When Your Pants and Your Life Don’t Fit – SheLoves Magazine

I was asking God to help me lose weight. Instead He made me buy bigger pants.You see, I had been praying to God that my pants would fit. Not those words exactly, but for sure I had been praying all around that topic. God give me more discipline, more will power, help me to resist the cookie, give me good rest, help me to wake up early to run. God, PLEASE let the number on the scale be smaller than it was yesterday.

I really needed my pants to fit. They weren’t not buttoning or indecently tight, but they were making me uncomfortable, these size eight pants of mine. I had to suck in to button up. I had marks on myself at the end of the day. My pants just plain didn’t feel good, and y’all, I want my pants to feel good. Because my pants weren’t just making my skin feel bad, they were making me feel bad.

Source: When Your Pants and Your Life Don’t Fit – SheLoves Magazine

The Other Side Of Abortion — the Better Mom

I don’t have to stand on a corner and hold up signs and posters of babies whose lives are taken by abortion. I don’t have to post articles on Facebook that make your stomach queasy and your eyes well up with tears.

I don’t have to show anger toward the doctor performing an abortion or the mother who has scheduled her final appointment. I have days when I feel restless because I want to do more. I want to save a mother from heartache and a baby from meaningless death. Some days I feel anger and I don’t know what to do with it. I think of strategies to intercept the mother walking into her appointment at our local abortion clinic. I practice conversations in my mind of what I would say to those doctors. I ask God to give me opportunities.

Ever since I had my second baby, Elias, abortion wasn’t just a distant thought anymore. It was a harsh reality. I feel haunted by the fact that 92% of babies with Down syndrome are aborted. It weighs heavy on my thoughts.

Read full article at: The Other Side Of Abortion — the Better Mom

Hottokēki (Japanese Hot Cake) | Tara’s Multicultural Table

I want to make this for Jia En and Zhou Hui for one of our Monday breakfasts 🙂

Hottokēki (Japanese Hot Cake)

2 large eggs

200 milliliters (3/4 cup plus 1 1/2 tablespoons) milk

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

200 grams (~1 2/3 cups) all purpose flour

8 grams (1 3/4 teaspoons) baking powder

40 grams (3 tablespoons plus 1 teaspoon) granulated sugar

In a medium bowl, use a mixer to beat together eggs, milk, and vanilla until foamy.In another medium bowl, whisk together flour, baking powder, and sugar. Use a wooden spoon or spatula to lightly, but quickly fold into the liquid ingredients until just incorporated. Allow to rest until slightly thickened, about 15 minutes.

Place a large skillet over medium low heat and lightly grease with butter or oil. Once heated, pour 1/4 cup of the batter in prepared skillet. Once golden on bottom and bubbles begin to form on top, flip to other side. Continue to cook until golden. Repeat with remaining batter. Serve immediately topped with maple syrup, butter, whipped cream, or fresh berries.

Source: Hottokēki (Japanese Hot Cake) | Tara’s Multicultural Table

Fudgey Chocolate Chunk Brownies – Something Swanky

Fudgey Chocolate Chunk Brownies

Ingredients

1/2 cup butter, room temperature

1 cup granulated sugar

1 tsp vanilla extract

2 eggs

1/2 cup all purpose flour

1/2 cup cocoa powder

1/4 tsp baking soda

1/4 tsp salt

2 cups chocolate chunks

Instructions

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

Line a 9×9 baking dish with parchment paper.

Beat together the butter, sugar, and vanilla in a stand mixer bowl. Add the eggs one at a time, mixing well between each addition.Stir together the flour, cocoa powder, and salt.

Gradually add the dry ingredients to the butter mixture. Mix in the baking soda.

Mix in the chocolate chunks with a wooden spoon or spatula.Once the batter forms (it will be thick), scrape it into the prepared dish and spread evenly.Bake for 25 minutes, until brownies begin to pull away from the side of the pan.Serves 9-12.

Source: Fudgey Chocolate Chunk Brownies – Something Swanky

My Weird Childhood Faith Isn’t So Weird Anymore | Her.meneutics | Christianitytoday.com

Sarah Bessey’s very insightful thoughts on being a charismatic and where the charismatic movement is heading. 

I received the gift of tongues when I was just eight years old. An older woman in our small charismatic church introduced us Friday night Bible study kids to the idea of a “prayer language.” I don’t remember how my teacher explained it, only how she gently placed her hands on our heads, one after another, while quietly praying in tongues herself. My mouth filled with syllables I didn’t know and didn’t understand; I lifted my skinny arms to the ceiling, and I spoke in tongues like a mystic.

I was raised in small charismatic churches in western Canada, long before the Internet made it easy to keep tabs on what other Christians were up to. I grew up believing that our experiences—speaking in tongues and then the interpretation, healing, miracles, prophecy, words of knowledge, and faith—were utterly unremarkable.

