A time for change

Today is the first day of the rest of my life...as the wife of a cop!

In one of my first blogs Change of Seasons I alluded to the long road we have been on these, hmm...three-plus years, and my husbands desire to be a deputy sheriff.  After completing night classes and training, my husband became a reserve officer last fall (pics of him getting sworn in).  Jessie has put in over 300 hours since last fall as a reserve officer and he has loved, I mean LOVED every minute of it!  Never has he been more sure of anything, except marrying me of course. :)  His passion is evident when you talk to him about his work.

The opportunity has finally come for Jessie to go on full time with the local sheriffs office.  This means training starts over for him.  He will head off to the academy before long for more intense training and testing than what he went through with the reserve classes.  He is excited and nervous and ready!  I know he will do well.  I am SO proud of him for pursuing his dream wholeheartedly! He inspires me.

As Jessie begins his new venture and our family falls in line with all that entails, we are also preparing for our girls to start school.  We home-schooled last year, which was a blessing in many ways.  My girls are SO smart and learn so quickly! It was nice having them home with me one more year, especially while baby number three was still so new.  However, trying to home school while running my business from home, nursing and caring for an infant, and taking care of a new dog...it was not an easy task.  While the flexibility was very nice, we were completely burnt out!  Our girls are ready for school, a classroom, a teacher, and new friends.  I am excited for them!  I know they will thrive in their new environment.  I'm looking forward to afternoons with them, catching up on their day, helping them with any homework, and letting them play with their dolls/dollhouse together as I am sure they will miss each other after their busy day.

My husband and I have often joked that we always have big changes, at least one, each year of our marriage.  Whether it is a move, a job change, a baby, a dog, a new business venture, or all of the above, there is never a dull moment in our home.  So it is really difficult for me to imagine the next 25 -or so- years with my husband doing the same thing.  However we will still have our side business, my full-time job.  And our kids are getting to an age where they will soon be involved in sports and plenty of things to keep us extremely busy.

I have no doubt that the fun has just begun!

Linking up with Carissa at LowercaseLetters

I HOPE...!

I use this phrase a lot!

I hope you have a great day!
I hope you feel better.

"Real Bible hope is not 'wishing.'  It is earnest, intense, expectation that what God has said will come to pass." Pursuit of His Presence, Kenneth Copeland


The Word says that Faith is the substance of things hoped for!  Hope in this context is not a feeling it is an action. It is a real expectation of knowing what is to come.  In my devotion this morning, I read that "if people would just expect God to move as much as a child expects his grandparents to arrive, He could move on their situation and change things drastically by the power of His Spirit."

Do you have young children?  I don't know about your children, but if my kids hear that their grandparents are coming by to see them they STOP whatever they are doing, get everything together that they want to show their grandparents (artwork, dolls, clothes, etc), ask every 2 minutes -or less- WHEN they will be here even if we've told them it will be 4 more hours.  They KNOW their grandparents are coming to see them, they EXPECT their grandparents to come through that door any second even though they know it might be longer, they ANTICIPATE the excitement of hugging them and playing with them, they LIVE for that moment, and NOTHING ELSE MATTERS!!

Whew!  What a revelation this is to me.  I HOPE for God to move, but it often is in the form of "wishing" rather than pure expectation with a KNOWing that He will do what He has promised.  What has he promised?  Find his promises in the Word.  I have promises I have been standing on...with expectation that the fulfillment of His promise will happen any second!  Well, I wish I could say that was always true...sometimes doubt can cloud my hope.  Sometimes fear can make my hope turn to frustration.  Is my hope pure like a child waiting for their grandparents to walk through that front door?  No, not always.  I should have such strong hope in the promises of God's Word that NOTHING ELSE MATTERS!  Circumstances do not matter.  What people say does not matter.  What the bills say does not matter.  What the doctors say does not matter.  Are you hearing what I'm saying here?!  God's Word is more powerful than anything we can say or do.  His Word is alive and sharper than any two-edged sword.  Faith is the SUBSTANCE of things that you truly HOPE for.

