I bet your world is full of holiday hustle about now, right? Christmas is just a few days away and your life may be crammed with parties and wrapping and baking and caroling and shopping and traveling… and… uh…. deep breath… and more wrapping and more baking and… okay, that’s enough!!
I need to stop and breathe. Do you? I mean, I – we — need to stop and breathe in the beauty, the meaning, the radical impact of Christmas. So, I wrote a simple prayer to center me, and maybe it will help you, too.
When my son Connor was six years old, he wrote a hilarious Christmas wish list.
I still remember his creativity and boldness in choosing the many, many, many, many items. I smile when I think back to the wintery day he asked to get out my laptop and type out his Christmas list for him. He stayed serious and thoughtful as he dictated each item.
When I found it recently, I laughed out loud and thought you may get a kick out of it too.
I had said yes one too many times and my life was too full for me to pull it off. I was forgetting appointments, neglecting my family and feeling like I was so busy that all I had time for was guilt.
Ever felt like that?
Busy. It’s such a loaded word, isn’t it?
Some people think busy is a bad word! When a woman says she is “way too busy,” it can be code for “I have no balance in my life and it is totally out of control!” Some women wear busy like a badge, as if her level of exhaustion and the number of things on her to-do list indicate her level of importance and her amount of significance.
Busy is relative. For one woman, busy may be a hair appointment on the same day she has to grocery shop. For another woman who starts her day at 6:00 AM and follows her first cup of coffee with six appointments, four phone calls, her part-time job, car-pooling the kids, and making dinner, the thought of being busy never even enters her mind! She still has time and energy to spare.
There’s not just one way to define busy. The definition of busy is as individual as each woman.
Hi there, dear ones. Jennifer here. The post I’m sharing with you this week is one I wrote a few years ago, but felt the need to share with you again. Given the messages and comments I’ve received lately, it seemed relevant to what so many of you are dealing with. My prayer is that if you’re newer to our community of sisters and reading it for the first time that it will encourage your heart. If this isn’t your first time to read it, I pray the Lord will use it in a fresh way to minister to you. So thankful for each of you.
Sometimes the things life throws at us can make us feel like God isn’t being fair. She got the job, and I didn’t. Her health is fine, and I have a chronic illness. The list could go on and on forever… we’ve all be there!
You’re frustrated, confused, sad, or discouraged, but you desperately want to keep trusting God and His Word. What do you do?
What a year it has been! When I think about the ups, the downs, and the in-betweens, there’s been this overwhelming theme throughout it all — the Lord has worked and been so very present. I’m so thankful in that what has been a tough year in some ways has also been an opportunity to experience God’s faithfulness. He is so good.
And I’m so thankful for you! Each one of you. Thank you for joining me for Java every week. It feels like we are truly on this journey together, and I couldn’t ask for a better group of sisters to join me. So, as the year winds down, I figured I would feature the blogs you liked the best from this past year! Let’s just sample a few sips of Java from 2016 together — maybe they will be sweeter the second time, and if you’re new to this great bunch of coffee buddies, pour yourself a tall something that is warm and refreshing, pull up a chair and enjoy a cup of inspiration… five cups, to be exact!
I know her. You know her. She’s the woman who is pouring her life into others or a cause or a ministry. She’s the woman who brings light into this dark world.
She may be in prison ministry, or working at a homeless shelter, or leading a women’s ministry at her church or leading women across the globe in an online Bible study.
Women who serve others may do it in a million different ways, but they have one thing in common-
