When God created the world, everything was perfect. When Adam and Eve brought sin into the world, it disrupted God’s perfect order. Not only did sin and death enter, but all other forms of disorder and chaos.

We became dirty.

To get into Heaven, we must be holy, as God is. Because of sin, though, no one is holy (Romans 3:23).

God loves us too much to leave us in our dirtiness, our sin (happy Valentine’s Day!)

Instead, He sent Jesus to take the punishment for our sins.

Isaiah 1:18, ESV, says:

“Come now, let us reason together,” says the Lord:
“though your sins are like scarlet,
“they shall be as white as snow;
“though they are red like crimson,
“they shall become like wool.”

Snow is a beautiful reminder of how God created the world to be: beautiful, pure.

In order for us to be ‘as white as snow,’ all we have to do is ask, like David did in Psalm 51:7 (ESV): “Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.”

God is waiting for us to come to Him. He loves you.

I have so much to praise God for right now. School is going well for my kids, my husband published a new book, I published a new book, and an anthology I was accepted in is available now! (All should be available on my website soon-ish, but clicking the links above will take you to Amazon. My husband’s book, “The Brave Little Seagull,” is also available on most major online retailers… mine will be soon, too.)

I wanted to take this month and encourage you to praise God.

Many of the Psalms are dedicated to praising God. I want to highlight Psalm 150. The ESV version says:

“Praise the Lord!

“Praise God in his sanctuary;

“praise him in his mighty heavens!

“Praise him for his mighty deeds;

“praise him according to his greatness.

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“Praise him with trumpet sound

“praise him with lute and harp!

“Praise him with tambourine and dance;

“praise him with strings and pipe!

“Praise him with sounding symbols!

“Let everything that has breath praise the Lord!

“Praise the Lord!”

Praise is a big deal.

Hebrews 13:15 says, “Through him then let us continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that acknowledge his name.”

That’s all praise is – giving God honor and credit for what He has done. It’s acknowledging that He is good, and we are not. He is God, and we are not. He is Creator, perfect, loving, Savior, [insert other name for God here], and we are not.

God deserves our praise, but He deserves more praise than we can give in our sinful state.

When we praise, we acknowledge our weakness and His strength.

He knows we can’t give Him what He deserves; He just wants us. He wants a relationship with us. He wants us to depend on Him. (“God, I can’t do it on my own, please help me.”) Then for us to praise Him when we see Him working in our lives.

God deserves so much praise.

The angels understand this. Revelation 7:11-12 talk about how the angels stand around God’s throne in Heaven, falling on their faces, and worshiping God.

Even when life is hard, we can find reasons to praise God. At the very least, He saved our souls from Hell! Definitely worth praising Him for.

I want to encourage you today, think about what God has done for you recently. Think back to when you first became a Christian and remember what He saved you from. Watch what He’s doing in your family and friend’s lives.

I encourage you to spend some time telling God how you’ve seen Him lately. Thank Him for those ways. Thank Him for who He is. Watch how it change you.

And if you are just so excited and and want to share what you’re praising God for – my inbox is always open. Just click on the “Contact” button at the top of the page. 🙂

When we first moved into our house, I was eight months pregnant with our first child. I wasn’t moving very fast – or very much. The house came with two gardens – one of which had beautiful bushes randomly placed through it. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to their placement.

The other garden had two bushes and a bunch of dirt. That dirt turned to mud when it rained.

A nice surprise was that in the spring, nine green plants grew up in three rows, but they quickly died off. Then in late summer, pink flowers on tall stalks shot up in a 3×3 grid. The flowers were gorgeous and smelled beautifully. We learned they were called Resurrection Lilies.

For the rest of the time, that garden was full of dirt. It wasn’t much to look at.

But I had dreams. I had plans. And now…

It’s still a work in progress. I’m modeling this off of an English garden, but it’s fairly small so it won’t be that grand. (Don’t worry about the Resurrection Lilies – they were successfully transplanted to perfect places all around our yard.)

However, my husband and I are proud of it and love it.

