What to Expect when Living in a Shop in the Winter

My family and I are building a house and we are all very excited about it! We expected to be moved into our lovely new abode by Thanksgiving. Christmas at least! But (sigh) God had other plans. For reasons I will not bore you with, after six months the house has its walls and windows . . . that's all. During that entire time, we have been living in a well drilling shop in trailers. And it's winter. In Eastern Oregon. (Just to let you know, winters here are crazy. One week there's no snow and its a nice warm forty degrees and the next, there's black ice everywhere as it snows all day long and the nights are in the teens or single digits.)
Now, if you ever want to build a house during the winter and live in a shop, here are some things to expect:

• Driers let off hot air. In a shop, the air kicks up the dirt and smokes up the place. Solution: Put a tube from the hot air opening, under the shop door, and to the outside. Problem solved!
• One office bathroom means a lot of traffic. Become comfortable with each other. If the toilet area is not private, that's an easy fix! Set up a five foot tall, one inch wide cardboard box and just put it between the toilet user and the others in the bathroom.
• Have a nice, big coat to take with you everywhere. In a shop to big to heat, it's chilly between trailers, bathroom, and everywhere in between. Just slip on a coat wherever you go and you'll be just dandy!
• Expect water to taste like sulfur.
• Did you know trailers slowly move on their own? They do so don't put one close to a wall because, after a while, the once wide walkways becomes a narrow tunnel.
• Pipes freeze in the winter, so don't expect to use the trailer's sinks or toilet. You could, however, if a large pot is set under the trailer where items can drain. Be sure to empty it on a regular basis.
• Because the pipes are frozen, dishes become a problem. No worries! Simply buy a dishwasher on wheels to set up in the shop. Load up all the dishes from the trailer and take outside to the shop's sink. After a complete rinsing in thirty degree weather, load up the dishwasher. Then, wheel the dishwasher up to the sink, plug it into the wall, and hook the dishwasher's water system into the sink. Those dishes will be set!
• Expect the cold weather to freeze the ground and prevent any progress to be done on the house your building. 
• Your belongings will be lost in a chaotic maze of boxes, furniture, and random stuff. If you don't know where something small is, like a picture, a CD, or shoes, forget about it. Its in its box, somewhere amid all the other identical boxes. Don't stress though. You'll just find everything again when you move into the house . . . hopefully.
• Expect your neighbor's chickens to get into the shop. Oh, and if they have a donkey expect a lot of loud, sporadic heeeehawwwws!
• Get creative. If there's room on the pantry shelves, give the space a double purpose; half the shelves for food and the other half for shoes.
• Expect to view heat as gold, a stove as an oasis, a speaceheater as a lost treasure, and a pare of nice wool socks something never to negotiate.
• Above all, expect difficulty. My family is strong, yet, honestly, this is hard. Most days we're alright and others we'd love to burn the shop down. Expect to be mad at everything, but nothing in particular. Expect sadness and envy of people living in a house. But expect God's hand to come and comfort. Expect your character to grow in strength and trust in God. Expect to appreciate the small things in life. Expect to be humbled. Expect to let go and fall into God's strong arms. He is faithful and there's security in that. 
• Oh, yeah, one last thing. Expect to never want to go camping ever again!

Do you have a trailer/camping experience to share?    

Heart Checks

I needed a heart check. I hate those. They're always so uncomfortable and demanding and painful.
Have you ever had a heart check? It's when God puts you into a situation, that's horrible and awful, until your heart changes. They such. Big time. I recently had a heart check and, honestly, saw it a mile away but tried my very best to avoid it. God's good at being patient though.
My awful situation was ________. You can fill in whatever you want. Anyways, I kept praying for God to change what was going on around me; make them change, take me away from here, just change it all!
What's that God? Me? Why me? Why should I change, God? I go to church, I read the Bible, I'm a good person. Don't I deserve a little help here?
I just shook my head and knew He was just waiting. Waiting for me to let go and for Him to mold my heart how He saw fit. Well, I didn't want any of that. I just smiled, a fake smile, and said, "I knew something like that was coming." And that was the end of that conversation.
But there comes a time when pride and will just aren't strong enough anymore. When you're at your limits and don't want do fight the situation, yourself, and God any longer. This finally happened about a month after my realization that a heart check was coming. I remember stopping everything I was doing, looked up at the ceiling and thought, God, I hate this. I don't want this anymore! So, so just change my heart, I guess. That's what You want right? Me to change? Well, do it. Go ahead. He, again, didn't answer, but I knew He heard me. So, everyday, as my circumstance hit me in the face like a slug hammer, I thanked God for it and just talked to Him about all the good in it. This went on for about a half a month.
Suddenly, I saw I didn't hate my circumstance! Yeah, I was still it in. Yeah, nothing changed in the physical world. But I changed and that is, sometimes, all it takes. After a year and then some of hating every moment of _________, I now have peace. God's peace. And there's nothing sweeter, and more addictive, then the peace of God.
So, where do you need a heart check?

