Wednesday, November 14, 2012
All that I am...I place in into your loving hands.
This is the song that has been playing in my head for weeks now. Music is huge for me. When I battle the natural thoughts in my head...I turn to music to change those thoughts and stay focused and humble. Worshiping in our storm I believe is the highest form of praise. I hope this song helps you as it did me....let me know if you love it like I do :)
Rooftops by Jesus Culture
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVUy6UHVzEQ
Monday, November 12, 2012
A living sacrifice
After this wonderful God experience...He was ready to take me to the next level...
Romans 12:1
Place Your Life Before God So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.
I believe we were chosen. Our special situation didn't happen by chance. I do believe that God allowed this to happen. I believe He plans to walk with us....He will never leave us. In this world we will have trouble....I try to remind my self. We aren't in Heaven yet...so we should expect trouble.
I like this scripture a lot. I had to let my earthly desires and expectations die...I had to place my life at His feet as a living sacrifice. Offering every moment of my day to Him. If we search daily for what He wants of us...it really is quite simple. It all starts with love (I believe). If we focus on God all day....we take the focus off ourselves. If we focus on Him..we forget about what we don't have and rather focus on what we do have. We can become thankful. Living with a thankful heart has changed me.... as a result, I feel His peace. If we have His peace, we can enjoy every moment in our storm. If we focus on Him, we can embrace this journey, we can learn and experience all that He has set before us. I know that I could not endure this life without His presence...I received His peace, His love and His joy. I am truly a changed person. If I never had to endure this storm...I don't know if I would have ever become the person that God wanted me to be. Unfortunately...I thought I was fine weathering life by myself...I had it all figured out. Boy..was I humbled.
Romans 12:1
Place Your Life Before God So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life—your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life—and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.
I believe we were chosen. Our special situation didn't happen by chance. I do believe that God allowed this to happen. I believe He plans to walk with us....He will never leave us. In this world we will have trouble....I try to remind my self. We aren't in Heaven yet...so we should expect trouble.
I like this scripture a lot. I had to let my earthly desires and expectations die...I had to place my life at His feet as a living sacrifice. Offering every moment of my day to Him. If we search daily for what He wants of us...it really is quite simple. It all starts with love (I believe). If we focus on God all day....we take the focus off ourselves. If we focus on Him..we forget about what we don't have and rather focus on what we do have. We can become thankful. Living with a thankful heart has changed me.... as a result, I feel His peace. If we have His peace, we can enjoy every moment in our storm. If we focus on Him, we can embrace this journey, we can learn and experience all that He has set before us. I know that I could not endure this life without His presence...I received His peace, His love and His joy. I am truly a changed person. If I never had to endure this storm...I don't know if I would have ever become the person that God wanted me to be. Unfortunately...I thought I was fine weathering life by myself...I had it all figured out. Boy..was I humbled.
Wednesday, October 31, 2012
My Mark 9:29 story...
If you feel like you are alone, I have a story for you! This is the most significant story of my life. Nothing this great has ever happened to me. It is quite lengthy....so you might want to heat your tea kettle:)
My whole life changed when I gave birth to my second son. Enzo Luigi. While pregnant, I pictured this Enzo to be a motorcycle racer....I pictured a cutting edge handsome boy with wavy brown hair. Why I pictured this I don't know....I probably wouldn't have let him be a racer! He was born healthy and with the hairiest back that I had ever seen, so I knew he could carry the name that we had chosen for him.
He was a very good baby, but he didn't sleep well. He would wake almost every hour. You know the first thing that you do when your child wakes and you don't feel rested...you look at the clock. On many nights he would wake at 1:29 am, he would nurse back to sleep. He would wake again, I would look at the clock and it would be 2:29. I would nurse him back to sleep and he would wake at 3:29 and we would repeat the process again. What was it with the 29th minute? I felt crazy! Morning would come and I would walk past the clock and take a glance....I always glanced at 9:29. Evening would come and I would always see the clock at 9:29. Now I really thought this was odd. I went through some postpartum depression within his first 6 months and I saw these numbers for 6 months! The number 29 did have significance in our lives. My husband and I were married on the 29th, my father in law passed away on the 29th, my due date with my first son was on the 29th. I couldn't figure out why this was happening. I thought that somehow my father in law was sending me messages from heaven. I thought he was telling me to toughen up and stop crying all the time. That didn't help. I started telling people that something was going to happen on or at 9:29. This number was totally driving me crazy! Well.....I did get my answer.
