On a scale of 1 to 10, how thirsty are you for God?

How often do you read the Bible? How often do you pray? How often do you worship? Three questions that are all equally as important as the next but I’ll ask you an even more important question: How thirsty are you do to all three of those things on a daily basis?

It’s okay…take your time to think about it, and REALLY think about it!

Can I tell you that amazing things happen when you take time out of your day to focus on all three of those things. Truly amazing things happen. You begin to feel better, you begin to feel lighter, and you begin to see all your circumstances in a whole new light. Even the toughest of things, no longer seem so tough. That’s the power of the ‘Powerful 15’. 15 minutes, that’s all it takes.

5 minutes to read the Word of God.

5 minutes to Worship the name of Jesus.

5 minutes to Pray.

In total just 15 minutes out of your day but how willing and how thirsty are you to make time for Jesus?

I’ll be the first to admit that sometimes I would rather be doing something else with those 15 minutes. At times I would rather just be playing a video game, watching tv, or maybe reading a novel. At other times I just get so distracted by whatever is happening around me that I lose track of time and before I know it, it’s the end of the day and time to go to bed. Then a day becomes two days, and two days becomes a whole week where I didn’t make time for that Powerful 15. How easy it is to get into the habit of forgetting but how hard it is to get into the habit of making time. I typically try to read a chapter a day from the Bible everyday. I do pray every morning and every night. But I can say that I do struggle sometimes with worshipping. It wasn’t until last night that I finally understood what it was like to truly worship. Before going to bed, I was feeling anxious and down about myself. So I decided to do what any other normal person does nowadays and went on Instagram. Luckily for me, my church had posted something on their story about worship. The person talking said how wonderful things happen when we worship. That it isn’t just about singing along with a song absent minded but to experience it. I had no idea what he was talking about but I tried to do it anyways. I put a song on that I’m use to hearing at church, I closed my eyes, lifted my hands, and pictured the same atmosphere I feel at church while worshiping. I sang word by word, and truly had myself understand each and every single one of them. I can tell you that after the song was done, I felt completely different. I felt lighter and those feelings of sadness and anxiety were gone. Now I can’t wait to repeat the process again later tonight.

Sometimes that’s what it takes. It takes a change in ourselves to get thirsty. And yes, I know, a lot of people say that we should activity seek Jesus without expecting something amazing to happen. That we shouldn’t need these “miracles” to happen, in order to feel that hunger for Him because we should naturally feel it already. While I agree with that statement, I also agree that we are creatures that are driven by incentives. It’s okay if you needed to feel better in order to begin to experience that hunger. It’s okay if you didn’t feel that hunger before that breakthrough. Maybe a certain circumstance will drive you to ask God for a hunger, a desire, and some discipline to have regular time with Him. And that my friends, is the starting point. Make time for Him, tell Him how you’re feeling, and listen to what He has to say to you. The more time you spend with Him, the more you love Him every day.

“Be persistent and devoted to prayer, being alert and focused in your prayer life with an attitude of thanksgiving”.
Colossians 4:2

Here is the song I listen to last night and I highly recommend it if you haven’t already heard it 🙂

Good Grace (live) by Hillsong United

– Brigette

Where do you get your self-worth from?

I struggle with feeling like I’m not good enough. Plain and simple like that; straight to the point. On a normal everyday bases, I struggle with this when I get on instagram, or while walking down the street. I might see someone that is doing better than me, someone with better hair, or someone with a prettier smile. We come across people that just seem to be doing 10 times better than us and ultimately we may believe they matter more. We all struggle with this and even if you say you don’t, at some point in your life, you have compared yourself to someone else. We tend to view our personal value as the things we have done, the things we don’t have, and the things others say about us. All those things can led to feelings of shame, guilt, and regret. Those are three factors that can easily destroy your minds perception of yourself. If we do this day to day with other people like us, then imagine what happens when we think of God and then think of ourselves. God is holy and He is perfect in every way. We could absolutely never measure up to Him. We aren’t suppose too and I believe here is where the problem lies when people say “Me go to church? Oh no girlfriend, I would burst into flames the moment I step through the door. Do you know all the things I’ve done? God would never allow me into church!” Those are real words, spoken by a real person that I once invited to go to church with me. Sad that they had this perception of themselves and God. If they only knew how loving and forgiving our Father really is.

