Making God First

I feel like our life is changing at a break neck speed right now and I haven't updated you all about it. Well, this post will not be about our rapidly changing life, that post will come later. No I promise it really will. This post will be about something else. Something God has been pounding into my head, and heart, a lot lately. Its come up in so many conversations, and in my Bible reading, and sermons. Just oh so many places.

This thing God has been showing me is how important a personal walk with Him really is. A personal relationship with God has to be everything in your life. It has to be the thing that you make the most important. I have to admit that lately I have not been doing a good job at working on my relationship with God. I have not made it a number one priority. So many times I think about working on my relationship with father, my family and others, and I start to neglect my relationship with God. What is wrong with me? Why is it that my relationship with God is one of the first things that I so quickly drop when things start to get busy? I know, I am ashamed to admit it. It is so wrong. But I have promised to always be honest on here.

So back to what God is showing me. I am realizing that he does not want my leftovers. He does not want what I have left over in my time to give Him. I know that in my relationship with my husband I have to make an effort to build our relationship. I can't just give my husband my scraps of time, and expect my relationship with Him to grow. I am realizing (and yes God has taught me this before, but in my somehow human mind I seem to forget this) that God needs my attention. He needs more than I even give my husband. If my other activities are taking away from my relationship with Him, than it should never by my relationship with Him that suffers, it should be that I need to take something out of my life that is distracting me. Working on my relationship with God should be the most important thing in my life.

Something that I have seen in my growing up (I'm at the ripe old age of 20, gasp!) is many of my friends, and aquaintances that I thought would never leave their faith are leaving everything I thought they believed in. Many people that came from good Chrstian families, and who I thought had strong Christian backgrounds are renouncing their faith. Now in many of their lives, it has to do with many different reasons, and I'm not saying that any one reason causes this, but something I am seeing as a big issue is that these people do not have their own personal relationship with God. In so many of these "good" Christian families the parents have a relationship with God, and teach their kids a certain way to live, but the kids never develop their own relationship with God. They rely on their parent's rules, and their parent's relationship with God, and then they grow up, and their parent's relationship with God will not hold them anymore. They flounder. I have definitley felt that way.

Something I have found, as a wife, is that it is easy to rely on my husband's relationship with God. Its easy to just say ok well He has a relationship with God, so I'm fine (ok well maybe not quite that simplified but you get the general picture). I know, that is so wrong. When I try to rely on His relationship, it puts so much pressure on Isaiah, and not only am I not getting what i should from God, but it hurts my relationship with Isaiah, and his relationship with God.

So here I am, saying that I am far from perfect. My relationship with God is far from perfect. But I need to work on not letting my busy life get before my relationship with my Savior. My Savior should be the most important Thing in my life. But ashamedly I say, sometimes He isn't.

I want to start making my Lord a priority. I want to make spending time with Him the most important thing in my life. I want my God to be first.

Need Some Help From My Readers

Lately I've been thinking a lot about homeschooling. As many of you know, I was homeschooled until college. It was an interesting experience, and definitely shaped who I am. We were not the family that you think about as "homeschooling". We interacted with others. We had a good education that prepared us for college. We did not wear khaki jumpers (not saying that those who wear khaki jumpers are bad). I am just saying I went through homeschooling and came out the other side.

Now I am studying to be a teacher myself. It has amazed me how much of a prejudice there is against homeschoolers. I know that it is a very touchy subject for many people. But I feel like I am coming from both sides. I went through homeschooling and yet I'm studying to be a teacher.

I also have a unique perspective because I have been all the way through it. I look back and see things that worked well, and things that didn't work so well for me. I have been thinking about an idea. I wanted to get some feedback from you all on it. What do you all think about having a homeschool blogathon? I was thinking about having some moms that homeschool write, and some ex homeschoolers write and all link up. And maybe have an opportunity to take questions from people. If anyone is interested in doing this with me, or would be interested in what would be said, let me know. I am trying to feel out and see if there is any interest in the blog world.

If anyone that has a blog would be interested in reposting this and helping me feel out interest, I would really appreciate it. Thanks!

Healthy and Beautiful

If you go back to my first blog post this year I said that I wanted to get healthy. So far this year I have done nothing but let myself go. I have had stress after stress and lots of excuses. I have gained weight. Its bad.

I hate the way I look. I know its not good to hate the way you look, but then some would say its not good to be content with yourself with you weigh as much as I do. So I guess no matter who I talk to, I'm not a winner. but I do hate myself. It got to the point that I don't want to go out because I'm thinking about what people are thinking about how much I weigh. I don't want to see any old friends because I wonder what they are thinking about the way I look.

I know that I may sound very self-centered, and that added to all the guilt and frustration I had. I felt that no one could love me because of my weight. It was exacerbated by the fact that people so many people started talking to me about the my weight. I know it was because they cared, but it felt like no one loved me for me.

I guess I felt like no one loved me just for my personality. I felt like if I didn't look the part, I wasn't good enough. This comes from many years of feeling fat, ugly and then hear I go, gaining weight. I just wanted to feel beautiful.

Thankfully I had Isaiah telling em I was beautiful even though I was overweight. I guess I didn't believe him. More than that, I wanted to believe that someone God had made me beautiful. I wanted to think that He loved me and had made me special. I felt like somehow He had made me beautiful and yet somehow I had messed it up and He didn't want to look at me.

I know the way I felt was wrong, but I promised to always be honest on here. So I will be honest. I still struggle with all this. Part of my resolution to get healthy was to see myself as beautiful, and I have to admit that I'm still working on that. I still feel ugly because I am overweight. I still hate the way I look. But I'm starting to accept that for some reason God made me not stick thin. He made it harder for me to lose weight. He didn't make me naturally thin, and that's ok. He made me beautiful to Him.

And I am starting to realize that I am beautiful to Isaiah. I am so thankful for a husband that sees me as beautiful no matter my weight. He tells me he thinks I'm still beautiful. I don't understand why he thinks I'm beautiful, but somehow he does.

So I'm still working through how I feel about myself, but today I started working out. I wanted to workout, and start feeling better. I hate how tired I am. I hate how I look. I don't want to lose weight through crash diets, or purging. I want to get healthy in a way that can be long term.

So I start working out. I start getting to a place that I can feel like I'm healthy and I'm happy with the way I look. I know I need to work out how I feel about the way I look.

So as you can see, I'm a work in progress. I haven't arrived. I am not perfect. I struggle, I gain weight. I'm imperfect. But I'm honest with you. I want to feel beautiful and accept myself.