Heavenly Homemakers

Encouraging women in homemaking, healthy eating and parenting

Journey

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If you haven’t already, you may want to go back and read Raw, Guilt , Beginning, Anxiety, Seek, Stop, Pride, Surrender,  Peace, and Empty before reading this post.

I’ve been learning so much the past 14 months about letting go of self and surrendering my worries and needs to the Father. The scriptures have been speaking Truth into my life and for the first time, I’ve really been listening. Learning to die to self has been both painful and beautiful, and I dare say I’ve even grieved this death of self. But after death comes new life – and I am now able to truly enjoy the fullness of life that God promises us on this earth.

Am I worry free? Not yet, but I have learned the beauty of giving my anxious thoughts over to the Father. Old habits die hard. I have thorns in my flesh that would like to take over my life and force me back into my former way of thinking. I’m on a journey to continue growing in my new walk as I learn more and more about dying to self.

Is my life without hardship? No, that’s not what God promises. But He does promise to carry our burdens and to give us His peace. He can and He will and He does. Living in Jesus is glorious. Allowing Him to be for me what He promises and desires to be in my life is rich and powerful. When I am weak, then I am strong (2 Cor. 12). Yes.  In the name of Jesus, yes!

Truth:  We can ask for anything in the name of Jesus and He will do it.

Jesus tells us this over and over. I counted this promise three times in John 14-16 alone. Jesus means it when He says this. Worried about something that you have no control over? Ask Jesus to overrule the worry and fill the hole with His peace. He WILL do it.

Truth:  His yoke is easy. His burden is light.

We can continue to carry our burdens on our own, lugging the heavy weight of worry, anxt, fear, or guilt around everywhere we go. It will wear us out, disrupt our sleep, make us depressed, and get us absolutely nowhere. Or we can gratefully surrender our burden to the One who is already carrying it for us. Why do we try to do what we know we can not do? Jesus asks us to let Him give us rest. Give Him your burden. Then breathe deeply and enjoy the comfort that comes from letting Him carry your load.

Truth:  The only One we need to aim to please is the Father.

Learning this truth has been life changing for me. As I recognize my need to let go of pride, and to focus on doing what God asks me to do – instead of constantly trying to gain the approval, recognition, or appreciation of those around me – I am experiencing His blessed gift of peace like never before. The blessing of seeking to please God alone is that by doing so, others are pleased too. Except for when they’re not.  But that is not my burden to bear. I can love people and point them to Jesus, but I cannot rescue, fix, or change anyone’s heart. I’ll do my job and let God do His.

This post ends this Raw series I’ve been honored to share with you about my journey to emotional healing. The series ends, but the journey continues. I am constantly growing, continually learning, and clearly recognizing my need for a Savior. I long to be whole, and I now realize that the only way to find true peace is to become broken at the feet of Jesus. His goodness overflows. His mercies are new every morning. He is what I can never be. And I am safely in His care.

While this specific series is ending, I will continue to listen to God’s leading and share truths and lessons He is teaching me.
Thank you for your kindness and love as I opened my heart in this series.

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Surrender

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If you haven’t already, you may want to go back and read Raw, Guilt , Beginning, Anxiety, Seek, Stop, and Pride before reading this post.

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Pride. Fear. Anxiety. Panic. Worry.

I knew I had to let these go. So I kept trying and trying and working so hard to let them go. I prayed and I pounded my fists. I fasted and I cried. I shouted, “I don’t want these sins anymore! I’m tired of being ruled by all of this ugliness!”

Ironically, all the work I’ve put into letting go of pride, fear, and anxiety through the years has left me a bit more prideful (look at what I’ve conquered!), more fearful (but what if it comes back?), and more anxious (I’m still not sure I’m doing this right.). Why? Because I was trying to do the work myself.  I wanted to be better for Christ. So I worked and I fought and I struggled and I worked harder to be a better Christian. I would think:  I’ve got this! I’m going to follow that advice I just heard. I’m going to go by the suggestions in that book. I’m going to just buckle down and work harder. I can do this!

