Treasure-chest of the soul--One cannot give what is not there, part 1

"Make your ear attentive to wisdom, Incline your heart to understanding; for if you cry for discernment, lift up your voice for understanding; If you seek her as silver, and search for her as for hidden treasures; Then you will discern the fear of the Lord and discover the knowledge of God. For the Lord gives wisdom ; from His mouth come knowledge and understanding. He stores up sound wisdom for the upright; He is a shield to those who walk in integrity." Proverbs 2:2-7

Bone chilling fog wafted through the mysterious, ancient cobblestone streets as I made my way to school each morning in Krakow, Poland. Mists wrapped around the gray stone walls of the  aged city, whispering of the hidden secrets of kings and queens who resided there through hundreds of years.

Living there during the Communist occupation meant that we could not buy much food. Meat was scarce and fresh fruit and vegetables were rare and brought into small, open air markets only in season. But always, we could find beautifully carved wooden boxes of every size, shape and style.

Hoping that some day I would have my own cottage to fill with beauty and color, I would scan the hundreds of choices to find a distinctly crafted box that might someday find a place in my imagined future home. I was particularly drawn to the treasure chests that had keys to lock away precious letters, secrets, journals or jewels.

Years later, when my home became a reality and little feet pattered around, my treasure chests became favorite relics in my home. Often, I would lock a scrawled verse on a bright piece of colored paper, place some chocolate covered coins, a tiny little ring, bracelet, knight in shining armor, or small puzzle inside for my children to discover. Glee and intrigue would fill their hopeful little eyes as they opened the chest to see what was inside.

During a quiet time one morning, my eyes lighted upon one of my little chests and the Holy Spirit impressed me to look at the heart of my children as treasures chests. Filling the treasure chests of their hearts with truth, beauty, love, great thoughts, books and ideas, adventures, memories, traditions, wisdom, music, art, lessons, all that I could imagine became a purposeful goal. I realized that I wanted to fill them with such an abundance of relics of eternal value, that they would draw beauty, strength, guidance, assurance, courage, love the rest of their lives, so that they would always have bounty to draw from the rest of their lives.

Realization came to me, though, that I could not give to them what I did not myself possess. If I wanted the souls of my children to be rich, then my soul needed to be rich because it was my soul they would draw from. And so the idea of intentionality began to engage the imagination of my heart.

Whatever I filled my mind with became the tutor of their education as I lived my moments in their presence. Whatever I had learned and embraced, became for them the message on my heart of my day. Investing time every morning with the Lord became the passion I passed on each morning over breakfast.

Finding great people whose presence brings life, inspiration, and after I am with them, I want to be more excellent, want to trust God for more miracles, want to be a better person is rare. But, I realized that I wanted to be that kind of person--where the living, sparkling, dancing spirit of God was so much a part of me, that to be with me was to be in the presence of God.

The Holy Spirit comes into our lives to produce the fruit of Christ--love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness and self-control, and so this is what I knew should be growing in me as I lived and abided in Him. I see that in God's economy, it is possible to become a "great" person, because He is great and desires to produce in us His holiness, righteousness, integrity.

But, filling our own souls with His character and grace does not happen by accident. I know many who speak of being committed Christians, but few who are truly great women because of who they have become from years and years of devoting themselves to Him.

If I am to become that kind of woman, one from whom all in my presence can count on finding Him there; finding truth there, finding life and inspiration there, then it will only happen with a plan, that will take every moment of every day to mold me into such a person.

And so I understood, that we must become actively engaged in becoming the kind of person we would like for our children to become. We must model for them what we hope they will embrace and learn. And so, I became a treasure seeker--I pursued all that was excellent and good, seeking to model myself after the most excellent, the most beautiful, getting rid of the garbage that was in my heart, as often as I needed to, so that I could fill my soul with all that was good.

"By wisdom a house is built, And by understanding it is established; And by knowledge the rooms are filled with all precious and pleasant riches."

