Look Who's Back

Today is Sunday, August 22, 2010.  Today I weighed in at a whopping 323.4.  Yep.  Read it and weep.  Are you weeping? Okay.  Now SNAP OUT OF IT!  This is the morning and this is the time of day when JOY arrives and, well, that silly weeping doesn't last always so SNAP OUT OF IT!

Okay.  Now that we've settled that here's to a new week, a new journey, and a new committment in myself.  I've already been to church.  I've already drank my breakfast and lunch and I've already wrote a lengthly blog about how I'm choosing to speak LIFE and TRUTH and BLESSINGS instead of the status quo.

So, since what I previously wrote for another blogging source is applicable here, I shall just copy and paste today.  So enjoy!

This blog is being resurected and tomorrow I will expand on all the nitty-gritty details but today, today is about accepting my blessings and proclaming healing and good health in the name of the Father.  I hope you read and comment.  But most of all, I hope you find yourself using your words!

******************************************
We went back to church today after a 3 week absence. It was like going home. Amazing. I had kept the pastors updated on my recent diagnosis and medication changes and they have kept us in their prayers.


The sermon today was based on the Pastor's recent trip to the Holocaust Memorial in DC. It was based in Deut. 30: 11-20. I wanted to put fingers to keyboard to share with you how God moved me today. I would rely heavily on my notes; however, I set them with my Bible on my coffee table and forgot to bring them upstairs with me so I'll have to go on memory.

Basally God gave us His Commandment and we can choose it and have life or we can deny it and "surely perish." Pastor Leo asked three people to stand up for him. One lady stood and then no one else stood so I stood and then one gentleman stood. We went up to the front and Pastor Leo had three $1 bills crinkled up in his hand. In the left hand was the blessing and the right hand was nothing. Which would we choose. We all chose the blessing. We each got a crinkled up dollar and returned to our seats.

Pastor Leo went on to talk about how if we chose to live and follow the Lord's commandment we will multiply. Things in our lives, the good things, the blessings will begin to multiply. I drifted off from what he was saying for a few minutes and I began to think. Really think. I have been so greatly blessed. The ways in which the Lord has walked with me my entire life, even when I wasn't walking with him, has been nothing short of amazing.

I walked to the front with the other two who stood when asked in great pain. Today is not a good day at all for me physically. In fact it is probably one of the worst I've had in awhile but I walked to the front anyway. I was barefooted as shoes are painful today but who cares, right? I stood and chose to receive blessings in my life over emptiness.

I walked back to my seat and laid the crumped up dollar on the seat beside me and took some notes. But I kept thinking about that dollar. It was folded in an accordion style, what you would expect from a dollar that had been crumbled in someone's had and it looked used, worn, tattered, and considering the vast number of places and hands that dollar has seen, it had at some point lost its crispness. It's value was still the same. Regardless of its crumbled nature, it could still be taken to McDonald's to buy a cup of coffee just as well as a brand new bill could. But this bill has a story. Its been places. It, no doubt, originated at the Federal Reserve in DC, but where across this country or this world has it traveled? Whose hands have touched it?

Did Pastor Leo get this bill as change in DC? Could it have been a dollar that President Obama had used? Could it have been held in the hands of a child, clutching it with great pride just before buying a candy bar? Had it been put in the bosom of a "dancer" who used it to buy cigarettes? Had it been the last dollar that a single mother had to her name as she bought milk for her baby?

This dollar has a story and the possibilities of that story are endless. The story can be one of whimsy or heartbreak. It could tell us the sinful and the prayerful journeys it's taken. But what matters now is the next journey.

You see, when I received that dollar and I began to mediate on it and on the message from which it was given, I began to see the future story of it. I gently smoothed it out and placed it in the back of my Bible. I began to picture it framed over the crib of our future child. It was a seed today. A seed sewn to show us that if you chose God's blessings and favor then God will multiply them. If you honor your God with all of your heart then He will honor you. If you accept your God, you will be accepted. If you give your life to God, your life will endure forever.

I have a long journey in my life right now. Right now it seems so big and so daunting. Sometimes it seems downright impossible. But today I was asked before my brothers and sisters in Christ and before my Father to make a choice: Do I want to be blessed or do I want to be empty?

I've walked shrouded in self pity for so long that it sickens me. I've walked in empty. I've been in a room filled to its capacity and have it still feel empty. I have given of my heart to those in need and felt empty. I have had more hope than I could have dreamed only to still feel empty.

Deuteronomy 30: 11-14says: " 11 Now what I am commanding you today is not too difficult for you or beyond your reach 12 It is not up in heaven, 13 Nor is it beyond the sea. 14 No, the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart so you may obey it. "

This whole time the words to make the emptiness go away and the healing to begin have been in my mouth. The words to my healing, my blessings, and my eternal life have been mixed in my mouth with all the gossip, profanity, lies, and words of compliant. I've just spoken the other so much that they had begun to taste like fine wine and chocolate to me and so in order to taste those I would continue to speak them. The words for my happiness, blessings and healing were in there too but they just didn't roll off my tongue as easily. We all know that with Satan roaming the Earth, he makes it easier to speak of doubt and evil than joy and blessings. By his hands we become so comfortable with self defeating prophecy that we ignore the prophecy of our Lord, the prophecy that he whom shall ever believeth in Him shall not perish but live life eternally. We don't feel as comfortable, sometimes, with the prophecy that the words to our deliverance and our healing are already in our own mouths just waiting to be spoken.

My mother has always said that words have power. What we speak out into the universe will come to pass so we can either speak truth and light and love or we can speak darkness, lies, and defeat. But whatever we speak, we shall expect to receive.

Today, I'm speaking truth and healing. Today I'm speaking life and eternity. Today, and everyday, I am confessing the Lord as my Savior, my Healer, my Rock and my Provider. I'm speaking the names of our children and that their homes, their rooms, and their parents await them. Today I am speaking remission and healing. Today I am speaking prosperity.

Deut 30: 15 See, I set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction.16 For I command you today to love the LORD your God, to walk in his ways, and to keep his commands, decrees and laws; then you will live and increase, and the LORD your God will bless you in the land you are entering to possess.

17 But if your heart turns away and you are not obedient, and if you are drawn away to bow down to other gods and worship them, 18 I declare to you this day that you will certainly be destroyed. You will not live long in the land you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess.

19 This day I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live 20 and that you may love the LORD your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him. For the LORD is your life, and he will give you many years in the land he swore to give to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

I will, at some point this week, remove that dollar from my Bible and I will pray over it. I will pray over it daily speaking truth and life and blessings over it. I will believe that dollar to be the seed that God sewed in my heart to be a mother to the motherless.

Only God has the power to determine the value of that greenish piece of cotton fiber paper especially made for us to use as currency. You know the commercial: "the touch, the feel of cotton, the fabric of our lives." Well, our government may tell us that piece of paper made of cotton is only valued at one dollar, four quarters, ten dimes, 20 nickels, or 100 pennies, but our Lord tells us that paper is worth more than we could possibly imagine.

By my government's standards, it will take roughly twenty thousand more of those dollars to bring our child home, but by my Lord's standards, that single bill is more than enough. It is within my mouth to proclaim and within my rights as a child of God to accept it and I do.

So, what blessings do you believe God for? You also have the words in your mouth to confess Jesus the Lord of your life. You have the the choice of life in your reach. You can speak it, claim it, praise it, and magnify it. Or you can deny it. But by denying what God has put into your mouth, you are denying Him and if you deny Him the Word is clear: you surely will perish.

So, what say you?