The more I fought, the more difficult my battles became. The more steeped in sin I sunk. The more exhausted and defeated I felt. So frequently I would think, “Why can’t I just stop being so freaked out all the time? Why can’t I just relax? Why? Why? What am I doing wrong?”

The answer came when I finally shut-up. When I finally waved the white flag to the One who has already won the battle for me and was begging for me to be still and sit calmly in his pool of peace.

Surrender.  Oh, sweet surrender. Such a simple, easy answer. Such a basic and quiet act. The very work I had been laboring over had already been done for me. All that was left was for me to stop, breathe, and recognize that I needed to surrender my self to my Savior.

Surrender.

All of this, Lord. I give it to you. All of my yuck. All of my fear. All that threatens to control me and pull me into my self-seeking ways. The only work required, the only action I must take, is the simple task of surrender.

Let go. I had to recognize that my own strength and desire, hard work and determination would not achieve the peace I was looking for.

Peace can only come through surrender.

Lay it down. Give it up.

It is so hard to let go of control. And yet I have found that by trying to hold on to control – I become crazily out of control. While working so hard to be and to do, I accomplish very little.

Surrender.

It has become a theme for me, a newly found word, a beautiful recognition of what God asks of me. Surrender.

God promises, “Let me heal you. Let me make you into what I am calling you to be. Let me. Let me. I’ve got you.”

Peace. Comfort. Joy. The beautiful blessings that follow surrender.

Upon recognizing this and experiencing the peace that came once I surrendered my sins and my self to Jesus, was the battle now over for me? In some ways, yes. But in other ways, my real fight was just beginning.

Continue reading: Peace

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Seek

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If you haven’t already, you may want to go back and read Raw, Guilt , Beginning, and Anxiety before reading this post.

So why was I like this? Why did I have this insane drive to go and to do and to please and to fix and to be and to go and to go and to go?

I had no idea. I had been like this since forever. I thought it was just how I was wired.

I realized that I needed to identify the root of this problem. I did not want a Band-Aid to cover it up. I did not want to deny the issue anymore. I needed to start at the beginning so that God could heal me and re-train my heart and head to respond to life in a healthy way.

I surrendered the need to God, stopped to listen, and after several days, He revealed the root of this issue to me. It was quite simple actually. As a small child, I had started believing the lie that pleasing people is the way to please God. That making sure people are pleased with me and happy with me was the gauge that measured my worth as a Christian. That disappointing others was a disappointment to God. Conflict and confrontation needn’t happen because I would simply live to please.

And so I did.

In doing so, I somehow lost myself. I was serving my family. I was serving God’s people. I was knocking myself out doing and being for others what I felt they were needing and expecting me to do and be. If someone was hurting, I thought it was up to me to fix it. If someone needed something, I would drop everything to meet that need. If I hadn’t known of someone’s need, I felt guilty for not being aware.

There is a certain level of pleasing others that is healthy and good. We want to be a blessing to those around us. But the truth is: The only One I need to seek to please is God. In doing so, others will be blessed. My focus needs to be on God and His will for me. Not on others. And certainly not on self.

Satan doesn’t want any of us to thrive. He wants us to struggle, hurt, fight bitterness, and stay stuck in a pool of yuck and assume that it is just a part of this balanced breakfast.

Sure enough, he often tricks us into believing that our struggles are “part of our personality.” We think, “It’s just who I am.” As a matter of fact, he’s such a good deceiver that often, we don’t even realize that a struggle is a struggle. It may even be disguised as a “gift from God.” Satan takes truth and puts a slight twist on it so that it becomes a lie. He is the greatest of all deceivers. He’s a clever one, that Satan. Which is why seeking truth is so very important.

God was glorified even in the midst of my struggle while I strived to serve Him through my weaknesses. It’s just that God wanted to show me a better way. I needed to recognize Satan’s lies about what it meant to be a servant of God. And I needed to stop being deceived into thinking that God was only pleased with me if I served others around me until I passed out cold.

