Posts Tagged With: attitude

It’s all About Attitude

Posted on September 19, 2011 by Mrs Knochel

As a stay at home mom and nap-time writer (who doesn’t usually get a nap-time to write anymore) you could say I’m a busy gal. There are always dishes to fold and clothes to unload, kids to shuttle from here to there, a husband to tend to, church activities and Bible studies to do and attend, loved ones to care for, friends to love… *wipes the sweat from her brow*… it’s a lot to handle for one girl. I’m positive you can relate! With everything tugging at us from all sides how is a modern mom like me supposed to get everything done without forsaking my relationship with God, my daily quiet time? He is the only way I can get through my day, so how can I fit it all in? I know that I need to build my day around Him and not the other way around. I also know that we all make time for the things we want to do. BUT sometimes the things we feel we have to do start to push everything else off the calendar square. Our priorities start to get skewed.

When doing anything, our heart attitude is what matters most to God, because it is our heart attitude that drives our actions. (Out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks.) Lets pretend for a moment that we’re planting a garden. Our heart attitude is the seeds that are planted, our actions are the outward appearance of those seeds, and the end results of our actions are the plants that come from the seeds. If I plant a heart attitude, or seed, of “I have to” do this, rather than a seed from the “I want to” do this attitude, then the plants that spring up from those seeds will be completely different. Although the outward appearance of the seeds, or the actions themselves, were the same, the end results are drastically different. From the “I have to” attitude we generally glean very little from our time with God. Usually because we are much less open to receiving a word of insight or comfort or instruction from Him; we are simply going through the motions of religion. However, from the “I want to” attitude we glean much more from our time simply because we are more open to receiving and it has meaning to us from the very beginning.

I feel like I need to add another attitude phrase. The “I have GOT to” do this attitude. Honestly, that’s the attitude I have walked into my quiet spot with today. I spent a good deal of time last night snuggled in bed working on writing a morning prayer for myself based completely on scripture. I ended up with about 10 scriptures, all very long, and the more I read the more of them I wrote down, until I realized “Lord, if I could, I think I would simply pray the WHOLE Bible over myself every morning! They’re ALL good!” And at that point it was 11pm, my husband was climbing into bed with me and I decided I would work on it tomorrow. Famous last words right!?!

So this morning I jumped out of bed and hit the ground running, packing lunches, making breakfast, dressing kids and walking Gabe out to the bus – practicing memory verses because we hadn’t had time to read any because the egg stuck to the pan; I immediately came in and started Anna’s morning movie (the only TV she gets during the day) and then started attacking the disaster in the kitchen from the weekend, then bounced to my computer to look up something they had mentioned on the radio; but then, the phone rings, it’s my prayer partner Tammy to pray, so I get up, grab my Bible and get on the floor to pray; but she can’t pray long because she’s volunteering at the Crisis Pregnancy Center today so I jump back up to finish the dishes I’d started earlier – but at the same time I’m feeling pulled to finish the new page on the website I’d started before the phone call, and well, there’s that morning prayer I said I’d finish today, and, WOW, I haven’t even prayed ANY morning prayer yet today, let alone write one; and then there’s that blog post I’ve got rolling around in my head that I’d like to start writing down, and I haven’t had my snuggle time with Anna yet – she’s a physical touch love language so, I’ve got to get that in there or she’ll be all over me later… AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!! GOD HELP ME!!!!!!! I grabbed my Bible, notebook and pen and fled to my bedroom, closed the door, breathing “Lord, protect Anna and keep her out of trouble while I’m in here!” (remembering what happened to the Israelites while Moses was on the mountain with God for 40 days; no golden calf messes here please LORD) and flung myself on the floor in front of our mirror with all my prayer notes at the bottom, praying “LORD! HELP ME! WHAT DO I DO FIRST??????”

An “I have GOT to” attitude… you know… those moments when I have GOT to pray or I’ll explode from being pulled in a million different directions at once. The attitude that comes around when you realize, hey, I didn’t have my “preventative” time with God earlier so I’d better do it NOW before things get worse.

So, in light of how the last 5 hours of my life has been, I have concluded that A) my life is a run-on sentence, and B) my morning prayer can still be based on scripture without being the whole scripture! And it was at that moment, like a breath of fresh air sweeping through the room, that God pulled the string to the light bulb over my head and BOOM! There was my scripture-based Busy Mom’s Morning Prayer!