This is how God works, too. Our sin, our messes, are like a plain dirt garden. Sometimes we might have something pretty pop up, but even then, we can’t really claim it. In God’s eyes, even the good things we do are like filthy rags (Isaiah 64:6).

Just like I had dreams and plans for our garden, God has plans for us.

Ephesians 2:10 (ESV) say, “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.”

God knew us before we were born (Jeremiah 1:5). He knows the plans He has for us (Jeremiah 29:11). They are good plans.

Sometimes, because of all the sin in the world, our lives look messy. They feel messy. Let’s be real – they ARE messy! I encourage you to consider the rough patches in your life as an empty dirt garden. God, the gardener, is coming. With beautiful, bright, vibrant flowers, ready to be planted.

Or maybe He’s growing something from seed. God will nurture it in your life and you’ll get to watch it (you!) grow.

However God works, it will be beautiful.

So no matter how hard your life feels – no matter how messy it looks – trust that God is working. You will see beauty from the mess.

“And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose,” (Romans 8:28, ESV).

If there’s a way I can pray for you while you’re in the dirt, please don’t hesitate to hit that “Contact” button above and let me know what’s on your mind. We’ve all been there, and we’ll all be there again.

Before Romans was a book of the Bible, it was a letter written from Paul to the church in Rome.  Paul considered himself a slave to Jesus.  He wanted to do everything He could to tell others about God.

Paul first started encouraging the Romans in their faith (1:8).  He assured them that he was praying for them (1:9-10).  He tell them that he wants more than anything to come see them (1:11-13).  He had heard God was moving in Rome, and Paul wanted in on the action.  However, he wass humble enough to stay where God told him to.

It really made me wonder (and I hope you ask yourself the same question) – would you be so willing to obey?  Especially if obeying meant the opposite of what you wanted.  

One of my favorite verses in Romans 1:16, which says in the ESV version, “For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek.”

I used to think this verse meant that if someone held a gun to my head and asked if I was a Christian, I should say yes.  When I was in high school, though, I learned that I shouldn’t only be willing to die for Christ, but also to LIVE for Him!  

The study I’m doing also talked about how easy shame of the Gospel can sneak into our lives.  Sometimes it can be quiet, like not speaking up when we should.  Sometimes it can be agreeing with someone to ‘keep the peace,’ but really we should have spoken truth.  Sometimes it can be more blatant, like lying to save our skins.  As a parent, it can be holding firm to an unconventional parenting method God is calling us to, despite society telling us it’s wrong or weird.  As a writer, I’ve been told I won’t make it unless I add more secular entertainment (sex). 

We have to actively fight against this shame.  We need to hold to the Gospel – the GOOD NEWS – boldly.

The first bit of Romans shows us how sinful we are, to the point that “God gave them up,” (1:24a) and uses terminology like “the wrath of God” (1:18).  

It is important for us to see how sinful we are.  It important for us to see what those consequences of sin are.  Paul takes his time making that point.

God doesn’t leave us in our sin, though, so neither does Paul dwell here for long.  

Paul starts talking about the “righteousness of God” (3:21).  He said, “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus,” (Romans 3:23-24, ESV).

I’ve never looked at the breakdown of Romans before, the different sections it’s in.  I’ve never seen the building blocks it’s made of before.

The book of Romans has helped spurn more revivals that any other book of the Bible.  It makes sense to me now.

We all sin.  We all have certain sins we struggle with in particular.  

No matter what sin we struggle with, though, God sent His Son Jesus to die for those sins.  Jesus told those sins and clung to them while He died on the cross.  We are forgiven.  We just have to accept that gift of forgiveness. 

Then, as Paul talks about repeatedly in Romans (1:5, 2:4, etc.) us accepting His forgiveness should prompt us to tell others about Him.

Today, I want to encourage you to thank God for what He’s forgiven you from. 

If you are not a Christian and have questions, I’d love to talk to you!  Just hit the “Contact” button above.  Even if you can’t formulate specific questions, just let me know your thoughts.  I’m happy to talk with you about them.

Then, if you are a Christian, pray about who you can tell about Him.  