Remember my “high gear?” My always revved engine? I truly was working to glorify God with my Go!Go!Go! mentality and activity. I thought that always putting others first and constantly seeking to meet the needs of everyone around me was the way I was to serve God.

As it turns out, I was really seeking to serve myself. It was time for me to learn truth.

Continue reading: Stop

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Anxiety

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This post may contain affiliate links. For more information, please see our disclosure policy.

If you haven’t already, you may want to go back and read Raw, Guilt , and Beginning before reading this post.

~~~

Sit down. Be still. Chill out. Relax. I have been good at none of these.

I have always been – okay not always – but since about age 12, I have been running on high gear. I have been an old clunker of a car that only continues to run if you keep your foot on the gas pedal.

What? You only have new cars and therefore don’t understand the gas pedal pushing of which I speak? I’m thinking back mostly to a car I had in high school. The car would start sometimes and only when the weather was right, if I wasn’t wearing the color blue, and if it wasn’t the fourth Tuesday of the month. Starting it required that I pump the gas pedal continuously, praying that in doing so, I didn’t flood the engine.

Once the (blasted) car finally started, it could never sit idle. I had to rev the engine constantly to keep it from dying.

Me.  I have been the car that has a foot on the gas pedal, continuing to rev. And rev. And rev.

I didn’t know it though. I just thought that this was how I functioned. This is my personality, right? That is how I was able to get so much done in a day. This is how I do things. This was just me.

Or so I thought.

I am now learning that revving my engine in high gear should be saved for the few and far between moments when one of my boys flings himself off a mattress and into a metal bed frame, resulting in the need for a fast trip to the ER for stitches on his forehead. That should not be my normal, daily mode. Life is not an emergency, but I lived each moment like it was.

So that was me, and boy did I kick tail every day. I loved everything I was doing all day long. I love being with my kids, and teaching them. (Although I’m not a big fan of grammar lessons because really, why do my kids and I need to care about, much less identify, a predicate nominative?)  I love cooking and taking care of my home. I love writing and blogging and keeping in touch with all of my readers. I love Jesus and serving his people.

But somehow, I thought I needed my engine to be revved in high gear in order to do these things. There was no peace. Only a Go!Go!Go! mentality that kept me constantly on the move, constantly working to make sure I was being the best Christian possible, all the time, because this is what He’s called me to be and anything less was just not enough because, well, it just wasn’t.

Hardly anyone around me, even those who were closest to me – and I’m talking about my husband here – were actually very aware of my constantly revved engine. I mean, like I said, I certainly didn’t really recognize it. I thought this was just “me” and how I did life.

As so much of my yuck has been revealed to me by God the past few months and as I have shared it all (in detail) to my (longsuffering, amazing) husband – while he has been thankful to hear what God has been teaching me, he has also been surprised. He feels that I’m being too hard on myself perhaps. “Really Laura,” he has told me, “you have never come across to me as being this anxious. I see you as being driven, hard working, intentional – and yeah, you get a lot done in a day. But you do it all in love and with care. I really don’t see you as the crazy brained woman you are describing.”

Yeah, that’s because my revved engine was all pent up inside. It was in my shoulders that were constantly tight and stiff. It was in my head, which was constantly thinking about the next eighty-three things that “needed” to get done. So much for living in the moment! After all, the moment is just about to be sooo thirty seconds ago. Go!Go!Go! (Wow, get migraines much, Laura?)

I’m so grateful to share that God is helping me let go of the anxiety that has been driving me all these years. Hear the key words in that sentence: the anxiety that has been driving me. How dare I let anything as miserable as anxiety drive or control me, my attitude, and my actions? God calls me to serve Him, but like this?

I needed to let it go. But how?

Continue reading: Seek

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Guilt

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I’ve tried several times to write about this, only to find my fingers paralyzed at the keyboard. I’ve experienced God at work enough during this past year to understand that the lack of words meant that God was saying, “No. Not yet.” And so I stepped away, waiting for God’s timing.

