Meg is going to be a MRS.!!!!

Some of you know Megan Brewster, one of my very best friends (Megan from Maine). She just got engaged this morning, and I'm so giddy right now!!! She called this morning to tell me, and I couldn't scream because my boys were both asleep, so I chose instead to leap across the house in excitement. I mean "leap" in the most literal sense. It would have been quite a sight, if anyone had actually seen it. But I could still do cartwheels right now over it. I haven't been this excited about someone getting married in a long time! Meg has so fully entrusted this desire of her heart to the Lord, and it is just so fun to see Him bless her for that and "return" what she's given up to Him. She is such a godly, wise girl who knows that marriage won't fulfill her in the way that so many women think, and God is going to be so lifted up because of this marriage. Beautiful! Congratulations, Nick and Megan!!! I love you, Meg....soon-to-be Meg CORNWELL!!!

Well, this last weekend was one of hearing exciting news from several friends. One of those friends is a girl I went to college with. Give her blog a visit! Welcome to the blogging world, Melody! I'm so glad to see how God has answered prayers and blessed your trust in Him.

ABCs and Ephesians 6:1

Moving On From the Chair....

Sorry I've been a sporadic blogger lately. I'm sure all two of you missed me. =) All of those September commitments I had talked about have been upon us the last couple of weeks. We made a super quick trip into Bartlesville last week and had a great time with family there, although it was really too short. But the next two times we'll be there - Thanksgiving and New Years - will give us longer than a day and a half, so that will be good. Other than that, our new community group started last night, and I am really excited to see what God is going to do in that group. It's a really fun group of couples!

And the Bible study class I've been leading (Calm My Anxious Heart) started last week. I've been wanting to blog about it. We've met two times, and I feel like the Lord is just doing His thing...showing up, giving wisdom, creating community. I've really felt His presence in my preparation time as well as during the class, and I'm excited to see all of the healing God will bring about in so many women's hearts who are willing to journey with Him all the way to contentment and trust. Today's class was our first day of real discussion since this past week was the first week to have done reading and homework, and already there was one lady who experienced a HUGE breakthrough with trusting the Lord this week. As it always does, it involved brokenness, but once she was in that place of really and fully giving up her plans or "control" and just obeying God despite how she felt about her circumstance, peace overwhelmed her. It took just a couple of days of surrendering, and she began to FEEL it. She is experiencing amazing calm and contentment over something she has struggled with for SO long. I had an experience like that this past week too....when intense anxiousness hit, the Lord brought me to a place of surrender....again (sometimes it's necessary for me to make it a repeat practice), and within a day, I felt completely at ease, resting in God's sovereignty and ok with it if He chose to do things differently than what I want. It's a good place to be. Restful. Peaceful. I'm so encouraged that God is doing something big in our class.

So we talked about how amazing it is how we can wrestle over something for so long, holding on to something we know God wants us to release to Him, and once we actually really are broken enough to surrender to Him and obey, His peace comes so quickly!!! He loves to give that peace! But even though that's true, we still tend to resist brokenness. So my favorite part of our class discussion today was about this. We talked about why it is that we resist getting to that place of brokenness/surrender. What are the real heart issues involved? Heart issues are the only thing really worth addressing, since the heart is what God looks at and is where true transformation takes place. Some of the possible heart issues shared were pride, humility, wanting to play "victim"/enjoying our "pity parties", selfishness, wrong focus - just thinking that this life is about me and my happiness, envy, wanting control. It was so neat because I know the Holy Spirit led us into that discussion. I hadn't planned it at all. I love it when He does that! He knew that I needed to dig deeper into the root causes of my refusal to trust Him completely, and I found some surprising things. But He's working on me in those areas, and I want to cooperate. I know that God is teaching me so much and challenging me during this Bible study, and I'm loving it. Even though it is hard. Really hard at times. The whole notion of surrender completely goes against our nature, but it is the crux of the call to follow Christ, and I know God cares so much about me getting to the place of surrender and living there. He cares enough to say a lot about it and gently guide me there. I'm just glad there are others journeying through it too! What a gift.

