How does ten years of marriage happen?  Is it always a happy ten years?  Does it always feel like a romantic movie when he carries you over the threshold every night?  Is it a bundle of joy and fun with constant smiles?

No.  Marriage is difficult.  Even just a short ten years, marriage is difficult.  Marriage is the collision of two wills trying to intersect and intermingle while causing the least amount of damages.  Marriage is where two sinful souls join together for a lifelong journey of giving and receiving.  Marriage is a beautiful and challenging thing.  Marriage is the mind-blowing illustration of Christ and the Church.  My will submitting to the love of my husband.  My husband sacrificially leading me towards to glory of the Father.

Our first year of marriage I tried to leave… more than once.  He wouldn’t let me.  🙂   Thankfully.

Our second year of marriage, we lost his father to colon cancer.

Our third year of marriage, we faced the challenges of home ownership- air conditioner breaking, having a mortgage, being adults.

Our fourth year of marriage, how about those credit cards?!  How did those balances get so high?  What careers do we really want to have?

Our fifth year of marriage, the birth of a beautiful premature nephew.  The purchase of a new puppy, a Siberian husky.

Our sixth year of marriage, experiencing the marriage of our beautiful niece.  Infertility struggle in it’s absolute fullness.

Our seventh year of marriage, the pregnancy and birth of our amazing Georgia Ruth Haley.  Our world turned upside down.  The joy.  The tears.  The experience of natural childbirth with a C-section ending.  Feeding our blessed cleft baby girl.  The wild nights of tears and sleeplessness.  The wild days of laughter and joy.  Climbing across the Brooklyn Bridge while 8 months pregnant!

Our eighth year of marriage, cleft surgery #1 and #2.  Giving away our precious Siberian husky puppy.  The birth of another beautiful, healthy nephew.  Facing tragedy in a way we still don’t have words to express.  Experiencing our first family beach trip as a family of three!

Our ninth & tenth years of marriage (mainly because it is hard to figure out which years what happened…), the Lord grabbing a hold of us and taking us on new adventures, new endeavors and asked us to have faith in ways only He could supply.  He moved us and asked us only to take the steps and believe.  He challenged us again to surrender and remember that He is the One True God.  He is the Only One to be trusted.  And He is always enough.  And getting our Murphy dog.

I am blessed to say that I am married to the one that My Father chose for me.  I am blessed to say that we are not perfect, but we are covered by His grace and our grace towards each other.  There is not another that I would want to have spent the last ten years with or the next 70+ years!  He loves my imperfections and challenges them.  He scrubs me with The Word and helps me to always step outside of myself and see the bigger picture.  He is used in my life to sanctify me.  Daily.

Today, I am thankful for you, Clifton Joel Haley.  “…I found him whom my soul loves…” Song of Solomon 3:4

 

When all of the lights aren’t shining, what should we do?  When the dryer breaks.  When the kitchen table falls apart.  When the building you are marketing for, seems to never open.  When one of the children you are raising and loving as your own, faces hardships.  When life feels like it is destroying you, what do you do?  Do we turn our back on The Lord because He isn’t protecting us the way we think He should?  Do we say He isn’t trustworthy because our lives are not flowing the way we think they should?  How do we trust Him?  How do we trust Him in our daily, practical lives?  What does it look like?  How is Christianity put into real practice?  Not the pretend smile that everything is okay.  Not the fake, superficial “faith” that makes Christianity look easy.  Not the forced answer of “I’m fine, how are you?”

There are seasons in life.  Each season contains its own struggles.  Childhood, you are always looking at being an adult, wanting adult things without the adult responsibilities.  Childhood also brings difficulties like not getting what you want for Christmas, not making the cheerleading team, not feeling accepting and loved or not making the grade you thought you deserved.  Teenage years is a constant struggle to fight for your independence.  Every day, counting down the days to grow up, move on to college and kiss your childhood goodbye.  And don’t you remember thinking that you knew everything!  Your twenties, many search for their spouse, beginning their careers and seek the path that the Lord has in store for you.  The days of your twenties focus on “when will I have a baby” or “when will I get to be married” or “I wish we could have a house all our own” or how about “when will I get the chance to shine in this office?”  Now, I have only just entered my thirties, but I have a blessed career that allows me to see those in their later years in life.  I see every day how those in their eighties and nineties desire their twenties again.  Even their childhood again.  Or, the desire to go on home to be with their Lord.  Very few desire the exact age, the exact season they are currently in.  And very few means I have never seen it.

