I Am God Designed

What state is your faith in?  October 13, 2017, we had a one night conference to address our faith and to teach us how to make our faith unshakeable ! The following are the notes that I took throughout the conference, where we enjoyed listening to 3 godly women: Valerie Howe, Kristi Neace and Brenda Poinsett.  I hope you are blessed in the passing of this wisdom. The Bible tells us in Luke 10:27 that "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself." What does that even look like? Our hearts are deceitful things! God warns us about this in His word.(Jeremiah 17:9)  We are told in many places to control our emotions. We are to "be angry and sin not," "be slow to anger", "put on the whole armor", "walk in the spirit" and so many more! Our actions and words show the inner condition of our hearts. If we have been hurt in some wa...

  I know its a little late, but I wanted to reflect on the conference a bit! Dr. Joy Greene was a delight!! I was laughing, crying, and just CONVICTED! I don't know about you ladies, but every week at church has been magnifying bits and pieces of the conference all over again. Now that is a God thing if I ever did see one! The very next Sunday(April 30), our Associate Pastor was preaching on some of the very same verses that Joy was telling us about(John 15:5)! He talked to us, again, about Abiding in Christ. We can do nothing on our own! We must be seeking Christ in our every day life to ensure that we are living according to His will. It is SO easy for us to get caught up in our plans for our lives...our dreams. But the Bible tells us that we are here to honor and glorify the Father! I am not here to honor and glorify Cheryl!  Wow! What a revelation, right?! This life is not all about me! Jeremiah 29:11(also heard in my church recently) "For I know t...

    The I Am God Designed women's conference is coming up so fast! I cannot tell you how excited we all are to put this together for you ladies again this year! Please share this information with all your friends! Make it a ladies weekend to remember!   We have a lot of things in store for you this year: Three Story Coffee will be joining us! www.threestorycoffee.com Our new speaker this year is Dr. Joy Greene, founder and president of Joytime Ministries www.joytime.org We will be serving a brunch on Saturday this year(as well as many yummy treats throughout the conference) We have so many of our wonderful breakout session leaders back again this year, as well as some new and some we missed seeing last year. We have some new cost options as well, including Friday night dinner, T-shirts, and Canvas totes! All of our breakout sessions will be digging into the stories of some of the different women of the Bible to see what God may want ...

How often do you say I love you? Every day? Once a week? Who do you say I love you to? Your spouse? Your kids? Your friends? In our world today we love everything. We love those new pair of shoes or that new dress we got on sale.  We even love the food that we eat or a delicious piece of chocolate cake. But do we really love anything. I mean really love. Not just I got a funny feeling in my stomach or I feel really strongly about this but real love? I often wonder if we even know what love really means. Love, according to a google search, is an intense feeling of deep affection or(as a verb) feel a deep romantic or sexual attachment to someone. Another definition described it as a devoted affection. We throw around the word love so easily now, that it has begun to lose its full meaning. When I see women on Valentine's Day, many women are full of smiles about the gifts they received or anticipating the gifts that are coming. Others are sad and full of depressi...

Kristi Neace, Valerie Howe and I are leading a conference called “Unshakeable” at First Baptist Church, Villa Ridge, on October 15. Our featured Scripture passage that day is from Luke 10:27—“Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and love your neighbor as your love yourself” (TEV). Kristi will be speaking on loving God with all your soul and mind, and Valerie will be speaking on loving God with all your heart and strength. I’ll be speaking on loving your neighbor. Cheryl asked those of you in her blog readership if you had any questions for the three of us regarding these verses. One of you told her to ask me, “How do you love yourself if you never have?” Here’s My Answer I would question the “never have” part of the question. I suspect you love yourself some . You love yourself if you take care of yourself at all. You love yourself enough not to step out in front of a speedy car. You make...

I was looking at my garden this morning. Or at least what's left of it. The weeds have gotten so tall now that it's hard to see the actual plants that are in there. Some of them are even taller than me(although, for those of you who know me, that isn't too crazy tall!). Even so, when I looked passed all of the craziness of what time, weeds, and chickens have done to this garden, I found quite a few tall, healthy, and fruit-bearing(veggie-bearing) plants!  I have peppers growing...lots of them!  And this was a garden that we had totally given up on, even to the point of talking about mowing it all down.  I had been so disappointed by the destruction that our chickens had done, I had come to terms with the fact that we just wouldn't get any peppers this year. I had stopped weeding it, watering it, everything! Then, I looked at those plants today, with amazement and excitement.                        Th...