When Enzo was 6 months, he developed a fever. A horrible fever...he went from fine and smiling to shaking with 104 temp within a couple of minutes. I can't even describe what happened...it was so bizarre. For weeks after he had shaking episodes. Doctors had no clue what was going on...I had no clue how to help him. It was horrible. Within a couple of weeks, we noticed his eyes dancing. Like something you would see in the circus. They sent us in for an MRI and found two symmetrical lesions in the pons area of his brain. This was a clue to the docs that he had "Leigh's Syndrome" a Mitochondrial disease with a life expectancy of two years. What?!??! My healthy baby was no longer healthy and was not going to live?!?!?! This was by far the worst day of my life. We went home and many people came over to help us with this news. I think we all stared at the walls....dumbfounded! I (once again) couldn't stop crying. It felt like the funeral process had begun....we began grieving. Still seeing the clock at 9:29 all the time. Now I was angry to see it, I started yelling at God, telling him that I did NOT understand. After a few days of grieving and uncontrollable crying, we finally got our message....it wasn't from my father in law....but from my creator....from God.
I received an email from my husbands Uncle Ed. He wrote that his daughter was praying for us and opened her Bible to read. She came across a passage that was perfect for us and wanted to share it with us. It was Mark 9 through verse 29. There it was...our 9:29!! I had shivers up and down my spine. I called my husband over to the computer for him to read it. He is such a skeptic that I thought he would think I was crazy (again). He was amazed also. We were so touched by God at that moment. For days we had felt so alone, without hope, devastated. God had been preparing me for what was to come and he didn't plan on me doing it alone. He knew that I would need him to get through this. He knew Enzo would need Him. He gave us hope!!! Mark 9:29 states that only this kind of healing can come from prayer and fasting. Holy cow! What a message!!! Our attitudes immediately changed. God was in charge and He had a plan. Holy cow! We began to pray. All the time....anointing him and praying as often as I could. If I left the house, I put on the Christian station to focus more on Him and what He wanted to do. I didn't want to miss one beat with God!
God really made this message clear to us. The story gets better! We hadn't chosen a church to raise our family in at that time. My mom's friend invited us to go to her church because they would anoint Enzo with oil and pray over him. So when we were cleared by the docs (we thought we were in the clear) to take him into the public....we took him to church. What do you think the pastor preached on? Mark 9:1-29! Yes He did! God wanted to make sure that I did NOT doubt this message for us. He is so cool. The pastor (still my pastor to this day) read every verse, explaining in great detail, all of the important information to truely understand this chapter. We were stunned. My husband the critic was stunned...there was no denying that this message was for us.
I hope I was able to write this story in a way that it hits you, like the reality of it hit me. To this day it is very real to me. It is so easy to live life knowing God is there...but, not really knowing that He is REAL. He wants to touch our lives personally if we will recieve it. We need to let Him be in charge. I love that He doesn't want us to worry. That seems almost impossible with a mothers love...but we have to realize that our special needs child is in His hands. We can only love them and care for them. Their destiny is not in our hands. Our children don't really belong to us....they are on loan and on this Earth to glorify God. Wow. Boy, did it take years for me to swallow all of that and believe it. I did and my heart has peace. I am able to enjoy every day that God is allowing me to have with Enzo. Come to find out, Enzo does have that disease that we didn't believe he had. We took him to Columbia University in New York when he was 3 because they weren't able to diagnose him in Detroit. He does have Leigh's Syndrome and he is now 7 years old. So far, 5 years more than expected. I am going to keep praying and fasting and asking for more. I know that He is there you are not alone.
My whole life changed when I gave birth to my second son. Enzo Luigi. While pregnant, I pictured this Enzo to be a motorcycle racer....I pictured a cutting edge handsome boy with wavy brown hair. Why I pictured this I don't know....I probably wouldn't have let him be a racer! He was born healthy and with the hairiest back that I had ever seen, so I knew he could carry the name that we had chosen for him.
