"Your greatest contribution to the Kingdom of God may not be something you do, but someone you raise." ~Andy Stanley

November 27, 2013

Wednesdays in the Word

"Is anything too hard for the Lord?" ~Gen. 18:13

"I am the Lord, the God of all mankind, is anything too hard for Me?" ~Jer. 32:27

"He does great things past finding out, yes, wonders without number." ~Job 9:10

"For nothing is impossible with God." ~Luke 1:37

"And to God I would commit my cause. -Who does great things, and unsearchable, marvelous things, without number." ~Job 5:8-9

Amen!!! What a great God we serve!

~Becky

November 26, 2013

The crazy upcoming fun of the birthday season with a couple holidays thrown in

Thanksgiving preparations start tomorrow. Whoo-hoo! Love this holiday!
 And Christmas around here starts on Friday! So, it will be a Christmas tree buying-decorating-light hanging-egg nog-drinking-kind of weekend! Can't wait!

This will be the first of many years to come, I'm sure, that one of our kids isn't home for a holiday. (boo-hoo) I know that I will miss Nathan like crazy, but I am so happy that he is living in California, where we have so many sweet family members that he can visit for holidays. It does this mom's heart good to know that he'll be with my mom and dad! : )

Next week my hubby is going to Colorado so that he and his dad can spend their birthdays together over the weekend. I'm soooo happy for them both. They haven't seen each other in 3 years!

A few days later, two of our kiddos are going to California to see one of their best friends for his birthday and also Nathan, who is having a birthday. Yay!
While they are there, my dad will have a birthday and they are going to get to celebrate with him too. Fun, fun, fun. -If they were taking more than just carry-on luggage, I'd totally be trying to figure out how to stow away with them!!!! ; ) Oh my word, are they going to have fun!

-Typing this sounds a little crazy. We really don't normally fly around the country for people's birthdays, trust me! lol

Everyone will be back in the middle of December and then a week and a half later, it will be Christmas Eve, and Nathan will fly home!
You can bet this mom will be a hot mess at the airport! Look out! : )
It is sure to be the best Christmas Eve ever!

Let the holidays begin!
What a tremendous blessing we have in our family and our dear friends!
~Becky

November 25, 2013

Celebrating 17!

How can baby #3 be 17 already?! I have no idea!

When your birthday is sometimes on Thanksgiving or very close to it, you rarely ever have school that day, 
 which makes you grow up thinking that your birthday is a school holiday LOL . 
Unfortunately, it fell on a school day this year.

When the birthday girl's favorite thing is to bake, she makes her own cake! Hooray!
 An out of this world, Snickers Cake!


We took a Joy quiz, and did a Joy word search, and told her what we admire about her . Then we played a wild game of Farkle! 


Happy Birthday, to the sweetest girl on the planet, who brings us all such joy!

~Becky

November 20, 2013

Wednesdays in the Word

"It is possible to take forgiveness of sin, 
the gift of the Holy Ghost,
and our sanctification with simplicity of faith,
and to forget at what enormous cost to God it was all made ours.
When once you realize all that it cost God to forgive you, 
you will be held as in a vice,
constrained by the love of God." 
                     ~Oswald Chambers

November 19, 2013

One big weekend

I've decided that a sign of a fun weekend,
is a messy-Monday-morning house... and that is what we had!

Friday night, Joy baked for a ladies event and she recruited me to bake a couple hundred of these German chocolate cookies. We were baking and serving for 6 fun hours with some sweet ladies!
She made a huge amount of these cookie dough pretzel bites. Yum! She also took lil smokies and wrapped them in bacon and sprinkled them in brown sugar and cooked them. They were yummy, but what isn't yummy when wrapped in bacon?
The woman in charge of the food made a pumpkin bread pudding. Y'all, that bread pudding was to die for. I don't know the measurements and it probably doesn't matter because she was cooking for 200,
but here's what she did:
She cut Hawaiian Rolls into cubes, then she mixed up a can of pumpkin, half and half and melted pumpkin ice cream and poured it over the bread and baked it for 45 minutes. But wait, there's more: when they came out of the oven, she put a mixture of butterscotch topping and rum flavoring and drizzled it over the top. YUMMMM!!!! I may have to add this to our Thanksgiving menu!
All these goodies were for a fun event called the Swapportunity, an event where ladies from our church brought their gently used clothes, jewelry and shoes to swap with each other... The organization team sorted all the items while the ladies ate. They were given numbers and then told when they could go to the various rooms to 'shop'. Such a fun idea.

