Wake up my Heart!

My son has this new saying. “Mom do you know what I do? I DO love you!” I love it. It so very accurately portrays love as an action verb. Which I have come to realize, it is. I also work for an organization where the motto really is “Love is a verb”, further defined in a way I think we are meant to compare to the fruits of the Spirit: Patient, humble, respectful, honest, kind, selfless, forgiving, committed. This means it is my job to love people. Can I tell you how wonderful it is to go to work and pray that during my shift I can best show love to the people I am serving?! On my drive, I make a choice. To love when it’s hard. And for the first time I really get Paul’s message in Corinthians. It is not that love is patient or kind. It is that when you DO love; patience IS the love. Kindness is the love. When you forget the wrongs, you are DOING the love. It's hard to put it into words, but there is a difference in loving passively and DOING love. Love is a ver...

This past week, I was in Illinois, quite unexpectedly and had the joy of attending the annual GOYA Ministries benefit. This ministry is near and dear to my heart and my past life and my present life are all crazily intermingled in it. The theme was "what if" and although obviously this was all in reference to how GOYA ministries has helped so many and how it will continue to do so, a couple of those what if comments have been with me, rambling as my thoughts so often do, since Tuesday! In 2011, tragedy hit Mitumba, a slum in Kenya. And here's the take away they presented: what if what the enemy meant for destruction, we could rebuild for hope? What if we have to be broken to be made better? Friends, I don't know what it's like to lose EVERYTHING. In my own life, here as a privileged white person in America, I cannot even begin to comprehend how destroyed and broken Mitumba (and it's people) were in 2011. But I know how broken and destroyed I was from S...

This is for you. You know who you are! Here's my story, concisely and truthfully.  If you asked me if I was a Christian my whole life I would have told you yes. I was Catholic. I knew who Jesus was. The end.  But then I realized that being Catholic doesn't HAVE to mean you are a Christian. It just means you are Catholic. You have to have a relationship with Jesus Christ to be a Christian...and I was missing that piece. And I was aching for it...I just didn't know it.  When I was 25 I became a Christian. I loved the Lord. But my faith was somehow tied to the man who led me to it (the father of my son).  I grew as a Christian during my married life, yes....but I still somehow had a God-shaped hole in my life. I tried to fit my husband in that spot...but he didn't fit. So, after he left my life (in the role of husband anyway), I had ANOTHER hole. Bigger than before. Something had to fill it. I didn't really think that it needed to be Jesus, bec...