Tis the season of Praise and Thanksgiving

“O my soul, why be so gloomy and discouraged?

Trust in God!

I shall again praise Him for His wondrous help;

He will make me smile again,

 for He is my God!”

Psalm 43:5 tlb

From Hope 4 You, Carole Lewis writes, “Praise and thankfulness are closely intertwined, but are also distinctly different. When I praise someone, I am affirming a truth about who that person is. When I thank a person or am thankful for someone, I am affirming a truth about what the person does. I don’t fully understand why praise has the power to renew hope; I only know that it does.

Short and Sweet

I'll keep this short and sweet…

Today, my husband helped me set up the Christmas tree, get down the decorations, and gave me moral support as I hung strings of beads, angels, reindeer, and glass bulbs of red, green, and gold while Christmas CD’s filled the air.

Holiday Confessions

I confess…

As the dust settles on the craziness of the year’s long move…as the boxes disappear from every room in the house… thoughts of my favorite time of the year is knocking on my heart’s door. The sense of holiday urgency for turkey dinner to decking our new walls with boughs of holly for the season nibbles at my core.

However, I confess to new anxieties.

A grateful heart is a gratified heart

In April of this year I accepted the challenge of blogging every day of the month using the alphabet as my guide. But if you’ve followed me at all, you know our move took precedence over all of my life. Nevertheless, I continued to blog through the alphabet with my most recent letter being “S” for Settled.

Fast forward to today and new challenges to make me write—daily blogging for November and writing devotionals with the intention of publication submissions…

Settled

“Do all things without grumbling…” 
Philippians 2:14 nasb

Oh to be settled…for all the boxes to be unpacked…a place for everything and everything in its place. Oh to have a schedule to do the humdrum daily household chores like laundry, cleaning, cooking, and bill-paying, so that I had real time to creatively write.