I’ve gone through rough times before. I’ve been through the refining fire and been taught tough lessons that have brought me closer to God. Those times were always accompanied by an obvious difficult situation – like the illness and death of my mom, or a major job transition for Matt that gave way to confusion and discouragement.

But this. This came at a time when all was well. Better than well, in my opinion. A thriving marriage, healthy children, growing businesses, a time of living our dreams. Life was good – and I asked God to show me His power and how He could use me best. After all, we should never get to a point that we feel we’ve arrived. To whom much is given, much is expected (Luke 12:48). I believe God expected more of me. I asked Him to show me what that meant. And He said, “I can’t until you give up your self.”

I didn’t really know that was what He was asking at first. All I knew was that life as I knew it began to change. I began to have more anxiety. I was having frequent migraine headaches. I began struggling with what has always come naturally for me, like inviting people into my home, giving of myself to others – wanting to be with people at all.

Which heaped guilt onto my anxiety. Didn’t God call us to love others? To serve? To sacrifice? To give of ourselves? What was the matter with me? What kind of Christian was I anyway?

I had found myself in the midst of spiritual battle, wrestling constantly with who I was, what God required of me, how I was supposed to love people, and in the midst of it all, how I was supposed to put dinner on the table.

(And here you thought that the Getting Ahead in the Kitchen eCourse and eBook were written as a normal part of my site. Truly, they were born out of my own need, solidifying everything I’ve always shared about preparing healthy food for days you don’t have time or energy to cook. In the midst of struggling emotionally and spiritually, keeping myself physically healthy became more important than ever.)

I’m getting a little bit ahead of myself. For now, here are some of the truths He is teaching me:

  • When we ask God to show us what He wants us to do, He will show us. When we listen, He will speak.
  • Spiritual battle is exhausting. Allowing ourselves to rest in the midst of it is wise and necessary. Taking care of our physical health is very important to our emotional health.
  • God is faithful to always provide what we need.
  • Sometimes we are called to serve; sometimes we are called to be served.
  • The Holy Spirit convicts us of our guilt when we are sinning, which leads us to repentance. But the nagging, worrisome, hopeless, unhealthy guilt that torments our thoughts does not come from the Father. It comes from listening to lies from the enemy.

Are you hanging on to unhealthy guilt that you need to let go of?  Join me in drop-kicking it in the name of Jesus. Trust me when I say that hanging on to guilt keeps us focused on self instead of our Savior.

Continue reading:  Beginning

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Getting to the Root Cause of Eczema: What Worked for Malachi

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Our six year old has struggled with chronic eczema since he was two months old. If you’ve been reading here long, you know the heartache we’ve had watching our boy suffer from this.

The hardest part of this has been that we’ve felt so helpless. We’ve tried so many different remedies in an effort to give him comfort and ultimately, to try to find healing for him. Time after time, try after try, dollar after dollar, nothing took away his miserable skin condition. We’re thankful that through this journey, our family has learned about eating a whole foods diet and about non-toxic cleaning and using non-toxic products on our skin. We’ve also learned quite a bit about overall body health and that simply “fixing Malachi’s skin” or any medical condition is not just a matter of “take this pill or use this cream” – we must get to the root of the problem.

Once we began seeking alternative and more natural sources of healing, we were taught that eczema is not ultimately a skin issue. It appears to be a skin issue because that is where the pain and itching manifest themselves. But skin is an organ. When other organs are not working properly, the organ of the skin can be effected. This was the case for Malachi. Doctors found that his liver and kidneys were not working properly, thus toxins were not being flushed the way they needed to be. Toxins have to go somewhere and in Malachi’s case, they were coming out through his skin. Therefore, he was covered with eczema. (Obviously, this is just my “mommy version” of the diagnosis – I don’t know all of the technical ins and outs of this. Also, not all cases of eczema are the same. This is just Malachi’s story.)

