(in)courage ~ Here for the hearts of women

A Human Mosaic

Tags:  Daily Guests, Imperfection

This exhausting battle with becoming true faced – the intentional drop of the façade, and the joyful embrace of the quirkiness – both amuses and saddens me, daily.
You see, I’m a recovering people pleaser.
That desire to fit in, to be liked, and yet…be “unique”, like…well, everyone else, has been as familiar to me as breathing.  Comparison became an involuntary function, “Insecure” my middle name.
Once you learn to live under the tremendous weight of this baggage, it becomes the way you function…
crippling the way you carry yourself,
coloring the way you engage with others,
warping the way you perceive God…and His plan for your life.
Isn’t it amazing how easily we get this all wrong?  We know what brews in our hearts, what we wrestle with in our minds, and what taunts us from our past…and on this, we base our self-perception, our value, our worth.  And yet we look at others – the well polished exterior – and make an assessment based on that single layer of their existence.
We judge, applaud, compare.
And most often, based on that broken scale, we come up short.
But you see, it is I that constructed this scale in the first place.  Of course it’s faulty.  It was never intended to be.
We have been wired – absolutely and intentionally – different.  Marvelously unique.  And rather than thrive in the delight of this reality, we try to fix, and survive amidst, what we view as wrong with us.
I am discovering, on this glorious road to freedom, that comparison kills contentment.  Go ahead; read that again, it’s profound…
As sure as the dawn, comparison will kill contentment.
So what do we do with our brokenness, if not resent and hide it?
I have experienced, first hand, the destructive, exhausting, pretentious lifestyle of hiding, and you could not pay me enough to live there again.
For I have tasted the light, sweetness of freedom, and I could never go back.
I will never forget that hot day in August, 2003, while sitting in the front row of a stadium in New York, listening to Pam Stenzel talk about purity.  It was just 2 months before I was set to marry the man of my dreams, a guy I was sure had fallen for the girl I was pretending to be, the girl I so badly wanted to be.
But God met me in the dark, dirty caverns of my heart.  Places I was determined to never revisit.  Concealment, I was certain, was my only hope.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

As it all came tumbling out; the ugly, the painful, and the downright shocking, a sense of intense fear began to grow, threatening to pull me back into hiding.
But even then, God was facilitating the exchange.  The fear was soon overpowered by a boldness that started to rise within me, and a weightless that sweetly settled on my heart, wooing me on to surrender more of what I had so ferociously protected.
I had carried this load for so long that I had no idea what it felt to live without it, to “travel light”.
God tenderly started to put me back together, like an artist painstakingly crafting a masterpiece from little shards of broken, irregularly shaped glass.  Pieces of something that used to be “put-together”, now repurposed in something new, something bigger…astonishingly beautiful and deliciously unorthodox.
It is true.  I used to want to look like a clear, crisp glass vase.
Pretty.
Striking.
Uncomplicated.
Untainted by the chips and dents of a messy life.
But I’m realizing that isn’t the image God is calling me to portray.
He gets no glory in my apparent perfection, in my finely-tuned charade.
It is in my brokenness, and reconstruction, in the wild, multi-faceted flicker of His light within me – glowing through those very shards I tried so desperately to cover up – that His beauty is displayed to a watching world.
Never before have I been so confident that He is more than able to bring about beauty from our brokenness.

The question now is simply this: will you surrender your past to the creative genius of a loving, redemptive God?

{who knows, you just might like being a human mosaic}

Ps.  In case you’re wondering…he did still marry me.  The real me!

by Joy McMillan, Simply Bloom

Tagged as: Brokenness, faith, Grace, identity in Christ

5 Minutes For Books

Dewey’s Nine Lives, review and giveaway: "

Christian Women Online

Taste and See that the Lord is Good! Christian Women Online

Godsy Girl

"But I can't find the right church": "Finding the right church can be a very daunting and confusing journey.



Sometimes, people grow frustrated in the process and are tempted to just give up. But, you can't!



Regardless of how you feel or how long the search takes, attend (some) church each week. You may not feel you're benefiting from it, but you are.



Here's an analogy I gave some one not long ago:



Say you eat at a restaurant and the food is mediocre. However, although the meal wasn't the greatest, your body was nourished and you gained strength from the food. You don't stop eating because you cannot find a good eatery do you?



It's the same with church. So, keep visiting Bible-believing churches until you find your home. Each week, you'll gain spiritual strength and fellowship.



Remember, no church will be perfect. Trust God and go wherever He leads- even if it doesn't seem 100% right. Know God's voice and follow Him.




As the old people used to say you need to be in "somebody's church". Amen, Godsy Girl?



P.S. Don't allow fear to paralyze you into making NO decision. So what if you pick the wrong one? You can always leave and re-align with God's plan. That's the magic of grace.

"

Wild Olive Tees

Meet the Teunis Family: "

We at Wild Olive are a passionate crew. And one thing that we are exceedingly passionate about? ADOPTION.

In an effort to help others who are in the process of adoption, we have started an adoption fundraising program to help families raise support to bring their children home. We would love to introduce you to some of the families who are participating in our program… and we will continue to post about other featured families in the weeks and months to come.

Without further ado, meet the Teunis Family.

