Christian Christmas Gift Guide for Him
A Christian Christmas Gift Guide to Encourage HimThis gift guide is full of gift ideas designed to ENCOURAGE. Whether it's for your grandpa, dad, brother, uncle, cousin, friend, son, nephew, or WHOEVER - these gifts for HIM are focused on uplifting. I hope you LOVE...
Living Purposefully Playlist
Music is SUCH a powerful tool.
It can uplift or help us really feel our sorrow. It can heal or bring up bitterness. It can empower or weaken.
Ever hear a song and immediately get struck by emotion?
Music is POWERFUL.
The Bible even speaks to the power of music.
So, we’ve compiled a She Lives Purposefully playlist to get you THROUGH. These are songs that me and our team listen to that move us for the better and draw us closer to the Lord. They instill and encourage healthy, intentional, healing, positive, real, purposeful ways of life.
God Uses What Holds Us Back
It’s as though the waves and waters of life were getting higher, without consuming me, and had risen just enough to make it hard to swim.
Just high enough so that I could do not thing but JUST stay above the water. I felt like I was using ALL of my effort to just stay above water rather than swim forward.
One life circumstance after experience after rejection after concern, one thing after another had been pulling me down and the waves were getting higher.
I was sick of that place.
I’d been wanting to desperately move forward in life happily, to grow, and I felt like so many things kept pulling me back.
But somehow, although giving full effort to do what felt like nothing but stay up, looking back, I realized I had been learning how to swim – or live – better.
I’d begun to realize that those things that were pulling me back were the very things God was using to grow me, mold me, teach me, change me, form me, stretch me, use me.
Embracing All God Has For You
God is a promise maker, not a promise breaker.
Promises are so easily broken. Even the most intentional, legally-binding, or emotionally-invested promises get broken.
This is why when I read a promise that God makes to me, I sometimes tend to not accept it fully. I find myself thinking that there has to be ifs, buts and loopholes.
But God is a promise maker, and a promise keeper.
What are some of His promises?
Purpose in Pain
We often think of feeling pain as weak.
We tend to push it deep down, leaving undealt-with emotions and agony.
But over the years I’ve found that there is purpose in pain. God uses pain in countless ways, some of which we may never even see.
I grew up on a farm with a get-tough attitude. Though this helped me have thick skin, it often made pain difficult to deal with, so I pushed it deep down. I felt like a failure if I was hurt and felt any sort of emotional pain. Eventually I learned that there is a strange, beautiful purpose in pain.
Pain is something we all have in common: broken families, difficult relationships, death.
As humans, we have all felt that suffering to some extent or we will.
Though we may see and feel the hard times, we have a difficult time walking through those seasons and seeing purpose through it all.
When painful times come, we often ask the Lord to get us out of the trial, not grow and strengthen us as we walk through it.
How to Make BIG Decisions – The Guide that Will Never Fail You Pt. 2
“Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.” (Psalm 119:105).
When the Bible really doesn’t seem to answer our questions, the verse still applies.
When the decisions we need to make are non-moral, the Bible is still a guide.
Let’s live determined to have God’s wisdom guiding us, His Word being a light to our paths, and let’s watch our path, even in making big decisions, be guided.
But if there’s no verse for questions like where to go to college, what job to take or who to marry, how do we navigate these decisions?
The Life Guide That Will Never Fail You
I’ve found one simple thing to GENUINELY guide me. If you grew up in the church it sounds cliché. But the absolute reality is that the Bible is a guide.
Now before you roll your eyes and click out, hear the why.
Because this truth APPLIES.
It applies to what friends you should have, to who you should and should NOT date, to deciding on if you should go to that party, take that job, etc.
And if you’re mind is going where mine goes, NO. You’re right.
The Bible is not going to tell you to go to XYZ college and there won’t be verse telling you to move to Kentucky. But it will guide you and, in fact, it brings a lot of peace and guidance in even questions such as those.
Here’s why we can trust the Bible to be a life guide – in all areas, and here’s why we SHOULD.