Tuesday, March 9, 2010

A Proverbs 31 woman week 1

I have been making a lot of changes in my life lately.  From weight loss, to increasing exercise, to stepping out of my comfort zone, reaching out to people I normally would not, and many other areas.  Through all of this, the thing that keeps coming back to me is that I need to revisit what a Proverbs 31 woman is.

In the past, I started a journal to jot down passages that spoke to me about what a woman and a wife should be in God's eyes.  The journal began with Proverbs 31:10-31.  It has been quite a while since I had picked up that journal to review it much less add something to it.  Sometimes we get so busy doing "stuff" that we forget why we are doing it.  That is where I feel like I am at right now.  So I plan to begin a journey through Proverbs 31 again and thought I would share it with you.  Each week I plan to break down a section of Proverbs 31 into an action plan for the week.  I plan to spend that week focusing on how God wants me to reflect that particular attribute and incorporate it into my own life.  Feel free to take this journey with me.

A wife of noble character who can find?
       She is worth far more than rubies.  

Her husband has full confidence in her
       and lacks nothing of value.
The description of a Proverbs 31 woman begins with her being a wife, which I am, but this is a wife of noble character.  Noble meaning possessing outstanding qualities or morals and character meaning an attribute that makes up and distinguishes an individual.  So this begins with making the comment that a wife who has outstanding qualities and morals as a part of who she is is more valuable than rubies.  What are your outstanding qualities and morals?  Take a moment to list them in a notebook.  Are you kind to others?  Do you try to find an encouraging word to say to those around you?  Do you use soft words when you speak?  Are your actions a positive example to your children?  Do you live what you preach?  It is important for us to know what noble characters we currently possess, because then we can identify those that we need to work on as we progress.  I know, it is hard sometimes to put pen to paper to list our positive qualities.  As women we tend more towards recognizing and dwelling on our negative features.  I don't believe this is what God wants for us though.  Yes, we need to be able to recognize them so that we can confess our failings and then ask God to help us to correct them.  However, when we dwell on them it is as if we are saying that He can not overcome them, that our failings are greater than He is.  So seriously, take a moment to list the good!

Verse 11 simply states that this woman has a husband who trusts her with everything, he has FULL confidence in her.  For many years this was not so in my own marriage.  Often our actions are such that prevent our husband from trusting us in certain areas.  My own was in the area of finances.  I would turn to shopping to satisfy feelings of bitterness or loneliness.  It was extravagant or to the point of bankruptcy or anything, but until I addressed this area of my life my husband was hesitant to trust me to set money aside for savings.  Is there an area in your own life that your husband may be hesitant to fully trust you?  You may need to sit down and talk to him candidly and ask because it may be an area that you don't recognize because it has become part of your life.  If you do sit down to discuss it with him, you can NOT argue with him about it.  This is about HIS perception of you, not the way you think it should be.  Does that mean he will necessarily be correct?  Not always.  His lack of confidence in an area could be due to a misunderstanding, or because it has become a part of who he is.  The point in this is to discuss it and bring it into the open in a non-confrontational way so the two of you can examine it together.  Remember, a husband and a wife are one, we need to strive to not let little things of this world separate us on any level from each other.

So, our task this week is to list our noble characteristics and to determine what (if any) area our husband does not have full confidence in us.  


Love,

Saturday, March 6, 2010

Week 10 - Snowflake Saturday

This weeks snowflake is a little different in that it is a bookmark.  Now I suppose you could leave the tail off of it and just do it as a snowflake if you like, but I like the idea of a bookmark.  The pattern is from Suzies Stuff.   I may do a few of these up, stick them in a devotion book and leave them to be found using BookCrossing  What do you plan to do with yours?

Love,

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

The Lord's Table Scripture Card

I am trying to get back into the swing of things here.  It is a slow process, but I will get back to everything again!

For those of you who have been following this for awhile you know that I have been having issues with my weight.  Recently I started a Bible based weight management study and liked what I was learning so much that I started a group at my church.  Each week there is a memory verse.  I got to thinking that since I was going to be using the memory verses, and others in the LIGHT (Losing Inches, Growing in His Truth) would be learning the verse and some of them visit here, I would use those verses as scripture cards.  So week 1's scripture verse is 1 Corinthian 10:31



Photobucket

You can download a high resolution image by clicking here

And for anyone who is interested in the Bible study, it is called The Lord's Table and is available free online, or you can order the spiral bound book below



Have a great day and remember to give God the glory!

