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Time, you are flying by.

It seems the older I get, the quicker you make my days pass by. Like a book flung open in the wind, you are blowing my flapping pages furiously toward its conclusion.

I feel these fleeting moments often when I look at my youngest, no longer a baby; he seems to grow taller everyday. My oldest is beginning to shed the skin of little boy as he tumbles towards the teenage years. And a quick glance at my middle-child reveals a shadow of the woman she will one day become.

Time, slow down.

On one hand, it feels as though there is plenty of time to read all the books we want to read, visit the sights we want to see, and instill the lessons we want to leave with our children. But then—just like that—we are over half way through this chapter of parenting and I’m not sure I’m ready for what’s ahead.

Time, I want you to be predictable. Safe.

I know all-too-well that I am not promised tomorrow. My personal clock may stop tomorrow. Or my husband’s. Or one of my children. Or one of my parents. Or another one of my siblings. And some moments, the thought of losing any one member of my family is more than I can bear.

Time, you are a constant reminder.

I cannot control you, but I know the One who does. He knows. He weaves. He carries. And in His perfect work, Time, He will allow you to march as fast or slow as you need to do His will for His perfect plan.

Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God!
How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!
“For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor?”
“Or who has given a gift to him that he might be repaid?”
For from him and through him and to him are all things.
To him be glory forever.
(Romans 11:33-36 ESV)

How is time passing for you these days? What verses do you cling to that point your heart to the One who holds every second in His hands?

November 3, 2016/0 Comments/by Katie
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I’m an idealist, which was a great thing until I became a mom and all semblance of control and the ability to complete my goals went out the window.

OK, so maybe I’m being a bit dramatic.

I’m sharing a bit of my heart and my struggle with perfection, today over at Inspired to Action. Join me?

I’d love to see your beautiful faces over there in the comments.

April 18, 2012/0 Comments/by Katie
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I love to study the Bible! It is a joy to see truths jump off the page.

For me, finding the main points of a passage is like a framing picture I can pick up and put on my desk—a tangible, visible representation of who God is and what He wants from me. Characteristics of a true Christ-follower become clearer, commands are more distinct, Christ’s greatness better seen.

I can pick up these “framed” truths and observe them again and again. Over time, my desk collects frame after glorious frame—portraits of the masterpiece of Scripture.

I’ve been in the Psalms for a few months now, and I saw Psalm 86 in a different light recently. I’m sharing about today over at Caroline’s.

I hope you’ll join me!

April 5, 2012/2 Comments/by Katie
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A peek into my life this week.

We made laundry soap.

It was SO EASY.

I have been using this homemade laundry soap recipe for a while now. It is a fairly easy recipe, but I just don’t like having to grate the soap…I know…I’m lazy.

Then I stumbled on this homemade liquid laundry soap recipe on Pinterest, and I am sold—at least on the preparation factor.

I told you—easy peasy, and extremely inexpensive.

I have only used it on one load of laundry, so its effectiveness it yet to be seen. I used our tea kettle to boil the water, and both my 4 year old and almost 2 year old helped me measure out the ingredients!

My favorite post from the week

“So, I will once again

Release my firm hold on that which was never mine to grasp!


And I will live by faith not by sight!

I will LOOK to HIM!

I will TRUST in HIM!

I will find PEACE & JOY & STRENGTH in HIM!”

via Our Family for His Glory: Waiting.

Taming the email beast

I thought this was interesting…Increase Productivity by Ignoring Your Inbox?


Have you tried to make your own laundry soap before?

Have any recipes to share? I would love to know if any of you use your own dishwasher detergent?

March 9, 2012/5 Comments/by Katie
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Looking for a way to tell your children about the reason behind why we celebrate St. Patrick’s Day? The Real Reason for St. Patrick’s Day Besides being a fun reason to wear green and pinch those who don’t, it is a celebration of a man of God who sacrificed all for the sake of the gospel. Hands down, the best book for telling the true story of St. Patrick’s Day is The Story of St. Patrick: More Than Shamrocks and Leprechauns.

This is a great book to read for family worship time together, as it will certainly bring up some good conversations about a heart for the lost, and sacrifice for the sake of others and their salvation.

Highly recommend this book! You can read more about The Story of St. Patrick book in last year’s post.

Fun Ideas for St. Patrick’s Day

We had all sorts of fun with the color GREEN last year! A quick trip to The Dollar Store and we were set with fun accessories! We ate pistachio pudding (yummie!) and green macaroni and cheese (just add green dye to the water when you boil the noodles.) 
How do you celebrate St. Patrick’s Day?

Any books to share?

February 23, 2012/8 Comments/by Katie
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I shared my heart a few months ago, about my struggle with being a stay-at-home mom. It was a post that I knew I was supposed to write, but felt myself extremely frightened hitting publish. For the most part, the “bearing of my soul” was incredible well-received, and you all just showered me with encouragement and stories of your own struggle.

Thank you, for that.

The more I share my heart, the real me, the more I realize that there are so many others out there that also struggle. This is all so strangely freeing.