Which I will share with you tomorrow. 🙂

Hmmmm…… maybe my day wouldn’t have felt quite so crazy if I had taken 30 seconds to start my day with prayer instead of jumping straight into the day…. we might just talk about that tomorrow too. 🙂

Categories: The Crazy Mom Blog | Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Seeking Him

Posted on August 9, 2011 by Mrs Knochel

“Seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.” (Matthew 6:33-34)

It’s been a rough week for me; a struggle simply getting back into writing daily. I’ve managed to remember how much I enjoy it and that this is a huge part of what God made me to do. But I was doing it out of a “have-to” attitude which wasn’t working. I’ve learned along life’s path that it’s always best to do the things that God has called you to do (like publishing daily). But I was coming at it from the totally wrong angle! You see God HAS created me to write, but He has not forced me to write. Just like He has created all women to have children, but He never forces them to actually have them (or keep them for that matter). I choose if I want to live out what I have been created to do. I get to choose if I want to be who I was created to be.

I was created to be, among other things, a wife, mother, teacher and writer. And there ARE times when I can manage to successfully do all four at the same time, but it’s not easy. There are times when one of my “hats” has to get taken off and put on a shelf for a while. It doesn’t mean that I don’t still bring my experiences from one area of my life into the others though. In fact, it’s quite the opposite! No, when I put down my pen and pick up a pan I don’t stop being the writer, the thinker, or the lover of Christ. It’s still a critical part of who I am. And when I put down the pans and pick the pen and Bible back up I don’t stop being the mother of my children or the lover of my husband. I’m simply changing my function while still being wholly and completely me. To completely set aside my family to write would be to deny half of myself, and vice versa. It would be impossible for Tamar to exist, because I would then become someone else entirely.

This week my struggle has been finding a good balance between the two halves of myself. And it’s been HARD. I have felt the pressure of the Potter’s hands this week and have tried my hardest to yield willingly to it… sort of. All summer long I’ve been forsaking my God-given gift of writing, as occupation, therapy and relationship with My Lord. I’ve been focusing on my kids and enjoying the summer with them. Which is fine, to a point. But God made it clear to me, that starting August 1st, it was time to stop playing and get back to “work”. And I have… begrudgingly. Like I said, I was coming at it all from the wrong angle; a grumpy and untrusting one.

The first few days I stayed up until REALLY late in the night to write. Then I would end up sleeping half the day away. With two kids at home, that wasn’t working. And then the Holy Spirit stepped in and made me realize that I was staying up late to write because I wasn’t trusting myself or God to A) help me get up early enough to write long enough to get something “worthy” of sending out into cyberspace. B) Or that I was ABLE to even write still – it’s been almost a year since I’ve written anything for others to read. (Remember the pool story from Monday? That was part of it! A fear of writing again.) c) I wasn’t trusting God to watch over my kids while I write. Despite the fact that I normally write while they’re sleeping because that’s when it’s the quietest and I can think.

So, with God’s help I got through all those things and could move on to my next set of issues… my attitude while I was writing. Or rather, I suppose, who I was writing for. I had been writing with the mentality “they’re counting on me to do this.” As if, for some reason your world would stop turning if I failed to get this devotional into your hands first thing in the morning. I have no idea where THAT concept came from! But it probably came from my pride which is rooted in my insecurity. My writing was no longer a gift or an honor; it was my job, my work. And that’s never how God intended our callings to be! Yes, He created us to do work, but not for it to be work. We’re to do everything as if we were doing it for Him. It should never be that we HAVE to work, but rather that we GET to work. (Right Beth?) We don’t HAVE to be parents, we GET to be parents! I don’t have to be a writer, I get to be a writer – EVERY DAY!

But even after all that, my trajectory was still a little off. And the way that God pointed it out to me really got my attention. I have a friend on Facebook that I have never met in person. But in many ways I’m just as close to her as many of the people I see all the time. Simply, because she is my sister-in-Christ and that in itself is an unbreakable bond. One of the things she said recently really struck me. She has been fasting, not to seek God’s will, or His favor or even to repent but to seek HIM.  And it made me question, what is THAT? What IS seeking Him? What do you do? What do you say? How do you go about seeking HIM? And when I prayed about it, that’s when it hit me! THAT’S what TODAY is all about! Not me writing for myself, not me writing for you, but me writing for HIM! Writing down the things that I question and discover along my journey of seeking HIM! FINALLY my trajectory is correct! Or… at least close enough to it to move on.

So, I guess I wrote all that (partially) to tell you this. I am a visual learner and writing things out helps me think because then I can see them. Also, the best way to really learn something is to teach it. So, TODAY is really just my ramblings to try to understand and get to know God more fully, all while you get to read about where God is taking me and what He is teaching me and saying to me. And if you benefit from it, great! And if not, then so be it. From my perspective right now, you all are my accountability group for seeking Him while it is called TODAY (Hebrews 3:13)! J I love you all so desperately! Thank you for allowing God to use you to keep me on track!

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Categories: The Crazy Mom Blog | Tags: , , ,

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