Love,

Saturday, February 27, 2010

Week 9 - Snowflake Saturday

Rather frustrated in the snowflake search this week.  Seems I keep finding links to patterns that are no longer available or the link is broken.  Many of the broken links are due to places like Hometown no longer hosting blogs!  Shame on them for just dumping all of those good patterns into cyber wasteland!  I, of course, am to impatient to visit the Way Back machine (AKA the internet archive) to see if some of the patterns I was searching for may have been archived.  Those that I did find, like 4 patterns being offered on Martha Stewart's site, just weren't appealing to me.  I prefer patterns where the design is the showpiece and not the blocking as that is my least favorite part.  Besides, if the blocking makes the design then if someone washes the snowflake and they aren't familiar with blocking, they lose the beauty!

After much searching, I came across this Crochet Snowflake Ornament, which is admittedly simplistic, but I am tired of searching today.

Love,

Friday, February 26, 2010

Bubble Jingle Teether

I am NOT going to be one of those bloggers that gives you a big list of reasons why I haven't been blogging.  Lets just leave it at "life got in the way" and move on from here.  I am back now and have returned with a new pattern to share.

I have promised my wonderful husband to start using my yarn stash and eliminate some of it before I go out to buy new yarn for new projects.  I know, what was I thinking!!  Still, a promise is a promise.  I decided to start by using up the misc. balls of yarn I have floating around.  So I gathered them all together and put them in a basket beside my chair.  I have made several baby booties and I have shared in a previous post using these, but I was aching to start designing again.  Problem was that I only had bits and pieces to design with and I didn't want something with a lot of ends to weave in and I have every weight of yarn in this basket from sock yarn to bulky.

After some time I came across a pattern for a little caterpillar that I thought was cute and it sparked something.  Next thing you know I had this pattern wrote up.  I will say it has met with Baby A's approval as it seems that every one I make finds it's way out of my basket and into her mouth.  I had hoped it would have enough texture to give an interesting mouth feel for the babies and apparently it does.  So here is the newest free Sunflower Original
 

You can download the PDF version of this on Ravelry or  by clicking above.  Hopefully this is the first of many new patterns this year!

Also, for those of you who remember from earlier this month that we were looking for a new vehicle since the truck had a major oil leak and my van was quickly becoming unsafe to drive, just want to share how God has blessed us.  This past Wednesday we bought this:
  
Our new 2004 Montana.  We have been shopping the local ad bulletin for 3 weeks now trying to find something in our price range.  Hubby wanted an AWD van due to the steep hill leading into our subdivision.  It is hard to find an AWD van.  We were supposed to drive about 1 1/2 hours from our house to look at a Sienna that day.  At the last minute God made it very apparent that the Sienna was NOT the vehicle for us (talked to the woman who owned it rather than the man and she said it had been sitting for over a year and had never been started during that time!)  So we made plans to drive and look at a truck that was 2 1/2 hours away instead.  This was on Tuesday night.  I went to bed and hubby stayed up.  He looked through the ad bulletin again and found this van listed in the wrong section (4 wheel drives rather than vans) and after looking it up realized that they were asking several thousand dollars less than the blue book value.  Wednesday morning we called hoping that we would be able to look at it that morning and God opened the door.  The gentleman had an hour and a half window that had just opened up that morning and we could check it out then. 
We really expected for there to be something wrong with it.  We discovered, however, that the man selling it was a Christian.  He buys vehicles, cleans them up and resells them in an attempt to supplement his income from the Christian School he works at so he can buy his wife her dream car.  This van had had one owner, a clean carfax report and was loaded.  Leather seats, 4 captains chairs, power everything (and it all works), dvd player, wireless headphones for the dvd player, and on and on.  Not only did we buy the van, but this gentleman has offered to take us to a dealers only auction to look for a truck for my husband as well!  God has so blessed us!  Just wanted to share with you.

Love,