Messy Mondays

I found something on the wonderful world of YouTube that I must share!
Mess Mondays are a series of videos made by young Christians who state the truth of life in amusing and blunt ways. They talk about everything from The Top 15 Christian Clichés, How to Tell Someone You Are NOT Interested, to 15 Ways Movies Think You Are Stupid and so much more.
The video I keep thinking of this week pointed out Christians get a spiritual high after an amazing weekend with God. However, sadly, once the weekend is over, so is the high. The video, very plainly and hilariously, explain that it's not about how 'high' we are on God, but being determined to stay close with God.
Check it out by clicking the link below and feel free to watch their other videos. You'll enjoy them!

My Spiritual High Is Higher than Yours  

The Woes of a Derby Chick

The entire world was against me! Nothing could change that fact! The very first roller derby scrimmage I have been invited to was out of my reach!
I had been practicing roller derby for seven months and I thought it was high time I was on a track, battling against other girls on wheels, and knocking people over. But . . . everything around me seemed to think otherwise.
There was so much that had to be done before the scrimmage, which was only five days away. I had to get roller derby insurance, and I didn't know how to do that at all. I had to pass a minimum skills requirement test, which it a seven sheet paper on various ways to skate, how to legally hit opponents, how to properly fall, and several other derby regulations. Someone mentioned a one hundred question test on the gazillion rules of derby, which I knew nothing about. And! On top of everything else, I knew if I faked my way through everything, pretending the entire time I knew what I was doing, I would have to be in the scrimmage. Face players who knew what they were doing. Skate against big girls with big attitudes. I could get hurt. I could suck. I could make a fool of myself. I could find out, after seven months of practicing, that derby just isn't for me. Needless to say, all that week I was freaking out.

God is so good though! Every time I would panic and start thinking what if . . . He would stop me and say, "It'll work out. I know what I'm doing." That would calm me down a little and I would focus on His truth.

The day finally came. The scrimmage was at noon and I had one hour to pass the minimum skills requirement test. No sweat! That was the easy part in my mind. I began to do the drills and, one by one, things were checked off the list. Midway through, I had to skate the length of the track on one foot. Oh I can do that! I thought. Everyone, stand clear! The master's going through!

I failed it.
I had forgotten that my skates, which were the cheapest I could find, were broken. The front two wheels were bent, therefore it was impossible to skate in a straight line.
My heart was crushed. Not just a little. A lot. Imagine my heart is a porcelain doll. Imagine a piano suspended thirty stories above my cute, fragile porcelain doll heart. Imagine the piano falling. That's how my heart was crushed. It hurt.
Now what? I don't have skates that will work, I couldn't pass the minimum skills test because of my skates, the whispers of a required written test disturbed me, and nothing was gone right! But every time I began to freak out, God reminded me, "Calm down. I got this covered." So, after a few deep breathes, I drove with a friend to the scrimmage, praying all the why.
And guess what?
I got to participate!
Because it was a scrimmage, a lot of derby regulations didn't apply. A friend let me barrow her skates, which were not broken. Also, that horrible written test wasn't mentioned, so I didn't mention it either. God was so good! It was one of the most amazing, scary days! I got knocked over about a dozen times, nearly skated over a kid, and didn't make any points, but, man alive! I had a blast!
And that's because God had it covered. He's got my back; and yours.

Pizza Faithfulness

The other day, I was at work and had to make dessert pizzas. They're full of dark chocolate and marshmallows and its very cruel how I have to make them! They always look so good!

Anyway, there's one part to the dessert preparation that's tedious and doesn't make sense to me. The crust has to be braided, or made to look like a pie's crust, and in each braid has a chocolate kiss inside. Now, that doesn't sound like a big deal, but when there's ten desserts that must be made as fast as my little hands can go, I start to wonder what type of person thought of putting kisses in the crust.

Then, I have another light bulb moment. Can the customers taste the chocolate in the crust? No. Can anyone see the kisses in the crust? No. Would anyone know if I didn't braid them in? No. Should I do it?

That's always the question. Should I? Who would see? No one else dose it anyways! Why should I! If anyone complained about it, they should get a life.

But then I remember one thing: Oh yeah! God will see. He sees everything. That fact alone keeps me in line. It's not that I'm afraid He'll smite me into a pile of smoky ash. It's deeper then that. I want to be "faithful with a few things so God will put me in charge of many things" (Matthew 25:21). Start small, then go BIG!

Why would God give us our dream carrier, the two story house we've always wanted, or the fat bank accounts we've longed for when we can't handle the little we already have? Show God He can trust you with what you have now before He gives you the next great thing.

Now, here's the question:

Next time, will you braid chocolate kisses into the crust?

 

Noah's Rad!

