Saturday

Today is my day to go do something I've been excited about since I signed up...learning to make cheese. Yesterday I went to Stitches and felt inspired to keep creating with yarn, fabric and today I'm enlarging my knowledge base of creating something that is edible. I'm taking the class from Happy Girl Kitchens which is an organic food preservation based business. I'm going to Pacific Grove which should be beautiful today. I'm thinking about this quote from Lysa Terkeurst and she said "Indeed, what we fix our attention, heart, and mind on is what we'll worship. What we worship becomes magnified. And what is magnified will consume us and perpetuate more and more worship." I want to fix my attention on the Creator of creativity. Today is the day, this is the moment...let's get started.

Journey Musings

Today I was reading in Romans and this scripture popped out at me..."What benefit did you reap at that time from the things you are now ashamed of?  Those things result in death." Romans 6:21  The day before that I had a Chinese proverb tell me (after completing a rousing game of mahjongg) that "Hard work has a future payoff.  Laziness pays off now." For quite some time I have been pondering the question of Who am I? and I have discovered my view of myself has been skewed for as long as I can remember.  I am sensing this is the core issue of my struggle with my weight.  I've started focusing on not just who am I but who am I in Jesus and I have noticed my struggles aren't lasting as long, they aren't as deep as they once were.  I am super hopeful that this is the last time I have to lose the weight and that I am then ready to keep it off.
So in my pondering I have discovered that I have always been performance based in order to get approval, love and acceptance. As a young child through adulthood I have firmly established in my mind that doing well = approval, love, acceptance and doing bad = disapproval, unloved, unaccepted.  I have also noticed that for me doing well means I try to please everyone around me so everyone is happy thus making them feel good which then in turn makes me feel loved.  Thus I have created a false sense of security because it's based on trying to make everyone feel something when in reality that isn't what God has called me to do...He has called me to be the woman He wants me to be and to please Him.  The second thing about doing well is that I have a perfectionistic tendency when it comes to my standard for myself.  If I don't succeed in being perfect then I disapprove of myself and I show that by the things I say to myself, the way I take care of myself, and it is paralyzing me.  My fear of disapproval from God, others, and even myself paralyzes me.  This is so cemented in me and I am so thankful that I see it.   When reading scriptures that tell me that God loves me for me, not for what I do...it's so foreign to my thinking.  I am hopeful that now that I see this way of thinking, the Holy Spirit is going to start showing me how to crack this cemented thinking into freedom.  When stress comes, instead of going to food which always results in feeling ashamed and death, I want to go to scriptures to have freedom and life.  I have bought the lies of the world, Satan, and even my own thinking, and it's time for change.  Dare... to believe that God loves me, He's for me, He created me, and He has every detail laid out for me.
"My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever." Psalm 73:26  Let the cement be broken in my thinking so that God's ways can go deeper in me.