The Mom Heart Blogs just keep coming and are delightful to read:

http://somegirlswebsite.com/showing-love/2011/02/god-is-at-work-in-your-childs-life-tea-time/

http://mamahall.blogspot.com/2011/03/tea-time-five-adjectives.html

Sunday Ponderings

"The path of the righteous is like the light of the dawn that shines brighter and brighter until the full day."

Proverbs 4:18

The older I get, the more I realize I am approaching the "full day." That day when I see Jesus face to face. I have fewer days left to love Him, to worship Him, to cherish the gentle, beautiful, holy, generous, redeeming servant King who walks with me on this path and teaches me day by day.

Today, I am asking how to come to the quiet, Him, and fill my soul and engage my heart in His love,  and to hold on to Him in the midst of the loudness and busyness and shallowness of a contemporary, impersonal culture, so that all who are with me may be confronted by His presence, coming through my very being, invading the darkness with the present I AM.

Comfort food and a good English Drama

Several close friends and family were ill last weekend and had some sort of respiratory virus, and so it was going around. So I can't really blame any one person and don't want to make anyone feel guilty. But, after going to emergency care this morning and ending up with 6 medications. (I am an asthmatic and I have bronchitis and my sinuses are totally stopped up, so after I take Joy on an errand, I will come home to just rest, play, and be sick. Not often we give ourselves permission to just take a day off! Comfort for me will be something of a rhythm. Homemade cream of broccoli cheese soup from yesterday. (I add a couple of potatoes so it feel creamy with out so many calories and fat.)

Old fashioned chocolate chip cookies with pecans that Sarah made. (The secret to good cookies is always whip the butter, vanilla, sugar and eggs by themselves for 5-10 minutes on high and then don't bake the cookies too long--they will cook a little more after they are out and on  a stone and they will dry out a little, so you don't want them tough.

Of course pots of tea. And some great English drama series that we can be romantic with and enjoy the countryside and dream.

Our favorite that we have watched over the years are: (and we almost have them memorized:

Pride and Prejudice (the new and the old 8 hour one!)

Sense and Sensibility

Persuasion

Emma

Larkrise to Candleford--so wonderful and new, but they are canceling it after its 4th season!

David Copperfield

Wives and Daughters

Victoria and Albert and Young Victoria

Mrs. Brown

Daniel Deronda

and more.

I will send pictures of the soup if I get around to it, but think maybe I will just go climb into the pallet the girls have made (pillows, blanket, candle lit, vase of flowers, water, sparkling water with juice and plenty of kleenex.)

Good health to all of you today!

Join the sober club!

Today, Sarah and I picked up Joy from working at MOPS in our neighborhood. She has us in stitches telling us stories about the 2 year olds she was taking care of today. There were stories about all sorts of body fluids--a little boy whose mom said he was being potty trained but had no diapers--only underwear--who eventually cried, sobbed, screamed twice when he has accidents and soused his clothes again and again, with Joy to clean it up. Joy was wondering if this was what most moms called "potty training." There were other stories about nose junk, bottom junk. sucking junk, kids sneezing on her, hitting each other, hitting her, screaming--and by the time we got her, she was exhausted. She has been working at MOPS for 3 years, but has just been recently assigned to one of the most challenging groups. Did you go through all of this with us? How did you make it. (Don't really know how I made it, but somehow muddled through.) I told her just to be sure not to have 10 2 year olds at once.

Life as a woman, mom, wife, can sometimes be gross, stressful, overwhelming, exhausting, boring and demanding on many levels. Sometimes moms feel guilty admitting the variety of feelings they have. Feelings are neutral--they neither define who we are or take away from our righteousness. They are just a reaction to the situation we are in.

I remember so many years when I just obeyed what I was supposed to do without feeling like doing it. Because I loved my children, I made decisions to cultivate what was best for them. Because I was committed to loving Clay, (and loving God), I acted, as a choice of my will in the best interest for Clay, by faith, not by feelings. As I look back, I am so glad that i learned to put one foot in front of the other, because usually my feelings would follow and I am grateful the Lord kept me going in the right direction by the convictions I held and followed. If I had followed all of my feelings, the results would have been disastrous.