What determines our personal value?

Imagine living your life, feeling insignificant because you are 25 and have yet to start your career. Or imagine feeling insignificant because you are 30 and have yet to get married and start a family. Oh boy! Imagine the stuff your friends and family are going to say about you…Lordy, Lord. Performance and self-esteem. That is what both of those things weight heavily on. But can I tell you that YOUR personal value doesn’t come from the things you’ve accomplished or the things you have yet to accomplish. It actually comes from a place much deeper than that; it comes from within. It comes from understanding who you belong to. We base our self worth on the things we can see, instead of on the love from the One we can’t see. I can’t count the number of times I’ve compared myself to a instagram model, asking myself why I didn’t look like her. I truly believed that if I looked like those girls, my worth would go up. It’s sad. I spent years with this kind of mentality and it only made me more miserable. I still felt that I needed to do more to make myself matter. What was the next trend I had to follow, or when did I need to post my next selfie to get a bunch of likes…that would determine if my value was high right? Want to know when I truly discovered my personal value? It happened when I picked up a book called the Bible. When I decided to follow this ‘Jesus’ fellow that everyone was raving about. So, remember when I said that our true value comes from within?

“God is within her, she will not fall”
Psalm 46:5

This applies to you to boys. But my point here is, our true value, the one that should mean the most to us, is living inside of us. It is literally stated in the Bible and if that verse isn’t convincing enough then lets try this one:

“You are utterly beautiful, my dearest; there’s not a single flaw in you”
Song of Songs 4:7

Again, that applies to you as well boys. It is stated in the Bible, that we will not fall because He is with us. And while we might see many flaws, He sees none. So forget comparing yourself to that Instagram model, or that person you saw walking down the street. Your value doesn’t come from trying to look or be like them, it comes from someone that sees perfection despite every single one of your flaws. If you matter in His eyes, then shouldn’t that be enough?

A sparkling diamond vs. A black backdrop

Imagine this comparison: a sparkling diamond, against a black backdrop. That diamond sure is going to shine huh? That is kinda what happens when we sinners come face-to-face with God’s ultimate purity. God’s holiness just seems so defined compared to everything we lack. I believe that is what happened with the person I invited to church. They compared their sinful ways to God’s ultimate goodness. They saw themselves as the black backdrop and God as the sparkling diamond. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m sure everyone of us has thought that way as well because at the end of the day we are all sinners. We have all done things that just don’t add up to Godly traits. We have done things that will have us want to walk away from Him because our ways and His ways just don’t go together. Despite how we might view ourselves compared to God, here is one of his many beautiful attributes:

“God caused the one who didn’t know sin to be sin for our sake so that through him we could become the righteousness of God”
2 Corinthians 5:21

He knew that we would always be sinners. We will never be pure enough, honest enough, or sinless enough. No amount of time spent at church will ever take that away. (Sorry to break it to you) Unfortunately, it is in our nature to sin. So thinking that all these ‘bad’ things you do now or have done, are a reason to not be allowed to get close to Him…….is completely wrong. That is why he sent Jesus. You are loved and you are forgiven and that is all you need to know. That is absolutely all you need to realize how much you truly matter. So again I ask, where do you get your self-worth from? I get mine from this ‘Jesus’ fellow, He is pretty awesome.

