Who you are.

My pastor read this out loud towards the end of the sermon yesterday and while the words are awesome to read, they were even more powerful read aloud. These words really resonated with me and God knew I needed to hear them in that moment. It's in a blog from another pastor in TN.

It's entitled You Are Not:
You are not your past
You are not your failures
You are not your parents
You are not your sister
You are not your regrets
You are not your sin
You are not your weight
You are not your divorce
You are not your unemployment
You are not the choices someone else made for you
You are not your brokenness
You are not your bitterness
You are not your abuse
You are not your loneliness
You are not your marital status
You are not your tax bracket
You are not your crisis
This is who YOU are:
You are loved
You are forgiven
You are redeemed
You are destined
You are set apart
You are a new creation
You are valued
You are gifted
You are chosen
You are prized
You are reconciled
You are called
You are noticed
You are pursued
You are a child of The King
You are a co-heir with Christ
You are a royal priesthood
You are adored, cherished and treasured by the God of this universe.
When you choose to stop living out who you are not and you start to live in who you are…
It changes everything.

This was way too good not to share.
Here is the original link: http://refineus.org/2010/09/you-are-not/

The Good Stuff

This week's positives are as follows:
-Going to Wednesday night church
-Ginger cookies made by a friend
-Chick-fil-a
-Shopping with friends
-New Jeans
-Payday!!
-Doing the macarena in a gym full of 2nd graders
-Parents of students that don't freak when feeding tubes are...um relocated...
-Getting my hair colored
-Beautiful weather
-New curtains
-New mercies every morning

~And every breath we drew was hallelujah~

The search for positive-ness

Let's face it, sometimes it just seems impossible to find something positive about certain situations. You're late for work, you're having a bad hair day, you can't pay the bills, the list goes on and on. Sometimes when we focus too much on the negative, and not the positive parts of our days, we ignore what God is doing in our lives and the good stuff He is doing in spite of the "bad" stuff.

This word came to be my theme for the year, in which I am determined to pick out the positive out of every day. I think I will blog weekly so as to give a list of all the good stuff that's happened.

Soo. This past week here were the positives:
-My students.
-Getting all my paperwork turned in at my new job.
-Good friends who fix my cars and feed me dinner.
-Relaxing on the couch.
-Finishing the Lost series.
-Coming up with a theme for the year.
-Worshiping God with an awesome church family.
-Book group.
-Sunrises and sunsets to and from work.

I'm learning there's too much good in life to focus on the bad stuff.