When I was in college, I was part of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship.  They have a program called 2+.  That means we were supposed to have two people we were constantly praying for and looking for chances to spend time with and, ultimately, share Jesus with.  I currently have two people I am praying for, and I encourage you to do the same.  (Feel free to not stop at two, that’s what the + is for!)

And if there is any way I can pray for you, just let me know!  Evangelism can be scary – only because Satan wants it to be.  I’d love to help encourage you in this! We don’t want to be pushy or make others feel like we’re forcing our beliefs on others, but if we have great news – shouldn’t we want to share it with others?

The subject of luck is all around right now.  St. Patrick’s Day is coming up, and the creative writing club I’m part of gave a topic for our next assignment as something having to to do with luck.

I get it.  We love to blame something when things don’t go our way:

“That shot should have went in – that was unlucky!” 

“He has the worst luck in women.” 

And we like to hope for things:

“Maybe I’ll get lucky and pass the test even though I didn’t study for it.”

“Maybe I’ll get lucky and it won’t rain that day.”  (Side note: Our church is having a Mental Health Hope Walk on May 17th, so if you’d say a quick prayer that it won’t rain that day, I’d greatly appreciate it!)

If we look in the Bible, at first glance, people may seem to be lucky – or not lucky.

When we read 2 Chronicles 18:33, it may seem that King Ahab was unlucky because in a battle, he was struck and killed by a random arrow shot by a random archer.  The archer wasn’t aiming for the king, but killed him anyway.  If we read the rest of the chapter, however, we see that God’s hand was all over that battle.  King Ahab had ordered someone else (Jehoshaphat – if you want to say that five times fast) to wear the royal robes, but God lead their enemies away from him and had a random archer kill a very wicked king.

Or consider Rahab.  It might seem unlucky at first that two spies made it past the city walls and ended up in her house (Joshua 2).  But then we see that she becomes part of the lineage of Jesus (Matthew 1:5).  Because she obeyed God and the spies, her life and the lives of her family were spared.  It had nothing to do with lucky, it was all God.

We can look at Paul in the New Testament.  He was beaten, shipwrecked, imprisoned – all kinds of things.  It seems like he had a very unlucky life!  (You can read a summary in 2 Corinthians 11:23-29).  However, all of these things were part of God’s plan.  God told Ananias before he went to talk to Paul, “For I will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name,” (Acts 9:16, ESV).

Sometimes good things happen to us and we feel lucky.

Sometimes bad things happen and we feel unlucky.

The one thing we need to remember is that God is always in control.  Nothing happens outside of His design.  

Proverbs 16:33 (ESV) says, “The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the Lord.”

When I was in college, I had a Cognitive Science professor who showed us the Boids flocking simulation.  (Feel free to look it up on You Tube – it’s interesting!)  He said this computer simulation proved there was no God because even the computer grouped in community and would avoid obstacles.  He said the ‘birds’ would keep this up forever without interference.  (He and I tried to talk, but I often didn’t understand enough of what he said to know how to talk to him.) 

I agree this simulation would show what earth would look like if God had created the world and then stepped back and left things to luck.  

But that’s not what God does.  God is still deeply involved in every aspect of our lives.  He cares deeply even about the birds (or Boids?).  

Ephesians 1:11 (ESV) says, “In him we have obtained an inheritance, having be predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will.”

Psalm 115:3 (ESV) says, “Our God is in the heavens; he does all that he pleases.”  

God is still alive and active in and on this earth.

So, friend, be encouraged.  If you are feeling very unlucky right now, trust that God is working out something for your good, even if you can’t imagine what that might be.  

I won’t pretend to know why God does He does sometimes, but I know I have been through some crazy hard times, and God has always brought me through it.  It’s made me stronger.  It’s helped me depend on Him.  It’s strengthened my faith.  Sometimes, it prepares me for something else yet to come. 

And yeah, sometimes I just don’t know why He lets me go through some things.

But God loves us.  He loves YOU.  He has good things in store for you (maybe on Earth, maybe on Heaven).  Trust Him, not luck.