Our Journey to Adoption

Isaiah 43:5-7

We are Steve and Jennifer Teunis. Our hearts have been on a journey to this place for longer than we have known. When God revealed this to us, we just knew without a doubt that our hearts and our family were created for this.God has blessed our family beyond measure. Honestly, it would seem that we have it all. We have a wonderful love story, we have 4 healthy children; a beautiful home in a wonderful, safe Midwestern community. God has led us as we have triumphed through our own personal heartbreak and He held the wheel that helped us navigate our children through the heartbreak of divorce and then the stress and adjustment of a blended family. We have laughed and cried and prayed our way to this wonderful place of peace in our lives.

It would seem strange perhaps then, that we would each feel this longing for something more. Not in a way of needing something else, not discontentment….but that God might HAVE something else for us? Something to learn or to experience, to share or to Praise Him in; that our lives are not just about getting to this place and this is IT. Is there an opportunity to serve, to enrich, to bless, or to discover a closeness to Him that we haven’t even been able to conceive of? Maybe any of those, maybe all of them, maybe more that we can even imagine.

We blended our family of all boys, 7 years ago. I guess you could say we were ‘almost done” as our kids are aged 13-24. We have a college graduate, a college sophmore and 1 each in high school and middle school. Now, we are starting all over and there isn’t a big enough font to type and tell you, just how EXCITED we are to bring home a baby girl from Ethiopia. We never imagined this path for oursleves really, but we are so grateful that God has laid adoption on our hearts. We are so excited to see how He leads us on this road. We are very mindful that HE is in control and this journey and it will not take one day longer, or come one day sooner, than He sees fit. He is preparing every situation for us to bring home the the exact little girl He has for our family.

At times this process does get tedious and wary, but I firmlly believe that it is in those times that He is doing mighty work. We are growing spiritually and learning more and more about waiting on and trusting The Lord. It isnt right to say that we are waiting on God’s timing, and then get frustrated when it takes so long. So we wait with hopeful hearts.

Please pray for us and for our new little munchkin. We are already falling in love with her and don’t even know who she is yet. He is knitting our hearts together accross time and miles. If you feel so moved, you can help us on our journey by purchasing an adoption Tee Shirt through our TEAM TEUNIS family store, as a portion of every sale, will go directly towards the adoption costs and the travel costs (which just got bigger ~ 2 Trips are required now ;-/)

Thank you for stopping and reading our story.

~ PEACE

Jennifer Teunis

Our blog: Cry of My Heart

"

Reading Rockets: Parents Resources

Revisiting Read-Aloud: Instructional Strategies that Encourage Students' Engagement with Text: "This article describes evidence-based practices that encourage first graders' engagement with texts. The authors review reading as a transactional process, revisit the benefits of reading aloud to students, provide a rationale for promoting engagement with texts, discuss three literacy strategies implemented in one first-grade classroom, and share examples of work contributed by the students."

Komen News

2010 Komen Brinker Award for Scientific Distinction Winners Announced at San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium: "An American scientist studying how breast cancer may alter the hormonal development of mammary glands and a South Korean physician improving ways to predict the effectiveness of certain breast cancer treatments were honored Thursday night as this year’s winners of the Susan G. Komen for the Cure® Brinker Award for Scientific Distinction in basic science and clinical research."

Health Tips

Blood pressure tip: Stress out no more: "Stress or anxiety can temporarily increase blood pressure. To reduce . . ."

Children's Book Press

Books on dealing with disaster: "

A Place Where Sunflowers Grow is one of several books reviewed in the article “A Dozen Great Books: Dealing with Disaster: Ways of Coping, Healing and Fighting Back,” in the Fall 2010 issue of the Journal of Children’s Literature. As the authors of the article state, “Our hope is that readers will be moved by these stories as they encounter characters’ hardships and ponder their paths to healing and action.”

The Journal of Children's Literature is published bi-annually by the Children’s Literature Assembly (CLA) of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE). The journal provides professional and extensive coverage and information of books published for children and young adults.

The journal is great reading for lovers and scholars of children’s literature. Here’s the review of A Place Where Sunflowers Grow:

A Place Where Sunflowers Grow by Amy Lee-Tai. Illus. Felicia Hoshino. San Francisco: Children’s Book Press, 2006.

Even though it has been 13 months since Mari and her family were relocated to the Japanese internment camp in Topaz, Utah, she remains withdrawn and dejected. Mari’s artist father takes her to a drawing class, but the harsh reality of living in the camp inhibits her drawing. One day, Mari’s teacher asks the class to draw things that make them happy at Topaz. Unable to think of anything, Mari remembers some- thing that made her happy before coming to the camp. She draws her old backyard with its sakura trees, flowers, and swings, and hangs it on the barrack wall above her bed. Through her drawing and happier memories, Mari slowly recovers from the trauma of uprooting and the injustice of internment. The community connections she forms because of her drawings empower her to heal and remain hopeful, like the sunflowers she nurtures in the camp garden. Inspired by the paintings of the author’s artist grandmother, Hisako Hibi, on whose experience this story is based, Hoshino’s delicate artwork evokes the fragility of the family’s desert life and of continued hope.

read more

"

Breast Cancer News

Circulating Tumor Cells Linked with Recurrence of Early Breast Cancer: "Among women with early breast cancer, the presence of circulating tumor cells (cancer cells in the bloodstream) increased the risk of cancer recurrence and shortened survival. These preliminary results were presented at the 2010 San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium. Among ..."