Wine & Airy Dresses

November 18, 2013November 18, 2013 / Jaimie / 2 Comments

We can’t always trust our eyes. They lie. This morning I kept glancing at a magazine on my table (pictured above). I could have sworn it said “Wine and airy dresses to indulge your sweet tooth”. I kept thinking it just didn’t quite make sense. It wasn’t until much later when it caught my eye again that I looked closer and realized “dresses” was actually “dessert”.

Life is like that too. My pastor always says, “Lord, stamp eternity on my eyes so I can see things as they really are and not as they appear to be.” We look at our lives through earthen glasses and miss the bigger picture. God is looking from beginning to end with a plan in mind. We need to trust that He’s got it all under control and not let our senses fool us.

I encourage you to trust Him fully today! Have a wonderful Monday everyone!

Random Beauty – Grace

August 17, 2013 / Jaimie / 11 Comments

We’ve had a lot of rain over the past month here in Southwest Florida. The ground is saturated and consequently when more rain comes, we flood. The odd thing is that most of our street is high and dry, but our yard is a swamp. It’s inconvenient in a lot of ways. We can’t mow certain areas so the wild is overtaking the manicured. Bugs are invading the house more than normal.

If you’ve never visited South Florida, I can tell you that it is an education in strange bugs and arachnids. We have some mega spiders and odd-looking creepy crawlers. Most of these don’t bother us a bit, but I have to admit that spiders the size of my hand appearing in the bedroom (as a general rule) do not inspire happy thoughts in me.

I warn my son daily to be on the lookout for snakes and gators when he’s playing in the yard. Living by a canal, we usually look out for these anyway, but with the extra water, comes extra cottonmouths and you never know when and where a snake will pop up as we learned earlier this year (The Snake in the House).

Despite all of this, I’ve been intrigued by the water. It’s random beauty standing out from the otherwise consistent. The fact that it’s just our yard strikes me as well. It’s like God sending a little beauty just for us, washing us with the water, changing the landscape. Sure, problems sometimes come with the beauty. God never promised us a life of roses and relaxation. The greatest character is built through the storms and the chaos. In the midst of these, we learn to trust him and find the wonder. In that, he is glorified and we are changed a little more into his image.

I pray I always find the wonder in the midst of the flood, that I find the beauty in the chaos, that I look for the ways he’s romancing me and reminding me of his love. Nothing he does is haphazard. He paints the skies with us in mind. He plants flowers to amaze us. He smiles at us in the midst of the brokenness, wraps us up in his love and inspires us to be completely his. There is truly nothing better than that.