Recipes I've tried recently

Recipes I’ve tried recently

I’ve always liked to cook.  I used to help my grandma and mom bake when I was little.  I also used to make meals for my mom and I when I was living with her before I got married, and still do sometimes!  Now that I have my own home, I love to cook new things at least once a week (or so I try).  I have a pile of recipes in my recipe binder that are just waiting to be tried and I just keep adding to the list!  The new recipes I’ve recently tried are the following:

Spinach-parmesan cakes :: so tasty and so healthy!

Homemade pop-tarts :: messy & time-consuming, but really tasty and a LOT healthier than store-bought pop-tarts

Chewy chocolate cookies with cream cheese frosting :: easy to make and colored the icing to make them fun!

I'm learning how to gather recipes I want to try and to just pull them out when I am about to go on a grocery shopping extravaganza.  I love to find recipes that I can put in my recipe binder and share with others how good they are!

Calloused Hearts

I’ve been thinking about calloused hearts lately...  I also remembered that I posted a status on Facebook about it a long time ago, it said:  Don't ignore the pull on your heart anymore... it may not be there forever. The continuous refusal to respond to the guidance of the Spirit of God may eventually lead to a state of moral insensitivity. Grieving (Eph. 4:30), resisting (Acts 7:51), and quenching (1 Thess. 5:19) the Holy Spirit may lead one's heart to become so hardened and calloused that he will not even hear the truth.

Then today I read a devotional where it pointed out Matthew 13:1-15.  Specifically 13:15, which states:  

Jesus said, "This people's heart has become calloused; they hardly hear with their ears, and they have closed their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts and turn, and I would heal them."

The devotional also had an example:

"I've started playing a guitar again after a lapse of more than 35 years. I haven't played since I was a teenager, and I had forgotten the first major obstacle to playing: tender fingers. Guitar players must build up a layer of callouses on the fingertips so that pressing the strings doesn't hurt. I finally have a sufficient layer of callouses on my fingertips. But when I pick up a coin, stroke my daughter's hair, or touch my own face, through the callouses I feel only the pressure of an object, not the object itself. Now I can better understand the barrier between the Lord and me: My heart has become calloused. The Holy Spirit speaks to us within our heart. In right relationship with God, we open our calloused hearts to the presence of the Holy Spirit. If we do, we will not be among those who hear and do not understand, who see but are blind, who touch but do not feel." -Stanley Hurst (Alabama, USA)

Living in right relationship with God keeps the heart soft.

It made me think of how so many of us take for granted how much God is pulling on our hearts to turn to Him, yet we refuse to respond and in turn we let our hearts become more calloused each day.  Each time we reject God, we are hardening our hearts so badly that one day we won't even be able to recognize what truth is.  Don't let your heart become like this... recognize that God loves you and He is always trying to get your attention so that you will turn to Him and let Him change you from the inside out!

This is my prayer: that all of our hearts would be softened toward God and toward each other and to be sensitive to the leading of the Holy Spirit.

(Originally posted on my Facebook Notes in 2010)

Wedding Vows

Wedding Vows
In honor of my previous post, I decided to post our wedding vows and the font that I used to type them up and frame them in our bedroom!  Not only do they look really cute on our wall, they are a great reminder as to what we have promised to live up to in respect to our marriage!  The font is called Jenna Sue J  I got this idea from one of my favorite blogs, Life Blessons.

I take you to be my wedded spouse

To have and to hold from this day forward

For better, for worse

For richer, for poorer

In sickness and in health

To love and to cherish

Till death do us part

According to God’s holy law

I pledge you my faith. 

Why I Love My Husband

My husband Peter has always told me that for guys, their hearts wander starting with their eyes.  For women, it’s an emotional attachment to another man (more of which I learned from one of my favorite books, Every Woman’s Battle).  For guys, it’s their eyes that lead them down a long, horrible path that more often than not, leads to broken relationships and even broken marriages.  This is why I respect my husband more than anything—he protects his eyes. 

This post isn’t a list of all of the reasons as to why I love my husband… just one particular aspect to him that I truly admire, adore and most importantly, respect him for.  He works for a moving company as of right now so that means he’s always around guys who are a little rough around the edges.  They will often try to one-up each other and talk about not-so-great topics of conversation.  Every day he comes home and usually has an interesting story to tell me about his day.  One particular thing that is usually part of his day is the fact that the guys crudely talk about women and break their necks looking at them.  It truly makes me sick hearing some of the things guys say… and many of them are married.

When Peter and I are together, he makes it a point not to look at other women that are wearing barely anything that could potentially make his thoughts go where they shouldn’t be going.  He keeps his eyes on me instead.

And it’s not just when we are together.  He tells me of the times at his job where his co-workers want to show him crude things on their phones and he tells them he doesn’t want any part of it; when they tell him to hurry up and look at the girl walking past them he makes it a point not to look.  He tells them he has a wife at home whom he loves (and goodness, does hearing that from him make me smile!).  I know he is being truthful to me because, first off, he is the most truthful person I’ve ever met, and secondly-- I hear the disappointment in his voice.

I hear disappointment when he tells me the guys who do this have a wife and kids at home.

One guy even said, “You can look at the menu, but just don’t order from it!”  What kind of nonsense is that?!  Do I want my husband looking with lustful thoughts at another woman when I’m not around him… let alone when I’m WITH him?! No way.  No way do I want my husband leading his heart astray with his eyes and thoughts.  This is why it's so important to pray for the men in our lives, especially our husbands, to have discipline over what they let their eyes and minds dwell on.

And this is why I love my husband.  He respects other women.  He respects me.  He loves me enough to protect his eyes and to remember the covenant he has made with me when we said “I do”.  Our vows specifically state that we have pledged each other our faith (i.e. our love) and to forsake all others.  We vowed to God that we would honor one another.  And this is my husband living out his vows to me, and more importantly, to God.

This is why I love my husband.