-Brigette

Cursing? Oh, that ol’ thing…

How quick are we to curse? Pretty quickly if you ask me. It’s as natural to us as breathing. How quick are we to not notice the words that come out of our mouths? We speak before we think, that’s a given. In today’s society, it has become the norm to speak fouly, to say profanities, and speak negatively. I’m guilty of this myself. I decided to write about this because it came to my attention of how insignificant we might view this. I mean, it’s something so small compared to all the other countless ways we could be doing wrong. But God takes into account all the BIG and SMALL things we do throughout our lives. At work, I notice how easily it is for kids to curse at each other. I hear the young girls referring to each other as “bi*****”. It’s normal for them to say “Hey bi***, how was your weekend?”. When did this ever become the norm? The worst part is, that if you don’t play along to words like that, you’re considered to be boring and a goodie-to-shoes. How sad that the norm to God is the un-norm to society. I wonder if we realize that through our words, we will be judged. I wonder if we realize that through our words, we are creating or destroying our harvest. I say ‘we’ because I’m including myself. As I write here, I am also learning. I am not preaching as if I know everything but instead just simply sharing what was placed in my path. Last night as I read Matthew 12, I came across these verses

“I tell you that people will have to answer on judgement day for every useless word they speak. By your words you will be either judged innocent or condemned as guilty”

Matthew 12:36-37

While I am referring more to cursing, I still believe that spreading rumors or negatively speaking about someone or ourselves could be considered “useless words”. We reap what we sow. The more we curse, the more we create a foul character. The more we speak negatively about others or ourselves, the more we destroy our good nature. I realize how simple of a subject this is and that there are more important things out there to focus on but something as simple as this has the power to create or destroy. It has the power to create our character or destroy our character. Will we have dignity in how we talk? Will we have dignity in how we refer to each other and acknowledge each other? Our words are a gateway to our characters. I know these behaviors have become normal to us so stopping them all together almost seems impossible. At some point throughout the day, our old habits will come out without our approval. We are quick to act and quick to speak. But I believe that if we become aware of this subject, then we will be able to stop ourselves one action and one word at a time.

“Keep your conduct among the Gentiles honorable, so that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may see your good deeds and glorify God in the day of visitation”

1 Peter 2:12

Have a lovely day everyone, may you honor the one that loves you with your words!

-Brigette

It’s hard being a newbie Christian… part two!

I realized how popular of a topic “being a newbie Christian” is. I appreciate all the positive feedback everyone gave me on my first post about it. With that being said, I felt that I should add a part two to this topic. So here we are on “It’s hard being a newbie Christian part 2”.

You messed up? No way….me too!!!

Something that came to mind the past couple of days is how easy it is for us to fall off the deep end. It’s like we took 1 step forward in the right direction and then a 100 steps back in the wrong direction. No matter what it may be that tempts you to go back into your old ways, you know as well as I do, how discouraging it could be to get back up and continue down the right path. Personally I feel like a hypocrite, trying so hard to be good and act gracefully but here I am getting angry because the person driving in front of me is going too slow and I’m going to be late to work. I pray and sing songs about being patient but when the time comes to act on what I practice, I’m tempted to do the total opposite. Just the other day I experienced anger and lack of patiences, two things that I have been praying for God to help me overcome. Needless to say that I didn’t act in a Godly manner and instead of asking Him for forgiveness, I laid in bed that night and said “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I even bother trying so hard when in the end, I always mess up. I’m ashamed and I know the right thing to do is to get up from this situation and to continue praying to you but I just don’t want too. I’m a hypocrite. I messed up. Let me just continue down this path because that’s all I’m good at”. Overly dramatic and harsh right? Yeah…I know. See here is the thing, instead of trying to overcome those thoughts, emotions, and overall ungraceful manner, I believed that in that moment I didn’t have what it took to continue my relationship with Jesus that I had been working so hard for. I felt that it was just easier to give in to temptation and to continue to behave with anger and lack of patiences. Why would I bother trying anyways? Clearly all my hard work was for nothing because I thought I kept regressing. I say ‘I thought’ because I’m almost certain that was not what God thought. He wants me to continue working as hard as I have for our relationship. For all I know, He is proud of my small steps of victory but I doubted myself. How often do we lose control of situations? Our own emotions? We lack self-control because we are human. And I want to point out…don’t be fooled by all those people that look like they have self-control over temptation in their lives. Chances are it took them a lot of trial and error to learn to have self-control in certain aspects of theirs lives and I’m almost certain there is still something they haven’t learned to overcome. Speaking from the perspective of a 24 year old that is just beginning to live life, I know that while I might have self-control over saying ‘no’ to drugs, I lack the self-control to not be so quick to get angry. Everyday we are tempted in some way, and at times we might even give in to that temptation. Like I said before, we are human. But when that does happen, it is important to repent, get back up on your feet with you’re head held up high and continue to follow the one that believes in you despite all you’re defects.