Saturday, my hubby sweetly worked on the Honey Do list that he had me make.
 This will also be remembered as the day that my hubby found out I ruined the whole house. LOL
 Otherwise know as the day he found out that I painted our hallway cupboards with watered down paint!!! -How does that happen??? Painters can't live with bad paint jobs, I found out. He was so cute saying "I can't believe this happened in MY house!" So, we each had a power sander and we went at those hallway cupboards for a good hour while paint flakes flew everywhere... Ugh!!! Boy, was I ever sorry for my sorry paint job! I think I ought to leave all future painting to him. : )

After the paint agony, it was time for a date night! We had a Groupon for a BBQ place on the water. It turned out to be a really cool outdoor restaurant on a lake. (which I would never want to go to in the summer in FL, amen!) But the weather was cool, the view was beautiful and the food was really good.
And then the sun went down and the mosquitoes decided that I was dinner..

Sunday, we had a guest speaker. John Bevere, who comes to our church once a year! He spoke from this book, which was awesomely insightful. That night, the whole service was praise and worship and it was so powerful and wonderful!

Monday morning I went back to church, to celebrate a life well lived! One of the men of our church died of cancer. He was a dear brother with a powerful testimony of a redeemed life! He genuinely cared for everyone he came in contact with and you could feel it. He will be missed by people of all ages. He taught a Wednesday night class for junior high boys, and I sat in front of two of them at the funeral, who were silently crying their eyes out. There really wasn't a dry eye in the house, even though we know he's with Jesus now. He will always be remembered for his BIG smile and the tray of impanadas he made and brought to every VBS to bless all the workers. : )

~Becky

November 15, 2013

For the love of books

                  "I cannot live without books." ~Thomas Jefferson

Here is a book that I can't wait to buy for our Christmas devotions:


We love to light candles and read a book together as a family while eating and drinking something yummy during the Advent season! This year we are going to use Ann Voskamp's new book. I love, love, love her because she always points me to Jesus! : )

I've been praying the prayers in The Power of a Praying Parent and praying for my guy with The Power of a Praying Wife for years. I love those books! So, I was beyond thrilled to see this book the other day!
Hooray! A new season of life and new scriptures to be praying over my grown children! Thanks, Stormie!

We heard General Jerry Boykin speak on Veterans Day and were just awed by his life and his faith. He was very inspiring and admonished us that we need to stand firm for what we believe in and not be swayed by political correctness or others opinions. I ordered this book about his amazing life:

 
Here is the description from Amazon: 
"In 1978, Jerry Boykin joined what would become the world's premier Special Operations unit, Delta Force. The only promise: "A medal and a body bag." What followed was a .50 caliber round in the chest and a life spent with America's elite forces bringing down warlords and war criminals, despots, and dictators. In Colombia, his task force hunted the notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar. In Panama, he helped capture the brutal dictator Manuel Noriega, liberating a nation. From Vietnam to Iran to Mogadishu, Lt. General Jerry Boykin's life reads like an action-adventure novel. Boykin's powerful story will keep you riveted as he reveals how his military duty worked in tandem with his faith to bring him through the bloody storms of foreign battle-and through the political firestorm that ambushed him in his own country."

If you love history, this Christmas wish list of books looked like it had some great suggestions from the Girl Talk Blog (conversations on Biblical womanhood and other fun stuff).

Happy reading!

~Becky

November 13, 2013

Wednesdays in the Word


I love that Job was someone that God could brag about to the devil:
 "Have you considered my servant Job? There is none like him on earth, a blameless and upright man, one who fears God and shuns evil." 

When he lost everything:
"he fell to the ground and worshiped."

He said:
"The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord."

"Shall we indeed accept good from God and shall we not accept adversity?"