To know I’m not alone in my depression and struggle with motherhood.

Of course, I know the struggle is mostly in my head—that I am not the only imperfect one. But getting it to sink deep down into my heart? That’s a different story.

Most of this is about the battle to connect my heart’s cry with my what my mind knows.

Dealing with Opposition

So, I said that it was mostly well-received. There was a bit of opposition. I’m not afraid of opposition, and I am so thankful for those comments. We all need to be able to hear the criticisms, and take them to the Lord. He has given us each other to point us to Him—sometimes through difficult conversations.

I did take the concerns to the Lord, and to my husband, but came out from it back where I had landed—that this IS the best place for us now.

Yet, I find myself feeling a bit mis-understood.

It is difficult to communicate by heart, and all of my story in 700 words. My struggle with being a stay-at-home mom is only one part of the journey. The words of the concerned commenters were very kind, but I could hear the worry in their words—the worry that I was going off the deep end, losing my focus—and my children would be the ones to pay for my “mistake”.

I don’t know, maybe this is all about the same issue, that I care too much about the ideal and what other’s think. But it still weighs heavy on my heart—that you all might be out there thinking that since I have given up my pursuit of being the typical stay-at-home mom, I am now giving my kids second-best.

How I’ve Become a Better Mom

There are certainly other factors involved, but the bottom line is that the pursuit of the ideal had led me to depression, and as I have taken steps away from trying to fit into a certain “homemaker” mold, my depression is lifting. (That, and a certain little blue and white pill.)

I did not making it lightly, this decision to not homeschool. Nor did I flippantly make the decision to start working outside of the home. Neither were made out of emotions—on solely what I feel. These decisions were prayerfully, slowly, and carefully made by my husband and me.

I was absolutely against going back to work and putting the kids in childcare, even for just a few days a week. It felt like a deferring of my God-given role to someone else. I had my heart set on homeschooling and continuing the typical full-time stay-at-home mom pursuits. But there was one big problem.

It wasn’t working.

Honestly, I was a really bad mother most of the time. Extremely irritable; completely un-motivated to do anything around the house, while I wallowed in my “failures” because my time at home didn’t look like so-and-so’s.

I was so overwhelmed by all that I wasn’t, that it paralyzed me from being who God made me to be.

I have been searching the scriptures lately, on this phrase in Titus 2 to be a “worker at home”, this phrase that so many see as the lynchpin to motherhood. I’m kinda surprised by what I have been learning, and observing…

…but that is all for another post.

Do you feel the pressure to be a certain “type” of “good Christian” mom?

Where do you feel you may be trying to fit into a mold God never designed you to be in?

Have you experienced this “walking away from the ideal” to find that it makes you a better momma?

February 16, 2012/24 Comments/by Katie
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For when my kitchen is a mess… …the living room has exploded… …and the laundry is taking over… …and for when I am weary of it all…

…I am thankful that when the God of all order looks at me He sees Christ’s perfect obedience—not all the chaos in my life, nor my disobedience.

For everyone has sinned; we all fall short of God’s glorious standard. Yet God, with undeserved kindness, declares that we are righteous. He did this through Christ Jesus when he freed us from the penalty for our sins. For God presented Jesus as the sacrifice for sin. People are made right with God when they believe that Jesus sacrificed his life, shedding his blood. This sacrifice shows that God was being fair when he held back and did not punish those who sinned in times past. (Romans 3:23-25 NLT)

Not because of what I’ve done, but because of what Christ has done on my behalf,  He is well-pleased with me.

(…and at least my floors are clean!)

February 10, 2012/7 Comments/by Katie
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So, we don’t do Santa, but we have decided to allow the giving of gifts, and even in the giving of those gifts at Christmas, we want to point them to Christ.

Giving (Just) Three Gifts

We’ve chosen to guide our gift-giving through the giving of three gifts. We also want to use the actual giving of the gifts to teach about the Christmas story. So, just as the wise men brought Jesus meaningful gifts, we give gifts with meaning as well.

And going into the house they saw the child with Mary his mother, and they fell down and worshiped him. Then, opening their treasures, they offered him gifts, gold and frankincense and myrrh. (Matthew 2:11 ESV) A Gift of Fun

One gift is simply something they will enjoy. I am not against giving big gifts to our kids, but I would rather leave those “big-ticket” items to be for their birthday. In other words, we don’t spend a lot of money on this gift.

A Gift of Meeting

“Then the LORD said to Moses, “Take fragrant spices—gum resin, onycha and galbanum—and pure frankincense, all in equal amounts, and make a fragrant blend of incense, the work of a perfumer. It is to be salted and pure and sacred. Grind some of it to powder and place it in front of the ark of the covenant law in the tent of meeting, where I will meet with you. It shall be most holy to you. Do not make any incense with this formula for yourselves; consider it holy to the LORD.” Exodus 30:34-3

The second gift is something that will encourage them in their walk with Christ; something they will use to meet with the Lord. For my little ones, it may be a children’s Bible, or a Bible story board-book. As they get older, and can read on their own, the options will open up quite a bit. My hope is that this will become the gift that they treasure more and more as they grown in their relationship with God.