“but if anyone suffers as a Christian, he is not to be ashamed, but is to glorify God in this name”
1 Peter 4:16

We messed up….so what now?

There isn’t a single human being that can say that they have never fallen into temptation. You, me, the person next to us, are going to come across sin. Does that make it okay to sin? Heck no! We are to overcome sin one step at a time. If you push yourself to run before you can walk, you are going to fall. It is okay, to do the right thing, one day at a time. Next time you are driving and someone cuts you off, try breathing in and saying “I will have self-control to remain calm. Maybe that person is having a bad day and they need Jesus. So let me show them a bit of Jesus’s light through my patiences”. I know, easier said than done. But remember…..ONE step at a time. All those little steps will begin to add up over the days, months, years, etc. Just because you messed up, doesn’t mean that God now hates you. He loves you and always will. If He seeks those that want nothing to do with Him, then imagine how He will continue to seek you. YOU that does want something to do with Him. No mess up will ever be too big compared to the massive amount of love and forgiveness He has for you through Jesus. Do not throw away a life-long relationship over mistakes that you believe are too shameful to ever allow Him to love you. You messed up? Well keep on trying! Tomorrow will be a brand new day full of His mercy. A brand new opportunity to continue to grow with Him. Do not give up.

“But as for you, be strong and do not give up, for your work will be rewarded.”
2 Chronicles 15:7

Remember this next time you think you messed up badly…

Little by little, step by step, one day at a time. For all of us that are starting off or believe that we don’t have what it takes, just relax. Just because you began your walk with Jesus, or maybe have very little time walking with Him, it doesn’t mean you can’t overcome your temptations. This is how it all begins. Failure. Trial and error.

“No temptation has overtaken you except what is common to mankind. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can endure it”
1 Corinthians 10:13

Remain faithful to Him. Set small goals daily that you can achieve against temptation. And no matter where you stand in your relationship with Jesus, newbie or not, remember He loves and forgives you.

-Brigette

By Faith, she’s got Grace!

Friday. The day everyone looks forward after a long work week. It’s the end of the stress and the beginning of the weekend. We all have different reasons to be stressed out at work but we must remember that through enough faith, we will have the grace to overcome anything thrown our way. I work with kids and to be more specific, I work with middle school students. The age group from 11 years old to 14 years old. If there is anyone else that works with this age group or is parents to one, then you know it ain’t easy. Attitudes are flying around left and right, there is still immaturity to deal with, and emotions are from one end of the spectrum to the other. It can be extremely overwhelming to anyone. I’ve had to keep an open mind to be able to understand each and every single one of my 130 kids. Every day I am responsible for each of those kids and on average my stress levels are through the roof. I leave work and I feel like I want to take a vacation for the next year or two. It’s rough, and while I don’t have it all down packed, I am learning to get through my days as gracefully as possible. I am trusting that my faith is going to give me grace.

Oh the stressssss! It’s agonizing…..

Stress, our number one killer. It can take on many different forms in our lives. From our work, to our families, friends, kids, our partners, bad circumstances, you name it. There is never a day where stress doesn’t appear in our lives. Even on those days “off”, you are probably still thinking of the million of things you must get back too after your vacation. It is always there buzzing around like a mosquito waiting to strike. Once it does strike, we are left with an unbearable itch and we can never truly ignore it. We scratch at it, try to put some anti-itch cream on it, but the truth is that the better option is to just not touch it. It takes some very strong will power to not scratch a mosquito bite. How can you ignore it right? It makes you feel extremely uncomfortable and in the end we get so overwhelmed with that bite. Right now you’re probably asking yourself, “what is this girl talking about? How does stress and a mosquito bite even correlate to each other?”. Okay, so just like mosquito bites, our stress does have ointment and that ointment is Jesus. When we scratch our bites, we irritate them and potentially make ourselves bleed which leads to a scar in the future. You’ve probably heard your mommas say over and over again “don’t touch it!” and you tell your mom, “mom it’s terrible. I have too. I need it to stop!”. And so, you end up making it worse. Like I said earlier, it takes will power. It takes will power to allow Jesus to handle our stress. Why can’t we simply have the willpower to pray to Him and tell Him that He is in control of the situation? It makes us uncomfortable that we can’t find a solution right away and in having that mindset we make it worse.