As I look back on my childhood, although the gifts of the Holy Spirit were dear to us and we deeply believed in their practice, the real difference was that we expected God. We wanted the wild and the untamed Spirit to disrupt us. We lived out of an assumption of God’s good gifts and overwhelming love. We yearned to see the Kingdom come on earth, right here, as it was or would be in heaven. We figured that was what God wanted, too. Believing power would come from on high to see the lost found and the sick healed and imprisoned set free, our church operated on a first-name basis with the Spirit.

Source: My Weird Childhood Faith Isn’t So Weird Anymore | Her.meneutics | Christianitytoday.com

Spoken Word: Beauty [and how He sees you]

the abundant life

John 10:10. the thief comes only to steal, and kill, and destroy; I came that they might have life and might have it abundantly.

Jesus came so that we might have life. And not just life, but the abundant life. So, what exactly is the abundant life?

Today, I set out on a little trek to explore the village. For those of you who do not know, I just arrived late last night in Fuzhou, China, and will be writing more about my experience here. So, anyway, with Kayla on my back and Bible stowed in her pouch, I wandered down the dusky dirt roads. Schoolgirls perched on bicycle frames with hanging baskets cycled past me, while the faster mopeds with little children sitting dangerously on their parents laps unprotected purred, stirring up sienna-burnt dust clouds. There were no street signs so I made turns at my fancy, in between dilapidated shingled huts and around hollowed houses of wood. The road ended up leading to a bridge over river and I found a shady spot to sing with Kayla, occasionally stopping to mark up my journal with my new mint-green and fuchsia-pink markers.

The question on my mind being – how do we grab hold of the abundant life? What does it mean to fully live?

My journey started with Psalm 27:4. Out of all the things King David wanted, the one thing was:

It starts with beholding His beauty. Do we ever wonder why the world has color? Or why the universe even has other stars apart from the Sun? Or why the Sun is a lot more glorious than it needs to be (apparently, we only use up 0.000045% of the Sun’s energy!)? He created beauty in the world and then created us to behold His beauty. He died so the veil could be torn so that we could behold His beauty. It is the capturing of beauty in the face of a dying baby, or a sunset of majesty, or a widow of 4th stage breast cancer, that we come to know Him.

To know, not just a superficial knowing of name, but the deep, experiential ginosko of Philippians 3:10. That we would know Him, not just in HIs power – the glory, the healings, the miracles – but also in the fellowship of HIs sufferings – in the dirt, the grime, the muck, the loneliness. The knowing that comes from beholding Him, then walking through life with Him.

When we know Him, it produces a radical love – just like how when we start to know someone intimately through marriage, we love them even more. Not a tempered love, but a radical love that compels us to do something radical with our lives. a love that defies logic and reason, but empties of itself to have all of the other. It is that kind of perfect love that casts out all fear.

1 John 4:18. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves punishment and the one who fears is not perfected in love.

And without fear, there is true freedom. The dance-in-the-rain fearless kind of freedom. The freedom that comes from truly knowing Him.

I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in Me shall live even if he dies. And everyone who lives and believes in Me shall never die. Do you believe this? – John 11:25-26.

I believe it is this beholding beauty – knowing that produces love – that casts out fear – that leads to freedom – is truly the abundant life. The only question is then, are we living it.

Fabric Photo Transfer Journals – A Beautiful Mess

Source: Fabric Photo Transfer Journals – A Beautiful Mess

The Simple Gospel

Do we overcomplicate the gospel? Can we lay down our religion just to know Him?

When you feel a bit selfish for pursuing your calling – Sarah Bessey

I saw this in a friend recently. She is a gifted Bible teacher and she kept putting it off and putting it off because it was hard to figure out a way to make it work in her season of life as a mother to young children and a full-time job. But when she made space to engage in that aspect of her calling – teaching, leading, training others how to study and love the Bible – she came alive! It was incredible to see. She came home from the nights of teaching as if she were on an adrenalin high. The joy of it would carry into her whole week, affecting her family and all the rest of us. The work she did mattered, of course it did, and she changed lives with her work. But the act of doing the work itself was also life-changing for her and for the ones who loved her.

If teaching or preaching or writing or managing or leading or painting or film-making or delivering babies or studying astro-physics or whatever it is makes you feel more whole, then darling, do it all to the glory of God and you’ll see that the way it makes you come alive will stain your entire life with joy. 

The work is good and purposeful and necessary in and of itself, absolutely. I’m always flat amazed at the ways that my words, tapped away on this smudgy laptop wing into lives all around the world in ways I never would have expected. That’s worthwhile! But I also love the gift that the act of working gives to me. Isn’t that just like God? For even during the Fall, when we were “cursed” with work, we find goodness hiding there, too.Because it’s never just about us. That true version of yourself – the one that needs the wholeness of creativity and work and service altogether – exists in a family and in a community and as part of God’s love letter to the world. When you are fully alive, as Ireneus famously said, it glorifies God. And when God is glorified, all of us are drawn to the light and life of that moment. 

Source: When you feel a bit selfish for pursuing your calling – Sarah Bessey