A gentleman I had met is 100 years old.  This precious aged saint reflects on the beauty of life.  Recently, we had seen a school bus of children killed in a fatal accident in our state.  As I spoke with this amazing man of God, he questioned how His Lord chose to take these small children from the world and leave his 100 year old aged body here.  These questions made me sit and reflect.  Dear Sovereign Lord, how do you determine when and how you do the things that you do?  When and how do you choose what you allow and what you ordain in the lives of those on this earth?

There are days when life’s struggles get you low.  How do we combat this lowness?  There are days that it feels too difficult to pray, too difficult to smile, too difficult to pick up the burden off of your own shoulders and lay them down for someone else to carry.  In those days, your Bible feels like it is written in a foreign language and that He is a million miles away.  These are the days, you rally behind the cross with your forever family holding you there.  These are the days, you eat your pride and ask your “iron” to pray.  Beg them to pray.  Cry out to them for prayer.  To fight for you.  To fight for your mind.  To fight for your sanity.  These are the days, when you let others fight on your behalf.  And then…. watch and wait.  The clouds will open up.  The sun begins to shine again.  And the burden is significantly lighter, almost invisible.  Why?  Because your forever family is carrying the burden on your behalf.

Today, ask your “iron” to pray.  Today, swallow your pride and ask them to pray.  And then you will have the strength to fix the other half of the light bulbs to allow them to shine brightly again in the darkness.

Psalm 91

Confirming the Voice of the Enemy in someone’s life can be extremely dangerous.  Many times the Enemy speaks to us, internally harassing us, with the same old thoughts and phrases.  He knows where to jab at us and when it will hurt the most.  He knows how to whisper the right things to the people near us and encourage them to repeat it as well.  When those closest to us begin to speak the very words that the Enemy is whispering to our hearts, what happens?  What does that do to us?  Have we ever even thought about what effect our words have on those around us?

In Matthew 4, we read of how the Spirit of God led Jesus into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil.  During this passage, we see in verse 8 the devil tempts Jesus to have “all the kingdoms of the world and their glory…. if He fell down to worship him.”  Essentially, Satan wanted to give Jesus an easy way out.  A way to have the glory of the nations without ever dying on the cross.  He was promising a way without the cross.  To normal, fleshly ears, that would be quite a temptation.  To Spirit-focused ears, Jesus combated that temptation with Scripture, and overcame the Spiritual battle.  Just a few short chapters later, we see that Peter offers the same opportunity.  In Matthew 16:21, Jesus shares of His upcoming death on the cross and resurrection.  Peter quickly rebuked Him for saying such things and said, “God forbid it, this shall never happen to you!”  Peter never wanted to see His Master endure the torture He spoke of.  He desired for Christ to gain the keys to the Kingdom another way.  A way without the cross.  Christ knew such options were not available and turns to Peter in verse 23 to say, “Get behind Me, Satan!  You are a stumbling block to Me; for you are not setting your mind on God’s interests, but man’s.”

Did Peter know the fullness of how Christ had been tempted by these exact same words?  In Peter’s ignorance, he was attempting to confirm the Enemy’s words in Christ’s heart.  How often do we do that?  In our ignorance, do we confirm the Voice of the Enemy in others?  It is easy to think of the times when others have done such things to our hearts, but what about when we do it, unknowingly, to others?

Science has proven that words matter.  I recently read an article about how scientists took dishes of water and froze them.  They spoke words of life to one dish and words of destruction to another, and the results of how they froze are completely different.  Words matter.  Below on the left is a picture of water that froze with prayer, then a picture of the water that froze without prayer.  Dr. Emoto (Dr. Emoto’s Water Experiment, The Power of Thoughts) conducted this experiment and you can read up on it more by googling the experiment.  Don’t forget, our bodies are made of mostly water.