He was a very good baby, but he didn't sleep well. He would wake almost every hour. You know the first thing that you do when your child wakes and you don't feel rested...you look at the clock. On many nights he would wake at 1:29 am, he would nurse back to sleep. He would wake again, I would look at the clock and it would be 2:29. I would nurse him back to sleep and he would wake at 3:29 and we would repeat the process again. What was it with the 29th minute? I felt crazy! Morning would come and I would walk past the clock and take a glance....I always glanced at 9:29. Evening would come and I would always see the clock at 9:29. Now I really thought this was odd. I went through some postpartum depression within his first 6 months and I saw these numbers for 6 months! The number 29 did have significance in our lives. My husband and I were married on the 29th, my father in law passed away on the 29th, my due date with my first son was on the 29th. I couldn't figure out why this was happening. I thought that somehow my father in law was sending me messages from heaven. I thought he was telling me to toughen up and stop crying all the time. That didn't help. I started telling people that something was going to happen on or at 9:29. This number was totally driving me crazy! Well.....I did get my answer.
When Enzo was 6 months, he developed a fever. A horrible fever...he went from fine and smiling to shaking with 104 temp within a couple of minutes. I can't even describe what happened...it was so bizarre. For weeks after he had shaking episodes. Doctors had no clue what was going on...I had no clue how to help him. It was horrible. Within a couple of weeks, we noticed his eyes dancing. Like something you would see in the circus. They sent us in for an MRI and found two symmetrical lesions in the pons area of his brain. This was a clue to the docs that he had "Leigh's Syndrome" a Mitochondrial disease with a life expectancy of two years. What?!??! My healthy baby was no longer healthy and was not going to live?!?!?! This was by far the worst day of my life. We went home and many people came over to help us with this news. I think we all stared at the walls....dumbfounded! I (once again) couldn't stop crying. It felt like the funeral process had begun....we began grieving. Still seeing the clock at 9:29 all the time. Now I was angry to see it, I started yelling at God, telling him that I did NOT understand. After a few days of grieving and uncontrollable crying, we finally got our message....it wasn't from my father in law....but from my creator....from God.
I received an email from my husbands Uncle Ed. He wrote that his daughter was praying for us and opened her Bible to read. She came across a passage that was perfect for us and wanted to share it with us. It was Mark 9 through verse 29. There it was...our 9:29!! I had shivers up and down my spine. I called my husband over to the computer for him to read it. He is such a skeptic that I thought he would think I was crazy (again). He was amazed also. We were so touched by God at that moment. For days we had felt so alone, without hope, devastated. God had been preparing me for what was to come and he didn't plan on me doing it alone. He knew that I would need him to get through this. He knew Enzo would need Him. He gave us hope!!! Mark 9:29 states that only this kind of healing can come from prayer and fasting. Holy cow! What a message!!! Our attitudes immediately changed. God was in charge and He had a plan. Holy cow! We began to pray. All the time....anointing him and praying as often as I could. If I left the house, I put on the Christian station to focus more on Him and what He wanted to do. I didn't want to miss one beat with God!
God really made this message clear to us. The story gets better! We hadn't chosen a church to raise our family in at that time. My mom's friend invited us to go to her church because they would anoint Enzo with oil and pray over him. So when we were cleared by the docs (we thought we were in the clear) to take him into the public....we took him to church. What do you think the pastor preached on? Mark 9:1-29! Yes He did! God wanted to make sure that I did NOT doubt this message for us. He is so cool. The pastor (still my pastor to this day) read every verse, explaining in great detail, all of the important information to truely understand this chapter. We were stunned. My husband the critic was stunned...there was no denying that this message was for us.
I hope I was able to write this story in a way that it hits you, like the reality of it hit me. To this day it is very real to me. It is so easy to live life knowing God is there...but, not really knowing that He is REAL. He wants to touch our lives personally if we will recieve it. We need to let Him be in charge. I love that He doesn't want us to worry. That seems almost impossible with a mothers love...but we have to realize that our special needs child is in His hands. We can only love them and care for them. Their destiny is not in our hands. Our children don't really belong to us....they are on loan and on this Earth to glorify God. Wow. Boy, did it take years for me to swallow all of that and believe it. I did and my heart has peace. I am able to enjoy every day that God is allowing me to have with Enzo. Come to find out, Enzo does have that disease that we didn't believe he had. We took him to Columbia University in New York when he was 3 because they weren't able to diagnose him in Detroit. He does have Leigh's Syndrome and he is now 7 years old. So far, 5 years more than expected. I am going to keep praying and fasting and asking for more. I know that He is there you are not alone.
Monday, October 22, 2012
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