Through the valley

Thank you for allowing me to be raw&unedited and then staying with me as I took a step away from this blog.  It was a needed break to get things in order and refocus/reground myself.

It has been good.  Really good.


I have been sucked into the hustle and bustle of life and have not taken the time that I should to stop and focus.  To more firmly root myself in Christ, and to draw my strength from him.  How easy it is to not do that.

1. Come Thou Fount of every blessing

Tune my heart to sing Thy grace;

Streams of mercy, never ceasing,

Call for songs of loudest praise

Teach me some melodious sonnet,

Sung by flaming tongues above.

Praise the mount! I'm fixed upon it,

Mount of God's unchanging love.

2. Here I raise my Ebenezer;

Hither by Thy help I'm come;

And I hope, by Thy good pleasure,

Safely to arrive at home.

Jesus sought me when a stranger,

Wandering from the fold of God;

He, to rescue me from danger,

Interposed His precious blood.

3. O to grace how great a debtor

Daily I'm constrained to be!

Let that grace now like a fetter,

Bind my wandering heart to Thee.

Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,

Prone to leave the God I love;

Here's my heart, O take and seal it,

Seal it for Thy courts above.

There is a reason that come thou fount is my favorite hymn.  It is so easy for us to derail, to be distracted, to be entangled in sin.  It is only through Him that I can do this whole wife/mom/full time worker/homemaking and life thing.

I am still challenged, I am still growing, I am still working on how to do this whole thing.  I think that is the thing, we are all still in process.  Some are further along than us, others simply appear that way and sometimes, we get ahead of ourselves and think we are further along than we really are and we try to do it all on our own to prove it to ourselves.  (*coughASHLEYcough *self finger point*)



The truth is, we can't.

That is the beauty of it though, realizing that we can't do everything and do it perfectly releases us from the burden of having to.

We don't have to do it all.

We don't have to do it all perfectly.

We are free.

In this freedom we can choose to do what we want, and the best thing is the biggest power source in the universe is on my side.

How easy it is to forget, the grace of it all.  There is that word again.  Grace.  My daily grace challenge has been amazing so far.  Extending it to others is so freeing.  Especially my husband.  Why is it sometimes so hard to do this to the people we love the most?


I know that this post had a heavy spiritual content, I truly do not mean to offend anyone, however this is what has been going on in our home, and is what I am sharing.  I normally do not share much of my faith on my blog, it is not because it isn't central in my life, it is because it is not the purpose of THIS blog.  I do have another one that focuses on faith, if you would like to know more about it email me.

In homemaking news, we have been having some MAJOR dust storms this week.  The joys of living in a desert.  It seriously looks like I haven't cleaned my house in months because everything is covered in dust/sand.  SUPER gross!

I also have some exciting things to announce soon for the blog.

Hope you all have had a wonderful month and that the US folks got their taxes filed yesterday!

Cheers!

Ashley