Live Passionately

Today would've been my Mom's 61st Birthday, and today has been a great day so far!

The church message was awesome, as always, and I was very excited to wear my shirt to church today that I got from my friend, Amy, to help bring Elijah home! I just hopped over to Amy's blog to copy her blog address for my post and saw that she has added more items to her Etsy shop. Let's all help her bring home that sweet baby boy!!



I went upstairs to help Lily get a movie to watch and Bella was running up the stairs like a crazy dog and I captured this picture of her. It just cracks me up! She looks so funny! She knows she's not supposed to come upstairs, so she was being all frisky. She's really the sweetest little dog.

I took Bella outside earlier and decided to snap some photos of Morgan's driveway project.

He's extending our driveway back behind the fence so he can park back there. His truck is just too big to park in the garage and we've had problems lately with kids messing with it in the middle of the night.

One night, he forgot to lock it and they stole a few things out of it. We know it must be kids because they've been hitting only unlocked cars. They won't physically break a window to get in. Then, on our Anniversary night, they put all kinds of disgusting things all over his truck and left a nice little note! Oh my.......he was furious! But, I know kids do these kind of things. Probably a dare or a football initiation, something like that. I told him he can't take it personally.

I'm so proud of him though. He and two of his guys from work did all of this yesterday. They got dirt, spread it around, built the forms, put the rebar in. Very impressive, I think! He's very good at what he does and even though he's the boss, you won't find him sitting on the sidelines, bossing people around. He gets right in there and helps get the job done. He is a very hard worker, no matter what job he has to do.

So today at church, we talked about living passionately. Having passion for life moves living to a whole new level. I can attest to that because ever since I've had passion for the Lord, my life has been awesome and it truly does feel like I've been born again!! Mark 12:30 says, "So love the Lord God with all your passion and prayer and intelligence and energy." Passion makes you come alive. We have to make sure we keep our spiritual fervor, serving the Lord (Rom 12:11) and not lose our passion for living for God.

Sometimes in order to live passionately, we have to do something drastic. Sometimes we have to create a bigger margin. Margin is the difference between your load (what you're dealing with) and your limit (the most that you can deal with). When your margin shrinks, your stress goes up. These days, we allow overcrowding in our schedules to shrink our margin to the point that we cannot live without being stressed out constantly. We talked about the story of the friends who brought their paralyzed friend to be healed by Jesus in Luke 5. They knew they needed to get their friend to Jesus to be healed, but the crowd was so heavy they couldn't reach Him. So, what did they do? They realized what was important and they removed the obstacles. They got up on the roof and lowered their friend down to see Jesus!

They knew they had a limited opportunity and they were determined to do what it took. Sometimes we get stuck on the roof worrying about things that don't matter. I think I've been stuck on the roof for the past five years!! We have to be like these guys and remove those obstacles! We have to expect the unexpected and create space for God!

(By the way, these thoughts came straight from our sermon today.....I want to give credit where credit is due!) Our Pastor said we will fall apart if we don't seperate ourselves from the overcrowding in our lives. When we do this, we will find clarity in what is important. We also should keep a constant reminder to seperate ourselves, because our natural tendency will be to slip back into our old ways. Our lives here on Earth are just a vapor. We have to add margin to our lives and live passionately for the things that matter most!

Hope everyone is having a great Sunday so far! In honor of my Mom's Birthday, I think I'll be back later to post some of my adoption story that she wrote. It's a beautiful tribute to what a loving and wonderful woman she was!