Are You Eating? In Los Angeles there's a famous canyon where everyone works out and walks their dogs called, Runyon Canyon. I try to make it there as much as possible (we know how that goes!) to go for a "challenging" walk! Not your average walk in the park. The steep hills, the huge mountain rocks to climb, various routes to take and let's not leave out the sun beaming down in the midst of all of this. Again, I will say, not your average walk in the park. Well one day I went with some friends, I hadn't eaten and decided I would be just fine!! And I was, for the first 30 mins. While walking down, I felt fine, but as soon as we started climbing up, I started feeling like I was going to pass out. Light-headed and nauseous... I had to take a seat. Everyone kept walking and before I knew it, I was laid out on the ground. No food and no energy to even think about moving! "Jesus, Take the wheel" I said to myself! Lol When I look back on that incident, the missing component from me not achieving my goal was a lack of food. I was thinking, in our daily lives when we lack spiritual food, how can we make it up these mountains? When circumstances are steep, life mountains are hard to climb, tough decisions are to be made and all of the heat on our shoulders... How can we make it if we lack spiritual food? The answer is, we can't. We need the word of God to help us on this journey or we just won't make it, we will be laid out. We won't have the wisdom, the power or the peace to make it through. We will be living but not LIVING! Without physical food, I ended up getting up and walking back down the path I had just come from while everyone else kept going forward. They knew the difficulty it would be on the canyon and the significant impact that food would be on their journey. Ladies.... I encourage all of us to take time to spiritually feed ourselves. God wants us to live life abundantly and knows that through His word we can! Spiritual food sustains us, gives us energy and the enthusiasm to move forward in this life. It gives us hope when we're hopeless and comforts us when our world seems to be spinning out of control. Lastly, I also encourage you to never go to the canyon on an empty stomach!! (smile)
Love, Dot

Funny Glasses: Sometimes life gets so overwhelming and so frustrating that we begin to question "why?" If only things could be the way we imagined, life would be so much better. We tend to think that if we only knew what God had planned we would be more at ease and we could plan life according to what would happen next.

I was getting a facial and my Esthetician put on these funny glasses. They were magnifying glasses and she said "do you ever look at your skin through a magnifying mirror" I answered "no." She said "great because if you did you would go crazy, some of these things we're just not suppose to see. Only I can see because it's my job to get rid of the bacteria." I thought to myself, WOW! Such is life. When we put our "life" magnifying glasses on we go crazy! We start to pick at things that are out of our league. We start trying to find remedies to fix our life's problems. While all along, God is saying... STOP looking at your life through that magnifying glass, those are my glasses. We were not built to see everything, otherwise we will go crazy! Let's trust that our Creator has Great plans for His creation even when we can't see. Let's trust God with our lives, our problems and frustrations. He has every tool and every remedy. Sit in his chair and relax... He is the Master Esthetician.

Love,
Dot

 

Solitude: “Women need real moments of solitude and self-reflection to balance out how much of ourselves we give away.” –Barbara De Angelis Solitude can be a very significant and life changing moment in our lives. It’s not at all selfish to take time to be by yourself, it’s actually a very mature move to position you to become more selfless. In order to have healthy relationships and be able to give wholeheartedly to others we must have that time alone to be re-fueled. A car can’t move without gas nor can we draw from an empty well. When we don’t take time for ourselves we become entangled in life’s circumstances and exhausted. Things that we may have had control over before now seem to be slipping out of our hands. Areas in our lives that we had a clear perspective on have become blurry because we have neglected our time of silence. Solitude allows us that time by ourselves to do a number of things:

1. It is a time of discovery. It helps us identify things about ourselves that we never knew and in this time of privacy we uncover our uniqueness.

2. It allows us to Trust God more and recognize our dependence on Him.

3. It gives us a clear assessment of our lives.

4. It gives us an opportunity to care for ourselves. These things are hard to accomplish if we are always busy and always speaking. Find time in solitude and see that you have more peace, your joy increase and the chains of your anxiety diminish.

“What a lovely surprise to finally discover how unlonely being alone can be.” –Ellen Burstyn

Love, Dot