My Chair Needs Help

That consignment sale has started selling furniture and home decor too. I went back for this parsons chair I saw:

However, neither the style nor color matches anything in my home, and I needed it for my yet-to-be-furnished "formal" living room, so I bought this brown slipcover to match the blue and brown color scheme:


BUT....I'm having issues because I don't know how in the heck I'm supposed to get the wrinkles out of it!! It says cool iron only, but it's been folded in a package for who knows how long, and those wrinkles are not giving up easily. I tried ironing the reverse side, but it was to no avail. Does anyone have any wisdom to share on how to get this velvet slipcover ironed and the pleats to actually look like nice, tailored pleats that resemble the picture on the package??? HELP please!!! I know some of you out there actually know something about this stuff. Please help out poor clueless me.

Elijah and the Apples

It's really fun now that Jonah gets to go to a real Sunday school class at the church since being potty-trained. They do crafts and Bible stories and verses and all that! I knew the lesson today was on Elijah, so I was asking him after I picked him up what he had learned about Elijah. He said, "Elijah and the apples." I asked him several more times, and all the details I could really get from him had to do with apples. I kept thinking, "Hmm....I don't think there's anything about apples in the story of Elijah, but it has been a while since I read about him...." I was trying to think of some detail about Elijah that would clue me in to the apples, but I was coming up with nothing. So I mentioned to his teacher later that when talking about the Bible story about Elijah, Jonah was saying a lot about apples. She informed me that they went into another room for story time, and that room had a bulletin board that had apples in it. She noticed that the whole time they were teaching the story, Jonah was staring at that board and really focusing on that instead of the story. SO....my son had just mixed up his daydreaming with the teaching and associated the apples on that board with what they were saying. Great. We're going to have some really mixed up ideas of what God's Word says!

Today was the first day of our Shepherding a Child's Heart class at church, and I'm going to LOVE it! Today was all about asking the "why" questions about our children's behavior to get at the heart issues involved. I really want to make it a practice to constantly be thinking about the heart issue involved in whatever Jonah does and make sure to address that. I pray that God gives me that perspective all throughout the day, every day. We also talked about how hard that is to do if we as parents don't do that for ourselves and get at the root heart problems in our lives. We have to make it a practice, as adults, to deal with the things in our hearts that stand in the way of our fellowship with God, or we'll never lead our children there. What a good reminder to live in grace, or else I won't be imparting it. There was more, but I'm needing to make this a short post and get Jonah down for a nap. But I'm sure I'll be sharing more about this as the class continues!

Missin' Cousins

We had such a great time with my brother and his family here, as always. Nathan seems so grown up to me, even since he was here in July, and Maggie and Jonah have really started to play well together. They're only five months apart, but it's only been since about four months ago that they really even paid much attention to the other one! Now they're buds. We celebrated Joel's 32nd birthday, went to a spray park with the kids, my parents took them to a circus, we went swimming at the pool, and just hung out tons over at Gigi's and Papa T's house. Blake captured Jonah's heart by reading him lots of books. Apparently, that's all it takes to be his favorite....nothing like feeding him, providing for him, etc. - Just read to him! Anyway, it was a big weekend, and we are going to miss those guys until we see them again at Christmas.







Last night was the big consignment sale, and it did not disappoint. At first, I was thinking it wasn't as great this time, as I couldn't find several items on my list of things I was hoping to find. But a big objective was 2T fall and winter clothes, and it didn't seem like much, but then I went through all my stuff and realized how much I got for Jonah - A LOT - and how little I paid. The average amount I paid for an item for him was 2 DOLLARS!!!! It was amazing. And it's really a fun night, for social reasons too. Ame and I went to Starbucks after our shopping, and we had a great time talking. I'm so blessed that God is really providing sweet girlfriends here....friendships that are really fun but also have lots of depth. Ame and I came up with a big plan to get together once a month to do meal-planning, grocery lists, share recipes, and find good deals on groceries....we are both needing some new energy in this area of domestication, and the accountability to be wise in these things will be a really great thing! We're also going to do some meal-swapping too. This should be good.

Just one quick thing...

Oh my goodness. Go here to read this article on John Piper's website. It's very timely for me, as my friend Laura and I were just tonight discussing the heart issues involved in anxiety/fear struggles. Then I happened upon this just now, and I think the point he makes is so true. Mainly because it's Scripture. =)