Steroids and cortisone creams had helped clear his skin somewhat when we tried those in the very beginning, but since those were only meant to treat the symptoms, as soon as he stopped using them, his skin broke out again. Once we had an understanding about the toxins trying to rid themselves from his body, it scared us to use the steroids and cortisone creams. Beyond other long term side effects that can result in him using steroids and cortisone creams, the thought of the toxins being suppressed in his little body gave us cause for many other more serious fears.

Over the past six years, we’ve tried a variety of natural methods to cleanse his system. Some of them were effective for a time, but did not clear him up completely. (You can read here about several things we’ve done that did make a difference – at least it kept the eczema from becoming worse!)

You may remember that we tried a gluten free diet last spring. You can read the details here, but long story short, it didn’t help even a little bit. We considered taking him off dairy, off eggs, off night shade veggies, off whatever it took to help him feel better. Thankfully, in the meantime, we heard about a biochemist in Wisconsin who sounded like a promising option. We’d heard great testimonies about how she’d helped others, not only with eczema but with all sorts of health issues.

We decided to make the investment. It wasn’t cheap (although it was very reasonable for the services offered). It was hard work. We had to carefully watch what Malachi ate and be diligent about giving him supplements. One of the simple but most important things – we had to make sure he was drinking plenty of water to flush out his system while the supplements, digestive enzymes and cleansing products went to work.

It was not an easy fix. It was not without frustration. Malachi did not become better overnight.

But after a long summer of dedicated time spent on this, he is now only taking minimal supplements and is back to eating almost all of the regular healthy, whole foods we feed our family. Now that we are at this point, it is very apparent that when he drinks his needed quota of water each day, he feels much better.

Praise be to God, our boy is making his way toward good health! The relief and gratitude we feel can not be put into words.

Look at that sweet, clear baby skin. I can’t help but kiss him frequently. Even during math lessons.
(And in case you’re wondering, he’s eating a vanilla pudding pop.)

I have to say that I’ve been hesitant to share too much about this on my blog. I WANT all of you to know about this amazing treatment option. There is hope and there is healing for eczema, allergies, behavior issues – many health concerns. A big part of me has wanted to shout this from the roof-tops – CALL THIS LADY! SHE CAN HELP YOU!!!! But there are many of you and I don’t want to overwhelm her with emails and phone calls. She has a heart of gold and a desire to help as many as she can, but she is also a human being with limits. So, I share hesitantly. ;)  Except for WOW I’M SO THANKFUL – that part I’m not hesitant about! You’ve all been so supportive and caring while we’ve walked this journey with Malachi. You deserve to have an update on his progress.

Thank you all so much for cheering for us and for caring about our boy. God is always, always, always faithful.

UPDATE:

We were initially helped by a Biochemist, named Su. I don’t know if Su still practices or not as I haven’t been in touch with her in several years and we’ve since found a local natural doctor that helped us even more! But here’s her contact information: [email protected] . Also, you can check out her new website here: http://www.promiseoutreach.org/

Either way, I encourage you to search for a natural doctor in your area who will help you get to the root of the problem. We sure appreciate our doctor who treated our son’s problem instead of his symptoms!

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Gratituesday: Prayer for Healing

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When my friends are hurt, I hurt. 

Last week, one of my friends became very ill. I’ve watched my church family rally around her family, helping with the kids, taking meals…and I’ve been so thankful to be a part of a body of believers that cares for one another.

I’ve been fighting a head cold myself, so it wasn’t wise for me to head over to her house to offer any help. But I’m doing much better now so finally tonight I got to go for a short visit. 

I didn’t do much. I delivered milk to her door and made a Wal-mart list of things they needed since I was on my way to the store. That was it.

But I got to hug my friend’s neck…and more importantly…I got to do what I’d been longing to do since I heard she’d become sick:  I got to pray with her.

Prayer is so powerful. When I feel helpless to do something to “make everything better” when truly, there’s not much I can do to help her body heal…I am so thankful that I can fall to my knees, take my friend’s hands, and pray.

It was beautiful, and I’m not sure but that she may have felt just a little bit better when I left. 

I know I sure did.

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