But there are just times in life or parenting or mothering or marriage that seem overwhelming and too depleting to handle. A few years ago, Clay and I decided that when we got to this point, we needed to call a sober club meeting. It stands for:

Sick

Of

Being

Responsible

Sober-sick of being responsible

There are times that we all just have to take a break! On our sober club nights, we always do something that we want to do that is just for us--sometimes we even ask friends to join us--go to dinner, a movie, a walk in the mountains, a drive to see the city lights--music blaring, windows down--just cruising and trying to relax. We do something different--go away from the stress, from the kids. We do not talk about any of the problems or money or stress or ministry. We just relax, have fun, get away and lighten up.

With friends or my girls, it will include going to some fun cafe, buying something little or fun thing that I enjoy (Joy bought me a small package of a warm vanilla sugar candle, lotion and perfume this week on a day of our meeting! Sarah bought me a piece of dark chocolate with almonds. Sarah suggested going somewhere for a massage, stealing a few dollars from  our little drawer where we put away dollar bills each month to have on "rainy"  days.

The principle is like Sabbath. Get away from the responsibilities. Go to a park when your kids are driving you nuts. Stop having school and go do something fun. Take a nap. Watch a movie instead of doing one more chore, buy some flowers when it is snowing for 10 days straight--just shake it up a little. Life is still there tomorrow after the sober club meeting, but we all blow off a little steam and then can face the responsibilities with a little bit fresher outlook.

Sober club met today after the flurry of the conferences. Tomorrow I will get back to responsibility--but tonight I am just going to go to sleep and snuggle up in my covers.

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Two More Great Mom Heart Conference Blog posts!

http://afieldsday.xanga.com/740733701/item/ (This one has beautiful pictures!)

http://mamahall.blogspot.com/2011/02/my-mom-heart.html

Mind your mind

"As a man thinks, so is he."

Often in our time in history, we think of worship as singing, praising and lifting our arms up to God. But to worship God means to honor Him and to place Him as our lens of focus through which we see and live all of our lives.

We are told to worship Him with our mind. Filling our minds with truth, pondering Christ, cherishing that which is holy is a part of this worship. God admonishes us to "delight ourselves in His law." Psalm 1; to hide His word in our hearts and minds; to think true thoughts.

We are told to think only on those things which are worthy of Him:

Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things."

Philippians 4:8

What do you feed your mind on every day? Are you reading noble stories? Are you filling your mind with God's word? With truth? Are you rejecting thoughts that would lead you to bitterness or strife or worldliness?

We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ."

II Corinthians 10: 5

Take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ--take every wrong thought and make it a prisoner.

Worshipping God with our mind takes intention. It takes investment. It takes time.

I have never met a deeply spiritual leader who did not think deeply, clearly and well. My spiritual mentors are those who cause me to think more highly of God. They are those who sharpen me with their ponderings of God, Christ, thoughts of eternity, truth, doctrine.

You cannot build your children into those who are worthy of God, excellent in all of their ways, unless you also invest in their minds. The foundations of their thinking patterns, vocabulary, ideas must be cultivated. In the cultivating of your children's minds, when you become a steward of what they think, your own life is enriched. And so worshipping God with our minds requires a commitment, a plan, an intention.

We must mind our minds if we are to be worthy stewards of truth.

Evaluate your own thoughts today. Does my mind cherish God and treat Him as holy? Do I regularly feed my thoughts on truth? on greatness? on what is beautiful?

What do I need to do to worship Him with my mind in a more worthy way? What thoughts are causing me to sin? What do I need to confess?

May God be praised and may we grow into His likeness as we pattern our thoughts after His.

Best to decide to like God's will, because it isn't going to change

I got to hold a precious one this weekend, see devotionmamablogspot

Why do I embrace the call of motherhood? Why do I think it is a worthy call to love, serve and embrace our children?

When we become Christians, we commit our lives to the Lord and say, "I will serve you. I will love you. I will do anything for you!"

