Christ in the Clouds

Today, January 31, 2016, the hubby and I celebrate 29 years of marriage!! It seems so surreal!! It definitely doesn’t seem like we have been together that long! We’ve lived and enjoyed so many blessings, as well as experienced many difficult and challenging years together. But through it all, God has been with us, guiding us, giving us His wisdom and love. I am so thankful for this man in my life!! He is my best friend, my prayer partner, the one I love and who has loved me through thick and thin.  Through the years of blogging, I’ve shared posts on our anniversaries. Each year, I found many reasons to celebrate and shared pictures, stories, and videos. Blog post for our 28th anniversary - 2015 Blog post for our 27th anniversary - 2014 Blog post for our 26th anniversary - 2013 Here is a video of us renewing our vows at for our 25th anniversary - a bit belated, but what an awesome day!!! Blog post for our 25th anniversary - 2012 Other posts about our...

Today, I am sharing the many gifts God has blessed me with over the past few weeks. In line with the  book: One Thousand Gifts : Finding Joy in What Really Matters " ... if joy is a matter of gratitude, and gratitude is a matter of perspective, then giving thanks changes not only your perspective   —  but also changes your life." #1783 - Full moon on a frozen lake. #1784 - Starting an online Bible Study Group with the book, "Fervent" . What a wonderful group of ladies!! #1785 - Attending church again, after missing several weeks, due to weather issues and family gatherings. #1786 - A family meeting that could have gone badly, but went well. #1787 -  Celebrating my mom's 79th birthday with ice-cream cake. #1788 - Laughing at the fact that my hubby left the ice-cream cake out and it melted...but still tasted good! :)  #1789 - Taking an invigorating, brisk walk on a cold, overcast day! #1790 - Being able to watch a Bibl...

source Ever have one of those weeks that goes from bad to good to bad and back to good again? Well, I just had a week like that. I have to say, I'm exhaused and trying to write has been a challenge. So I will probably make this one short. I recently pulled out an older Bible that I haven't used in several months to get a different version of some verses I was reading. When I opened the Bible, a few sheets of folded paper fell out. The sheets had some study/meditation questions typed up on them. I recognized them coming from a Bible study I had attended close to a year ago. The first sheet said to read and meditate on Psalm 51, followed  by some questions about confession, what we are trying to gain in our lives, and how the Holy Spirit may be prompting us with the truth about what God wants to provide in our lives. Underneath it I wrote "happiness" and also "I'm content, but not very happy a lot of the time." Wow! Those two responses really struc...

As I continue to read through the book, " Happiness " by Randy Alcorn, I will be sharing different parts of the book, as well as Scripture, and my own thoughts about true happiness. We live in a consumer-oriented, materialistic, hedonistic society bent on pleasing self. Most of us are accustomed to living with easy access to comforts, pleasures, and securities of life. Because of this, many people also believe that happiness comes in accomplishments, in recognition, and in material possessions. We are told by the world and media that if we just acquire certain things, then we can be truly happy and even secure. As a result, we seek to achieve happiness through these gains, much to our disappointment and regret. After years of striving for happiness, some even come to terms within themselves that happiness is not possible to achieve in this life.   The problem is most people’s definition of having joy(happiness) is feeling good all the time. But, that’s impossible! Even...

"Happy is {she} who puts {her} trust in the Lord!"(Proverbs 16:20) I bought a new book just the other day. It's a book I have wanted to read from the moment I had decided that my "word for 2016" was going to be  Happiness. Randy Alcorn is an author and the founder and director of   Eternal Perspective Ministries (EPM) , a nonprofit ministry dedicat ed to teaching principles of God’s Word and assisting the church in ministering to the unreached, unfed, unborn, uneducated, unreconciled, and unsupported people around the world. His ministry focus is communicating the strategic importance of using our earthly time, money, possessions and opportunities to invest in need-meeting ministries that count for eternity. He is also  a New York Times best-selling author of almost fifty books. So far, the book has been pretty basic. The preface and first chapter have described that, over the years, philosophers and religious sources have agreed that ...

Hello and welcome to my first post of 2016! I'm a bit shocked at writing this post, as I I haven't picked a word for the year for myself for a few years. I hadn't planned on choosing a word this year till recently.  But because last year had SO many challenges for me and I gave so much of myself and felt so drained of energy by the end of the year. it just seemed appropriate to decide on a specific word for 2016. Definition from Dictionary.com "The state of being happy." synonyms: pleasure ,  contentment ,  satisfaction , cheerfulness,  merriment ,  gaiety ,  joy , joyfulness, joviality,  jollity ,  glee ,  delight , good spirits, lightheartedness,well-being,  enjoyment ;   exuberance ,  exhilaration ,  elation ,  ecstasy , jubilation ,  rapture , bliss,  blissfulness I've been reading and praying about the word - happiness - in Scripture, in Christian theolo...