”Come to me, all you who are struggling hard and carrying heavy loads, and I will give you rest. Put on my yoke, and learn from me. I’m gentle and humble. And you will find rest for yourselves. My yoke is easy to bear, and my burden is light”
Matthew 11:28-30

He tells us to go to him with our worries, with what is overwhelming us and that He will take care of them. We are always going to have stress throughout our lives, just as we are always going to get bites from mosquitoes. It’s inevitable. Instead of looking for a way for stress to stop, we need to look for a better way on how we view it and handle it.

A humble attitude? Where can I find one?

I love sharing my personal experience that have guided me to seek out Jesus. I believe it’s important to write/talk about them with others because I’m not a robot just reciting something I learned from a textbook. So here is what happened to me. Yesterday…I snapped…and I am not happy about it in the slightest. I was hungry, tired, annoyed, etc. I lost my patients over something that I should’ve been able to handle more humbly. I was on the phone with my boyfriend and the signal was terrible, instead of understanding and being patient, I got annoyed that he wasn’t listening to me and gave him attitude. I believed he wasn’t listening but it was the signals fault, not his. I felt terrible about it later but in the moment I just felt overwhelmed beyond means. I hadn’t told him that I had had a stressful day and was starving. Poor him right? Not even an hour after that happened, my mom called me and asked about dinner arrangements and I just didn’t want anything to do with it. I wanted to be alone and just handle my attitude by cooling off. So instead of talking to her, I dismissed the conversation by being dry. My poor mom right? Both victims of my stress. Both victims of me thinking I could handle it on my own. I knew what was wrong but I couldn’t find a way to get over this overwhelming feeling I was having. (Here is the correlation of the mosquito bites. It just wasn’t going away) Lately whenever I’ve been faced with a difficult situation in my life, I have turned to devotionals. I mentioned in my previous post that I personally feel like a newbie Christian, so I can’t exactly pull out verses from my head for every predicament I find myself in. Devotionals are amazing in my opinion. There is literally one for any situation in life. Every feeling, every emotion, can be covered if we look for one.

Stress can be a good thing? What…..

Yes, stress can actually be a good thing. Our brains see stress as a threat that can be damaging to us. With this view point we can keep ourselves from danger, motivate ourselves to make better decisions, and help us to make necessary changes for our own good. Stressed because you aren’t getting enough sleep? Minimize the amount of things you do before going to bed. I have a long list of things I read before going to bed and I don’t allow myself to go to bed before reading my devotionals or reading the Bible. And while all those things are important and great, God does want us to rest. He doesn’t want us to be overwhelmed, worried, or anxious. Try viewing stress as a danger indicator telling us to make healthier decision. Upon reading my devotional and asking God to help me, here are three things I gathered:

1). Don’t let stress run your life

Allow it to guide you instead. Make better decisions for your health. Both mental health or physical health. Sleep more, take out toxic people from your life, find a healthier way to go about your circumstance. Don’t let it simply cloud your judgement. God can clarify your stress if you ask him.

2). Release Control

Just like a mosquito bite, leave it alone. Don’t overthink it, don’t get overwhelmed. Just breathe and let God take ahold of your stress. I promise you won’t regret it!

3). Ask for wisdom

It’s important to always see every scenario in a positive manner. How can stress teach you something? Maybe it’s how to handle a situation better. Or maybe it’s to learn to trust God more. At the end of the day, stop trying to handle everything on your own. Just as I tried to do yesterday and epically failed at it. Take hold of the one that wants to take hold of your burdens.

”But anyone who needs wisdom should ask God, whose very nature is to give to everyone without a second thought, without keeping score. Wisdom will certainly be given to those who ask”
James 1:5

By faith, I will have grace!