Let's get our minds in gear.  Let's focus on the promise and not the problem.  Boy is that hard to do!!  How do we do it?  We get IN the Word.  Read it-Speak it-Think about it-Believe it.

Your Spirit man is like the muscles in your body.  If you do nothing, you lose muscle and gain fat!  If you are active & eat right, you will gain muscle and lose fat!  Not only that, but the muscle you build will be so full of life that it will continue to burn fat even when you are not working out.  Oh man, this is good....  Well, when you feed on the word and speak and act on the Word you are building your spirit man -with FAITH- like those muscles, and burning up the FAT, aka: doubt and unbelief.  And if your spirit man is built up, then even in those moments of discouragement that will inevitably come, your spirit "muscles" will still be working to burn up that doubt!!

I don't know about you, but I needed to hear this today and just had to share it with you.
So, I truly HOPE you have a great day! ;)

Repost: "So you STILL think God is a merciful God?!"

Like so many others, I am horrified and disheartened at the senseless tragedy that occurred in Aurora Colorado on Thursday night.  I know we will ever understand why bad things happen to good people.  My heart and my prayers go out to the families of those who were killed or injured, and the survivors who witnessed this horrific outpouring of foolishness.

I watched an interview with the mother of a young lady named Jessica on 20/20.  Jessica was in the shopping mall during the shooting in Colorado just a couple weeks ago and survived.  However, she was at the theater with a friend the other night and did not make it out alive.  These things break my heart!

But! I know God is good.  And as the survivor posted in this blog below, "God is always good.  Man is not."  No matter what you are going through: tragic loss, illness, financial struggles...we serve a merciful God!  This world is full of hurt and sadness, but regardless of how circumstances around us may look you must find something bigger than yourself to trust in. And God is there with arms open wide ready to give hope to the hopeless, father the fatherless, and love without condition.  Trust Him with your heart and hurts and you will not be disappointed.  I pray you will be encouraged by Marie's story...

http://aminiatureclaypot.wordpress.com/2012/07/20/so-you-still-think-god-is-a-merciful-god/

Everything I need to know about life, I learned from The Andy Griffith Show

Andy Griffith passed away this morning.  This kinda makes me sad.  The Andy Griffith Show, the black & white ones at least, were a part of my childhood.  That's all thanks to my dad!  They were a part of his childhood and he made us watch them with him...but we liked it. :)  

I don't know a whole lot about his personal life, but as for the "lessons" he portrayed on The Andy Griffith Show, they will stick with me forever.  After all, "everything I need to know about life, I learned on The Andy Griffith Show".  Okay, so that's not entirely true, but it is something my dad would say a lot -jokingly- when we were young.  I think he even had a little devotional that provided Biblical application to lessons from Andy.  Maybe that's a stretch, but maybe not.  

A few simple lessons I learned from The Andy Griffith Show:

1. You have to take responsibility for your actions.  When Opey shot the momma bird and had to take care of the babies, then release them when they were ready..."but aren't the trees so nice & full"...ugh, -tears-

2. Drunkenness is not cool.  Barney would accidentally sip on some moonshine now & then, which was really funny.  And Otis Campbell was a sweetheart citizen in Mayberry who would lock himself up when he had a few too many.

3. Guns are not toys.  Barney wasn't allowed to have a bullet in his gun because he had an overeager trigger-finger.  

4. If you need help, just ask.  "Call the man!"  Aunt Bee was so stubborn and never wanted to admit when she was wrong. Didn't she read the script? Andy was always right. ;)

Andy, you were a television legacy.  I don't know where your heart was, but I do hope we get to see you again one day.  Thanks dad for instilling Biblical principles in our lives when we were young, and for introducing us to good, uncontaminated television (and music) classics, as it should be.  I love you!

Me & my Dad .circa 1979

Proverbs 22:6 Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.