Every day, I have been given gold. I’m serious! Little nuggets of gold, sometimes, more than one, have been handed to me. Ok, I guess they’re not real gold, but they could be. I have started to read through the book of Geneses in the Bible and, every day, I’m finding things I’ve never known before. I always see something new, something exciting, something treasured! (Like, I don’t know, nuggets of gold or something.)

So! I’ve got to show you a golden treasure God gave me the other day!

Remember Noah? If you don’t, no sweat. He’s an amazing man of God who lived in the early times of the world. He lived in the midst of a corrupt world where “everything they (man) thought or imagined was consistently and totally evil” (Genesis 6:5b). Wow! You think the world’s bad now! Ha! It’s got nothing on how it was then! Anyways, Noah was “the only blameless person living on earth at the time” (Genesis 6:9b) so he and God were BFFs. Because the world was totally bad, so much so that it “broke God’s heart” (Genesis 6:6b), that God wanted to whip out the entire population of earth and start over.

All except for Noah and his family.

Ok, here’s the good part that’s so cool! God turns to Noah and says (I’m seriously paraphrasing here) “Man! This world’s a mess! It makes me real sick and sad! I’m going to whip everyone and everything out! There’s going to be a huge flood and anything that breathes . . . DIES!” (Genesis 6:13-21)

Whoa! What would you do if God told you that? If God said that to me, I’d wet my pants. I wouldn’t know what to say and probably hid in my bed for a while. But not Noah. Now, the Bible doesn’t say flat out, “Noah was not afraid”, but God doesn’t have to tell him “Fear not!”, which is a very common thing supernatural beings say to us weak stomached humans. The Bible has no indication that I can tell of Noah being afraid. Sure, I bet he was a bit nervous, but I mean the terrifying, paralyzing fear an average person would feel after hearing mankind was done for.

God goes on to say (paraphrasing again) “So, Noah, build a boat. No, not a little sail boat, but a colossus, huge cruise ship! I’m calling it an ark. Two of every kind of animal will come and be you’re new pets for a while. Make the ark forty-five hundred feet long, seventy-five feet wide, and forty-five feet high. Oh, and make sure you pack enough food for your family and the animals.”

Once God slams down His flood plan, this is what Noah dose: he “did everything exactly as God had commanded him” (Genesis 6:22). He doesn’t question. He doesn’t freak. He doesn’t complain. He doesn’t argue. He just does what God said to do. And you know why he didn’t freak out? (Listen, here’s the punch line!) I think it’s because Noah had such a “close fellowship with God” (Genesis 6:9b) that he knew he and his family would be safe.

No.

Matter.

What.

Wow! I want faith like that! To be able to look around me and see horribleness, but know God will protect me against all odds! To be able to stand firm when the waves of life come like a flood, (divorce, work, depression, insecurity, pain, lies, loneliness, abandonment, rejection, and all the others) God will give us an ark. It will be hard, we’ll get wet, but we will keep our head above the waves. Oh, and if your concerned God will flood the earth again, don’t worry. He said “never again will floodwaters kill all living creatures; never again will a flood destroy the earth” (Genesis 9: 11b). He put the rainbow in the sky as a sign of His promise too.

So remember, God is with His people and “when you go through deep waters, I (God) will be with you. When you go through rivers of difficulty, you will not drown” (Isaiah 43:2a).

Thank You, God, for arks!

New Day's Resolution

Every new year, this is one of the things people ask one another: "So, um . . . what's your New Year's Resolution, pal?"
I don't know what resolution even means! And its all a joke, if you really think about. Honestly, dose anyone ever continue their resolution after three days (or three minuets, depending on who you are)? I think everyone's exspected to have a resolution and at the same time we're exspected not to keep it. It's kind of a louse louse situation. And yes, I guess there's those amazing type 'A' personalities that "get 'er done" and follow through with their plans. But I don't think most people are like that (and this is comming from a girl who has never had a New Year's Resolution. Why? Because I know I won't keep doing it and then feel bad about myself, think I'm so horrible, and not do anything about it.)
But! There's hope! I think I know the problem!
It's called a New Year's Resolution, right? Whoever thought of this crule game should have changed the tytle. Instead of new year's, it should be New Day's Resolution. If you only resolve to do something once a year, nothing will get done. However, if it is a daily resolution, a firm dicission to do, or not do, such and such, then I believe the goal can be acheaved.
Think about it.
It's a daily dissision, an hourerly choise, a minet's deturmination. That's how people get stuff done, therefore, I'm going to be brave this year and have a New Day's Resolution (Year's, whatever). I'm very excited about it and I know it's entierly original, I bet no one else has ever thought of it before!
So what are you going to do for your New Day's Resolution? What are you going to daily decide to do to better yourself?
Please post below and have a happy new year!


P.S.
By the way, my resolution is to exsersie more as well as, and more importantly, do one thing every day to draw closer to God. I encourage you to do the same. You'll be surprised (in a good way) by what happens!
I hope you sence my sarcasum.