me a chair! Yay!), Natalie Grant comes on stage with a powerful message about wanting Jesus more than anything and then she sings the song ‘More than Anything.’ The words go – Help me want the Healer More than the healing, Help me want the Savior, More than the saving, Help me want the Giver, More than the giving, Oh help me want You Jesus.
I had never heard that song until that moment… Add this to the stuff I wrote earlier- A lot has been going on in my life for what seems like a really long time from all sides of life. I keep living my life for Jesus yet bad stuff just keeps happening and there is really nothing I can do about any of it except keep praying and stay close to Jesus.
Which I do do.
Natalie sang more songs all of which had God speaking to me through them and then she started singing ‘How Great Thou Art’ and I started to sing along. I could totally feel God speaking to me about what I am supposed to do…the writing, Compassion… the junk in my life.
At that moment I was laying it all down and then I said to him, “God, it would be so much easier if you would just speak out loud to me,” and I heard Him in my mind say, “It’s time to get to work and get some kids sponsored” and then at the same exact time I felt a tap on my shoulder and heard the words “it’s time to get back work and get some kids sponsored” coming out of my husbands mouth.
!!!!!!!!
I was suddenly jarred back into the room… strangely I never really realized that I had totally forgotten the rest of the people there. For in the previous moments it had only been me and God. The lights were coming on now and people were coming up to the table to sponsor kids. I looked across the table and saw a woman who I had been talking to at the beginning of the concert who had been unsure about sponsoring as a child, she was now turning in a packet because she was sponsoring!!
I knew without a doubt this was where I was supposed to be. I can’t even begin to explain the peace that washed over me.
The peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Philippians 4:7
How Great God is!
Since my surgery, I haven’t been to a church service in 3 weeks. I was sick for 2 Sundays and then church was canceled another Sunday because of snow.
Today it felt so good to get to church and imagine my surprise (not) when we sang “How Great Thou Art
Happy Music Monday to you!
What song has moved you recently? Share it in the comments or on your blog and then link in the comments.
I used to blog here and then I blogged there and now I’m back here again.
That sounds like a mixed-up-I-can’t-make-my-mind-up kind of statement, doesn’t it?
Take a break from reading this post for just a moment and look at the page you are reading from. You will now notice that there is a different name at the top of the blog.
Actually, you will notice a different everything on this blog.
If you’ve been following my blog for awhile then you may or may not have noticed that you’ve been on a blog-hopping journey for quite some time now.
January 1, 2012. That was the day that I started this blog and this is the place where it all began. You are now at ‘A Story by Me.’
Those of you who have been following since the beginning know that this blog’s whole purpose was because God told me to write it and at that time of my life, I was about a year into my journey with Jesus.
I may or may not have shared this part before – writing a blog is way out of my comfort zone…. and it is sometimes really hard for me to share my thoughts publically.
But I did.
Every time I would publish a post I would always think to myself, “could this be this last one?” But then a few days later something would happen and God would prompt me that I needed to write about it and share it.
All seemed to be going great and then one day I decided I needed a nicer blog site. So I left this blog, directing my domain name to a brand new self-hosted blog and then changed the blog name and also the whole look of the blog.
Shortly after moving to the new blog I pretty much lost interest in blogging.
Since I now had a self-hosted blog and I am not as technologically inclined as I thought I was, I spent a whole lot of time working to keep the blog up and running and never seemed to have time to write. And…when I did have time to write, I seemed to have some crazy block in my brain and I couldn’t think of anything at all to write about.
Can you see where I am going with this?
Moving the blog wasn’t part of God’s plan.
This is his blog, not my blog and I’ve known that since the beginning.
All He wanted me to do was write and share.
Period.
He didn’t tell me to move to a bigger and better platform and spend all of my time trying to figure out all of the technical aspects of self-hosting a blog.
He didn’t tell me that I needed to change the blog name to something that sounded more catchier than the name my blog already had.
He didn’t tell me to do a lot of things that I did.
I had one simple thing to do but now I had turned it into a whole lot of hard things to do.
Sometimes it’s still hard for me when it comes to this God thing. When I was a newer Christian it seemed to come easier for me than it does now. It used to be that God would tell me to do something and I would just do it. Recently he’s shown me that somewhere along the way, I have started trying to jump ahead of him. I am the one who makes things hard when they don’t have to be hard.
Somehow I had forgotten that it’s His job to lead and all I have to do is follow.
I recently took a little journey through some of my old posts and I realized now why this blog is even here at all. It’s for people like me. The ones aren’t perfect. the ones who may be hurting, the ones who may feel unloved or lonely. The ones who may feel forgotten and afraid. It’s for the people who just need Jesus in their lives. Those who already know him and most of all for those who don’t.
This blog is not about me, it’s about Him, JESUS and how he can take the most messed up broken people and put them back together again when they let him in.
Why do I need a beautiful blog site when I have a beautiful savior to share?
In all of my years of life, I have never had to live a day without clean water.
But that is exactly what happened to me the other day.
I woke up just like I do every other day – half asleep and heading for the coffee pot.
I turned on the water faucet and received nothing but air.
In disbelief, I tried again and again with the same result dead air – not even a dribble of water!
I quickly realized that this was how my life was going to start today – There would be no shower, no face washing, to toothbrushing, and this was really bad – NO COFFEE!!
I whined a little bit okay make that a LOT while I dressed, threw my toothbrush in my purse, and headed for work, stopping along the way at McDonald’s for breakfast and a nice hot cup of coffee!
A little while later while comfortably at my desk with freshly brushed teeth, and a hot cup of coffee in my hand I received a call from the water department informing me that during the night there had been a water main break but that now our water at home was back on and safe for bathing in. They also said for the next 24 hours we were under a boil order for water used for drinking and cooking.
A few hours later I arrived home from work with the plan of taking that shower I had missed that morning on my mind but when I turned on the water I discovered that our water was now a nice muddy shade of brown!
Quickly deciding that shower would probably make me feel dirtier than I already felt that plan soon ended along with the decision that no amount of boiling in the world would make me feel comfortable to use the water coming out of my faucets for toothbrushing, cooking, or drinking! I also had mountains of laundry to do but figured my clothes would turn brown so that was also out today!
Brown water is not something that I am used to seeing coming out of my faucets and I bet you aren’t either.
Did you know that there are places where it is normal to have dirty water every day?
Did you know there are places where life is so poverty ridden that people walk for miles to get water… dirty water… and they carry it home and then they bathe in it and drink it?
Did you know that one of the most critical needs in the fight against poverty around the world is the need for clean water?
Did you know that every 15 seconds a child dies from a water-related disease?
Did you know that 4000 children die every day from easily preventable diseases?
Did you know that clean water helps children stay healthy and active in school so that they can focus on overcoming poverty?
Click here and check out these water facts -> water facts
For me, a day without water or dirty water is a once or twice in a lifetime occurrence so it’s hard for me to fathom that 35 percent of the world’s population does not have clean waterEVERY – SINGLE – DAY!
People shouldn’t have to go without clean water and WE can help to fix this problem.
For me, one day without clean water seemed like such a big deal and I still had access to ways to get what I needed.
Imagine if this were your life every single day… no possible way to get the clean water you need so you have to give the glass of water pictured here to your children?!
Thankfully there is a solution and you can help make that solution happen!
A Story By Me 
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