And so, God says, "Children are a blessing, the fruit of the womb is a reward." He wants us to cherish what He has called a gift. In Genesis 1, when He blessed Adam and Eve, He called out to that blessing, "Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth."

If we resist the call of motherhood, then we resist God, as He designed it to be eternally significant and meaningful. We cannot say we will love and serve God and then refuse to see our children as a ministry from Him.

All babies come into the world fragile, in need of comfort, love, food, protection and learning life from the hands of the mom and dad who gave them birth. And so, as God created them so, we have the opportunity to imprint their brains with impressions of what love is like when we caress them and embrace them and sing to them, so that their little brains will believe, when they understand words, that God truly is a loving creator. When we provide rest and comfort and verbal stimulation by talking to them, we are preparing their little brains with pathways of intelligence so that they can understand words and eventually truth and so on.

If God made babies so, then it is God's will for us to embrace our one opportunity to effect eternity by loving, cherishing, serving that which God gave to us as a gift, whose life will have implications for all of eternity. Our children, then, are not an interruption, but God's best plan for us to understand His own servant leadership, to see that He has placed in our hands the opportunity to be a part of shaping a mind, soul and body.

And so we embrace motherhood with our whole heart because it is the best way to serve Him. We cannot say we love and serve Him and then reject that gift that He has placed into our hands. A sweet friend posted this quote today on her blog, themobsociety, a quote from Mission of Motherhood. (Go to the rest of her blog for more.)

“As it is, after eighteen years of learning the truth of living sacrificially, I have found that embracing God’s call to motherhood once and for all has brought me great peace. Instead of seeing fusses and messes as irritations in my day, for instance, I am more likely to see them as opportunities to train my children to be peacemakers and to learn to be responsible for their own messes. Instead of resenting the interruptions in my schedule, I am more likely to accept them as divine appointments. More and more, I have learned to see my children through the eyes of God and to accept the stages of growth through which he has designed them to grow.” Sally Clarkson

So, I am praying for God to give sweet mothers a love for their children and a heart for their calling. Grace and peace in the midst of your sweet ones today.

For more blogs about last weekend:

http://www.pixelperfectblog.com/2011/02/mom-heart-conference_22.html

http://somegirlswebsite.com/showing-love/2011/02/you-are-invited-tea-tim/

If I missed any of your blog articles, let me know and I will post them tomorrow.

The Kingdom of God is at hand--in the face of my sweet daughter

This weekend, we hosted our yearly MomHeart Conference in Dallas. How wonderful to look out on this sea of women and know that we have all met together to be with the Lord, with like-minded women and to celebrate the divine design of motherhood.

There is a lot that goes on behind the scenes to make it a time of frenzy for Clay and me and my precious children and those wonderful families who help us. We are blessed indeed to be able to be a part of what the Spirit it doing in this world at this time to help moms love and disciple their children and to cultivate faithfulness to their husbands. It is exciting and grand and hundreds of people flittering around and basking together in ideas. There was a wonderful tea with possibilities of sharing life with so many other moms.

But......

When I come home and can sit on my child's bedside and hear her heart desires and thoughts and dreams;

When I can soothe a brow and speak comfort into the life of a weary friend or make Clay a warm meal and welcome him home;

when Sarah comes downstairs, and gives me gracious words and gentles down my weary soul;

and Joy in her pj's reading us idealistic poems she has been pondering in bed with a cup of tea;

then I experience the Kingdom of God, because Jesus is here with us.

It is in the taking a cup of cold water to one who is thirsty, clasping a real hand, looking deeply into the eyes of one so close and seeing love--this is personal, real, life-touching, giving of self. This is where the kingdom of God is--where Jesus can be real.

Jesus chose to stay in one place and to model for all of eternity that touching, taking children in His arms, giving gracious forgiveness to a woman scorned by so many men after being used, touching lepers who had longed for touch for so long, laughing, rollicking, eating with a gang of twelve rough-edged men-- this was His reflection to us, the essence of the kingdom of God--right here, right now.