(http://highexistence.com/water-experiment/)

How can we be cautious with the words that we speak?  How can we protect our minds from hearing and believing the Voice of the Enemy in our hearts and minds?  How did Jesus…. Scripture.

“Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is anything excellent and if anything worthy of praise, dwell on these things” Philippians 4:8.

Jesus, I am thankful for the times in my life when I say, “God, are You even real?”

These seasons, these roads, these pits produce the evidence that He is.

Over the course of my short 31 years of life, I have had many moments of doubt.  I have questioned whether or not our God truly does love.  Whether He truly does forgive.  Whether He truly does know all things and has good things planned for me.  I have often wondered, “are You even real?  Because I thought I knew what you wanted from me and for me….”

Did you know that this is normal?  Did you know that it is okay?  Did you know that our God is big enough to handle our times and seasons of doubt?  Did you know more people do this than are willing to admit?

There is freedom in realness.  Freedom in our relationship with The Saviour and realness in our relationships with others.  Many times we feel like we know, understand, catch a glimpse of The Lord’s perfect will in a situation and the circumstances do not line up.  Does that mean The Lord lost?  No.  It means that The Lord “causes ALL things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose.” Romans 8:28.  And this is written by God, through a man who faced many forms of persecutions and eventually death for the Gospel that he believed and preached.

I have faced loss and difficulties:

• death of all my grandparents,
• death of my father-in-law,
• watching loved ones fight through cancer
• infertility for five years wondering what I had done that God did not want to bless me,
• my blessed baby girl that the Lord breathed life into my womb, born with a cleft lip and cleft palate,
• feeling overlooked and unappreciated,
• friendships ending and not understanding why,
• persecution from others because of beliefs,
• cars breaking,
• home air conditioning going out,
• financial struggles- some because of my choices, others because of just life,
• feeling like my husband did not understand me
• etc, etc, etc, etc…. you get the point….

None of these are special just to me and my circumstances.  These are just life.  Life is difficult.  It is all how we handle the difficulties that defines us.  Do we pretend that everything is okay or do we face it?  And be transparent through the struggles?

In this world, we know that we will “encounter various trials”, but we also know that we should “consider it pure joy… knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance and when endurance has its perfect result, we will be complete and perfect, lacking in nothing.” (James 1).  Lacking in nothing.  Our King Jesus wants me to be lacking in nothing.  Today, I don’t necessarily want to be lacking in nothing.  But tomorrow, when endurance has had the chance to perfect itself, I will appreciate and be thankful for the testing.

Jesus, I am thankful for the times in my life when I say, “God, are You even real?”

For too long in my life, I’ve lived with this mentality that it is my duty to serve. Duty? Does that sound like a love relationship? God doesn’t need me.

He has created you for a purpose. Have you sat long enough with Him and His book to know what that purpose is? Or do we spend more time being “busy” serving without relationship? Busy as stated by a friend, is Being Under Satan’s Yoke.  Now is the time to sit.  Now is the time to listen. Now is the time to hear.

No longer should we walk and follow men and their activities.  Today, we follow God. Today, we search for what He has in store for us! Today, sit and seek and let Him tell us what the next step is and follow.

Our God wants to lead us. Our God wants to speak to us. Our God desires a relationship with us above all else. Our God wants YOU! Not your service. Not your sacrifice. Not your ability to follow. He wants YOU!

This series has radically changed my life.

The Lord has inspired this series to show us what is truly happening in the spiritual realm all around us. This book is the third in Karen Kingsbury’s Angels Walking series. 

If you are a believer and follower of Jesus Christ this is a MUST READ! In my life, I have seen dramas and books that depict the spiritual real from the demonic perspective, but Karen clearly gives all of the power to our God and His Angel Armies.  We don’t recognize that our God and His Angels (in the Name of Jesus) are all around us on mission for Him. We recognize the enemy only a third of the time that he is actually working. Karen has created a storyline that helps Christians identify when the enemy is   truly at work…. And it may just be more than we think! 

If you like to read, get this series. If you’ve never read, get this series. If you are curious about Angels and Demons, get this series. 

Please note, this book is not the Word of God and I do not equate it to the Word of God.  I do believe this is the greatest series that Karen Kingsbury has ever written and will have the greatest impact on the Kingdom of God.