30 it UP

Woohoo!  I bet you guys were wondering what has been going on during quarantine with my Bible Study.  Well, let me just say, thanks to Facebook Messenger we still can video chat and continue our study of the bible.  Since quarantine has disrupted our lives, this small group study is something we all look forward to ending our week and starting our weekend with.  We had started this group with the intent to read the Bible from beginning to end, but life happened and we got stuck at nearly the end of Genesis.  That was when we started skipping around.  I already wrote a post about the short chapter of Jonah (hilarious, if you haven't read it click here).  I then discovered this great bible study companion by Josh Hunt .  This author has many books but so far our favorite to enrich our study time is the "Question-Based Bible Study Guide" series.  These books are pretty much amazing at digging deeper into the different chapters of each book of th...

I recently read the Bible verse from James Chapter 2, verse16. "If anyone considers himself religious and yet does not keep a tight rein on his tongue, he deceives himself and his religion is worthless." Now I know what most of you are thinking.  "OMG, I swear like a sailor!  I guess that negates my religious values."  Trust me I thought the same after reading this verse.  Vulgar language is just that, vulgar.  I mean there are some many other ways we can express ourselves verbally.  Sometimes it's just more satisfying to use a cuss word. I get it, though.  When you open your mouth and a cuss word comes out, its so much easier to be tempted to use more.  That word opens up a whole new world of language.  It makes it so much easier to use hate speech and degrade and judge others.  And soon using all this language will begin to taint your mind and heart. Trust me, I'm constantly learning to watch my tongue.  Its hard.  Bu...

Is anything worth the wait?  Let me tell you a story I pray that most if not all of you are familiar with.  A story about waiting.  Ladies and Gentlemen, I bring you Sarah and Abraham! Abraham had faith in the Lord that I cannot even fathom.  He and Sarah had be married for a long time and she could not conceive a child.  The Lord kept telling Abraham to trust in Him and his descendants would be more numerous than the stars.  That's a lot of promise for someone we can't even see.  How could Abraham believe this?  Crazy, right?  And it puts a ton of pressure on her to produce an heir, not to mention performance anxiety. Sarah also had a hard time, she was having a problem bearing his children.  She told Abraham that since she couldn't conceive he should have one with her slave.  Ok pause.  I have problems trusting people and this one action would have pushed me over the edge.  It had to have taken guts.  Yes I know...

It has taken me so long to actually sit down and write about this. At the beginning of this year I read a quote and it really resonated with me. "If I were to be prosecuted for my r eligion, I truly hope there is enough evidence to convict me."-- Coach John Wooden This has made me reflect on what has happened in my walk with Christ. In high school I was this shy, reserved girl who went to church every Sunday and believed. My friends did not share the same religious views as I did, but I was ok with that fact. Sometimes too ok with it. So ok with it that I let people change me and not for the better. After being made to fell "silly" for my belief in God and Christ, I lost my way. Had someone prosecuted me for my beliefs then, I would have been portrayed as innocent. There was not enough evidence to prove me guilty. Honestly, I was lost. Lost in what I believed, lost about who I was. Because I felt lost, my relationships suffered. Tensions strained between my fam...

Dating is hard when you're in your 30's.  Its even more difficult when you live in the small towns and cities of the UP.  See, you've mostly already tackled your localized dating pool so you create a profile on a website.  You choose the free ones because I mean, honestly, who wants to pay for a dating service when you barely make over the cost of living. You spend hours, days even, creating the best profile available on this free site making sure to put that you are not looking for one night stands or hookups.  You proofread your profile multiple times before you hit "complete," and want for the cyper-suitors to come a calling. In my experience on these "free" sites you have to weed through the frogs to find your potential prince.  Nine out of ten messages I get are creeps that don't even bother reading the five hundred times I wrote in my profile "Looking for a relationship."  Seriously, aren't you supposed to creep a person's...