Ministry is personal and deep into the real lives of those in our midst. And so I find peace and joy here in my home where the Kingdom of God is at hand and real to me and to those I love. I am so much more comfortable in my home, away from crowds, just being a normal mom to my kids. It is the place of life and where profound things are really happening--the weaving of faith, goodness, beauty and miracles are all possible as we share in Him together.

It is to a woman's honor to overlook a sin

There are people in the world who will hurt you, offend you, disappoint you. The natural response is to become offended, to develop bitterness, to fight back. But I have always said to my children, it is natural to hate or react, it is supernatural to love, forgive, give grace and control your own spirit.

A woman has such a capacity to bring a spirit of grace and beauty into the world if she focuses on the beautiful--the Lord Jesus who did not revile in return. If you want to leave a legacy of grace, beauty and love, you must choose to walk in graciousness and become more gracious. You do not need to capitulate to the error of the irrational people, but you must discipline what goes on in your heart. The outcome of cultivating love is growing in love and eventually having a legacy of righteousness by your obedience to God.

The beautiful spirit of a woman has a tremendous capacity to bring redemption and strength and beauty to the world.

I need someone who understands my life!

Clay and I were sitting in our living room one evening after we had put our children to bed and I said, "I didn't know this was going to be so hard!" Giving, giving all day long, with nary a day off and then getting to 9 at night and having the smart, older children say, "Mommy, is there a God in the universe?"

Frankly, at that moment of the day, I found myself more concerned with getting into my own bed than answering a profound question.

And so I was baring my heart to Clay and said, He said, "What would help you?"

"I wish I had more friends who had my life, who shared my ideals, who agreed how demanding it is to be an intentional mother. I need someone who understands my life."

"I wish there would be a retreat or conference where I could sleep on a bed with clean sheets, be an adult for a couple of days, be inspired, eat chocolate, share my issues with like-minded women, have a nice luncheon, speakers who would encourage, but not give guilt--just a place to be renewed."

And, so my idealistic, visionary husband said, "Maybe we should do a conference like that."

And so 14 years ago, we rented a hotel, and the Whole Hearted Mom or now the Mom Heart conferences started right here in Texas where we were living.

And now I am even more convinced than every, after seeing my children into adulthood, that moms need mentors, encouragers, companions, prayer buddies, women who can support them along the way. Without a spiritually encouraging friend and companion, many women will give up their ideals.

And so we are meeting today, with God in our midst to celebrate this wonderful, amazing role of motherhood. Afterall, as mothers go, so goes to world. So, this morning, I am excited to greet my day with all of you who are gathering with us here in Dallas. May God be lifted up and praised and may sweet women be encouraged to stay strong and to celebrate life with their children so that eternity will be different for their servant leadership and loving, giving hearts. Bless all of you in your labor of love today.

Beautiful eyes, lips, ........beautiful woman

“For Attractive lips, speak words of kindness. For lovely eyes, seek out the good in people. For a slim figure, share your food with the hungry. For beautiful hair, let a child run their fingers through it once a day. For poise, walk with the knowledge that you never walk alone. People, more than things, have to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed. Remember, if you ever need a helping hand, you will find one at the end of each of your arms. As you grow older, you will discover that you have two hands, one for helping yourself and the other for helping others.”

Audrey Hepburn Last night, after visiting my sweet, frail mother, for possibly the last time, I was pondering her life and what it has meant to me and to my siblings. Joy and I went to the jacuzzi at our hotel and entered into a surprisingly meaningful conversation. We moved outside, covered in towels under the 65 degree, weather and sat in gentle breezes pondering life and values and goals. We each came up with 5 adjectives that we hoped would characterize our own lives. More on that later as I will be sharing some this weekend. But it has given me new soul food to ponder and new goals for my life. She had different adjectives--all worthy, but she also shared this quote with me. A great quote from a woman who, though a Hollywood actress, seemed to get to some of the true values of life. I have savored these words today as I am busy in Dallas getting ready for this wonderful weekend. Ponder........