-Brigette

Why bother?

Recently I’ve been very into self-help books. Whether they are religious or not, I love them. They serve as a constant reminder that each one of us is great in our own way. They are full of all these awesome pointers that should help us out if we know how to apply them to our lives. The main objective of these books are to remind their readers that they can overcome and accomplish anything. Positive thoughts = a positive life. Can I be the first to admit that I have a hard time following their positivity. It sounds great and all, until you actually try to apply their words to your life. Even when it comes to reading devotionals or reading the Bible, the messages state that God loves us and we can do anything through him if we have faith in him. Often times we read all these encouraging words that have the power to change our lives but nothing happens. We read and re-read them, but we struggle to understand how they fit into our lives.

Lack of confidence?

It came to my attention that a lot of us never end up doing what we have envisioned for our lives. We stray away from the things we would “love” to do. Why do we do it? Why don’t we ever go for the things that would make us happy? For many of us, we might believe it to be a waste of time. For others that might want to pick up a hobby or apply for their dream career, we might believe that there are better candidates than us or that we might simply suck at it. Learning to play an instrument? “I’ll never learn how to do that!” Learning to paint? “Why would I? There are people out there much better than me. I’ll just buy theirs.” Begin to write your own blog that you’ve been dreaming of doing for a while? “Who is going to read my content? There are like a million other blogging sites that are more popular than mine ever would be”. Start a business of your own where you are your own boss? “No…there are already plenty of businesses like that, mine just won’t be able to compete”. Why do we keep doing this to ourselves?!

So here is my truth:

For as long as I can remember, I have been wanting to write a blog. Never did I think I would do it but here I am. Did I think I would be any good at it? Heck no. Did I think anyone would take the time to read through my post? Not really. All those negative thoughts just held me back from doing something I really wanted to do. Why did I allow myself to think that way? I mean, Thank God that He took that fear and negativity out of my head. I had finally done it but then the other night it was like I had forgotten to be positive and trust God. I asked my boyfriend, “Why am I even doing this? I don’t think anyone is even reading my blog. There are so many other people doing the same thing. I am probably just wasting my time”. He told me the same thing the self-help books had been saying “Do it because you want to do it. You never know who you might make a difference too”. This conversation got me thinking of two very important things:

-Why was I really doing this and with what expectations?

-What made me stand out from everyone else?

And here is what I concluded: I wanted to do it so I could publish God related messages that I believe could be relevant to at least one person out there. I am not quite sure what would make me stand out but there has to be something right? (my boyfriend said that he could read the “Miami” in my post, so I guess that counts as standing out).

Andddd here is the self-help talk.

Why do we choose to do anything that we love? Simple. To make ourselves HAPPY. We put a downer on our own happiness. Who cares if it makes those around you uncomfortable? Or if they might disagree? At the end of the day, you do what you need to do for yourself. I decided to do this because I wanted to get my words out there while trying to honor God as best as I could. So if 1 person reads this or if 50 people read this…I ‘ll be happy regardless. The other night I came across a verse in the book of Matthew where Jesus was telling the crowds to not publicly do things for the acceptance of others but to instead do things to honor him and shed light of his kingdom. At the end of the day, I would like to be a worker that is working on His harvest and doing what makes ME happy at the same time. I encourage everyone to do the same. Go skydive, go take those salsa classes you’ve been wanting to take, go get in shape, or go and take church and reading the bible serious. When we do what we love, we radiate goodness and positivity. No need to be a debby-downer because you believe it’s to far out of your reach. And yes, there will be other people doing EXACTLY what you are doing but guess what? Each and every single one of us has our own set of talents and special gifts. We have our own perception on how we see things and how we do things. So while you may think you are copying the person next to you, your perception will always be different from theirs. No one two people are alike. So good news! Go ahead and do what you have seen others do without thinking you have to compete with them. You will add your own twist to it and furthermore expanding what is already out there.

“ All that matters is what’s true for you, and if you can stay connected to that without straying, you will be a mighty superhero”.
Jen Sincero

-Brigette