He didn't blame God for his troubles:
 "In all this Job did not sin nor charge God with wrong." 

And finally:
"In all this Job did not sin with his lips."
 -I'd like to go one day without sinning with my lips! LOL : )

I'd also like to be someone who doesn't 'charge God with wrong' when things in my world don't go the way I think they should. And when things do go wrong I'd like to be like to be the kind of person who 'falls to the ground and worships' rather than complains and whine.

May we all be people that God can brag about because we 'fear God and shun evil.'

~Becky

November 12, 2013

Another care-giving turn ends!

Last week, was all about packing up my brother-in-law and this care-giving turn coming to an end. He left our house on Saturday to spend the next several months with other family and friends and will probably be back for another stay in the spring.

We've been working on having him approved for public transportation for the disabled and finally got our interview the day before he left! Some people apply for this service who are perfectly capable of riding a regular bus but apply because of the convenience of having a van to your house and take you where you want to go. (nice!) The interview process weeds out those folks.
He uses this service when he stays in CA and is able to go to doctors appointments and out to lunch with friends from his stroke support group. We have high hopes that he will be approved to use the service here in FL too.
We've been giving him rides to the chiropractor and to his volunteer position at the aquarium. Getting him to and from the aquarium is a big process for me. Its OK for your heart to race when pushing twice your weight for a half of a block, right? -It is my Friday workout, for sure! Then I come back 3 hours later and do it all in reverse. All that to say, it would be beyond awesome if he gets approved!!!

Saturday, we were up at 4:30 AM getting him ready to leave and off to the airport. Then we started the process of putting our house back the way it usually is and removing all the things he needs to function around here and putting them in the attic. Joy gets her bedroom back and we get our family room back. All that means moving furniture from this room to that room. With all this moving around every four months, Joy has learned to live lean. She's decided not to keep any extra STUFF because it just makes more work. (good practice for someone who wants to be a missionary, I'd say) : )
We finished in 3 1/2 hours this time. Yahoo!
Then we headed to my favorite restaurant. The kids thought I should pick, since care-giving is the hardest on me, they say.
Unfortunately for them. I didn't pick Chinese. ; )

Now to enjoy a little break and the holidays! Hooray!

~Becky

November 11, 2013

For those who love Sherlock Holmes and love the Bible

I saw this book the other day in Barnes and Noble and was so intrigued to find that someone had written a book that had "The World's Greatest Detective Tackling the Bible's Ultimate Mysteries." What a great idea!



Our library had it on ebook and so I checked it out. (because I'm cheap like that)
I was so happy to find out that it wasn't 'cheesy' like my teenagers would say, but really well done, which makes me want to buy a copy for my teens to read.

I've only read the first mystery so far, but I really liked it. I learned a Biblical fact I'd never noticed before that helped me understand one of the Old Testament stories sooo much better! -Sorry, I know that's vague. I don't want to give anything away... 

I found this article by the author that describes why he chose to use Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson to solve Bible mysteries
 
Enjoy!
~Becky

November 6, 2013

Wednesdays in the Word

I was struck by the 'uns' in Romans 1 the other day.
Romans 1:28-32 describes a society that is in rebellion against God and although I'm not a 'hater of God' or 'violent' etc... The 'uns' did get me thinking...

Am I:
           Undiscerning?
           Untrustworthy?
           Unloving?
           Unforgiving?
           Unmerciful?

Ouch!

~Becky

November 5, 2013

Best steaks ever!

On Saturday, my hubby gave our-favorite-groom a little bachelor party, while we girls, attended the bridal shower.
He wanted to grill steaks, so I suggested he try something from the Pioneer Woman because everything she makes is amazing! -And I don't think a cattle rancher would steer you wrong when it comes to steak! ; )

He gave her Ribeye Steaks with Onion-Bleu Cheese Sauce a try.


And it was amazing!!!!!!!!!
That SAUCE! -Words don't do it justice. I want to bottle it up and pour it on everything I eat!
It is soooo good! We've decided we have to make it again on Christmas Eve! Can't wait!!!!

~Becky

November 4, 2013

The wedding!

I'm just too happy about this day to even try to find the words to describe it! 









~Becky