A Gift of Gold

Our children get a set amount of money and get to give a present to Jesus, through giving to others. As they get older, we want them to have more ownership of this, and choose for themselves how they want to give back to Jesus (there will also probably be a way for them to earn the money they give.) For now, we’ll stick with online giving options. Gift-a-Verse through OneVerse, and the gift catalogue from World Vision are probably the two we will use.

They also get a gold ornament, as a keepsake for the gift given to Jesus. I pray that they will grow to treasure these ornaments, and use them one day to carry on the tradition of giving to Jesus each Christmas.

I’d love to hear how you do gifts in your house. Leave a comment and share your ideas for using gift-giving to point our kids to Jesus!

December 8, 2011/6 Comments/by Katie
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Santa doesn’t come to our house .


Yes you heard me right. We don’t do Santa.

I know this is a hot topic, and before I go anywhere else, I want to say that I am no way suggesting that Santa is evil, or that families are “in sin” by having Santa come to their home. This is where our family has personally landed, as we strive to point our kids to Jesus during the Christmas season. That being said, here is what we have decided as a family when it comes to Ol’ St. Nick.

We desire to avoid confusion.

There are many reasons for why we chose this route; the bottom line is that we don’t want to muddy the waters when it comes to teaching our children about God. Noel Piper puts into words exactly how we feel about Santa (emphasis mine):

For several reasons, we have chosen not to include Santa Claus in our Christmas stories and decorations. First, fairy tales are fun, but we don’t ask our children to believe them. Second, celebrating with Santa and manger will postpone a child’s clear understanding of what the real truth of God is. It’s very difficult for a young child to pick through a marble cake of part truth and part imagination to find the crumbs of reality.We want our children to understand God as fully as they’re able, at whatever age they are. So we try to avoid anything that would inhibit or distort that understanding.

Third, think how confusing it must be to a literal-thinking, uncritical preschooler. Santa is so much like what we’re trying all year to teach our children about God. Look at the “attributes” of Santa:

• He’s omniscient—he sees everything you do.
• He rewards you if you’re good.
• He’s omnipresent—at least, he can be everywhere in one night.
• He gives you good gifts.
• He’s the most famous “old man in the sky” figure.

But at the deeper level that young children can’t comprehend yet, he is not like God at all. For example, does Santa really care if we’re bad or good? Think of the most awful kid you can remember. Did he or she ever not get gifts from Santa? What about Santa’s spying and then rewarding you if you’re good enough? That’s not the way God operates. He gave us his gift—his Son—even though we weren’t good at all. “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). He gave his gift to us to make us good, not because we had proved ourselves good enough.

—Noel Piper, Treasuring God in our Traditions (You can download this book for free here.)

So what, then, do we do with Santa?

We don’t ignore Santa.

We don’t ignore Santa when we see him in the mall. They get a bit excited to see him, just as they would Mickey Mouse, Sleeping Beauty or Lightning McQueen. But in our kids minds, as much as they can comprehend, he is fictional.

While Chris and I feel completely confident in our decision to not have Santa visit our house (we have made the same decision for the Easter Bunny and Tooth Fairy) there is some good that “Santa” can bring to our celebration of Christ’s coming.

St. Nicholas was a man who loved God and gave all he had, in secret, to those in need. We talk to our kids about St. Nicholas, the true Santa Claus. The Veggie Tales movie Saint Nicholas-A Story of Joyful Giving is a great resource, as it tells the story of St. Nick and how he gave to others in the name of Christ.

I really love this idea, where “in the spirit of thoughtfulness and generosity practiced by St. Nicholas, family members put little cards, treats or gifts inside.” We put the stocking up at the beginning of December, and fill each other’s stockings with gifts of encouraging words and small treats throughout the month.

We desire to guard other family’s traditions.

My oldest son is in First Grade and I cannot be there every moment to cover up his mouth before he shatters his classmate’s Santa dreams. I try to remind him, whenever Santa comes up, that it is not up to him to tell people about Santa; it is up to the parents to tell their children the truth about Santa, NOT HIM. He seems to get it, and I just hope that my kids NEVER do something like this!

So, what do you do about Santa? Incorporate him in your traditions? Ignore him?

December 5, 2011/24 Comments/by Katie
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So, I’ve been feeling a bit stuck about bedtime around here.

My older two, who are six and almost four are loving the “I’m hungry/thirsty/not sleepy/anything-else-they-can-think-of-that-can-get-them-out-of-going-to-sleep” game. (Although, one of my favorites is Anna’s “I’m scary,” which is usually her legitimately being afraid—not just stalling.)

I feel as if I am continually having to choose between setting the limits or savoring the moments. I want to build good memories of our time together at bedtime, but at some point I have to draw the line or they would stay up all night.

I’m over at Inspired to Action today…would love for you to join me!

November 30, 2011/0 Comments/by Katie
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