Archive for September 5, 2008

Love Him!

{ September 5, 2008 @ 3:20 pm } · { Growing in God }
{ } · { Leave a Comment }

Deuteronomy 6: 4-9:

4 Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. 5 Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. 6 These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. 7 Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. 8 Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. 9 Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.

Deuteronomy 6:5 is the verse that popped in my head this morning.  It’s strongly worded.  So I looked it up and discovered that the verses following it are even stronger.  Not only does God want us to love Him with our hearts, souls, and strength, He also commands us to impress that upon our children.  They are our future and our biggest responsibility.  We’re also supposed to make sure everyone around us knows it.  We should be a walking, talking reminder of our responsibility to love God with our whole being, and the best way to do that is to lead by example.

Unfortunately, we often let other things get in the way of our love for Christ.  There are three ways He tells us to love Him:

1.  Heart–I believe this is referring to our emotions. 
2.  Soul–This can also refer to our emotions or our thoughts.
3.  Strength–as I take it, He is referring to our physical bodies.

God doesn’t just want us to love Him when things are going our way, on Sundays when we go to church, or when we happen to think about Him.  He says “with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength”.  In other words, nothing should ever trump our love for Christ.  Nothing.  It is the one thing that matters above all else…above our families, our friends, our jobs, and our hobbies.

A glimpse into my brain:

{ September 5, 2008 @ 10:31 am } · { Everyday Life }
{ } · { Comments (2) }

Here’s what’s been on my mind over the past couple of days:

1.  Weather–I LOVE how the weather is outside right now.  When I step outside in the morning, it feels like a crisp, cool Colorado morning.  There’s nothing like it and it makes me instantly happy despite anything negative that may be going on in my world (see #3).  Ben just giggles at me ’cause although he does appreciate the cooler weather, I don’t think he understands why it makes me downright giddy.  I don’t really understand it, either.

2.  Baby’s Nursery–I don’t have to have a nursery that looks like it came out of a magazine, but I also don’t want it to look like every other baby girl’s nursery–white furniture with pastel pink everything else.  I love the idea of sage green walls, dark wood furniture, and decorating with a darker shade of pink–either salmon or hot pink.  Luckily, Ben agrees.  We’ve found the furniture we want, now it’s down to finding things in sage green and salmon or hot pink.  Not an easy task.  I figure worst case is that Mom and I can make something.  Anyway, keep your eye out, and let me know if you happen to see stuff that fits that description!

3.  Fleas–They suck.  Literally and metaphorically.  Our poor cat, Molly, has been put through every imaginable flea treatment to try to get rid of them.  Our new house had renters before we moved in, and they had an indoor/outdoor cat that evidently brought fleas in with her.  So Molly is miserable.  We gave her two flea treatments, neither of which worked.  Then we gave her a flea bath and put a flea collar on her, which seemed to help at first, but soon she was scratching worse than before.  So yesterday I went to the all-knowing source, the internet, to try to figure out what our next step was.  We decided to get a Frontline Plus flea treatment.  They claim to destroy 98-100% of fleas within 24 hours.  She stopped scratching almost immediately, and slept in one spot for the next ten hours or so…must’ve been exhausted from scratching all day.  During the night last night, she started scratching again intermittently, but it’s still less than before (and hasn’t been 24 hours yet), so we hope that stuff is still working through her system and doing its job.  If not, I don’t know what we’ll do next.  I feel awful seeing her suffer like that.  I never thought I’d care about a pet that much, but I do.  Guess we’ll see this afternoon what the results are and go from there.  Until then, I’m just trying not to think about it.

4.  Caylee Anthony–the little three-year-old girl from Florida that has been missing for months now.  I figured she was dead, and now it appears that assumption was probably correct.  I don’t know why this story has grasped my attention the way it has, but I just can’t read enough.  I always like a good ‘whodunit’, but would prefer it to be a “Law & Order:  SVU” episode, not a real-life drama.  Perhaps since I am on my way to being a new mommy, I just can’t fathom why someone would kill their own child, and a toddler at that.  I am just assuming, of course, that she did it, but I just don’t see how she didn’t have something to do with it.  I hope they can get this one solved before it drags out too much further.