By the light of my camera screen...

On this cold December morning, hours before light seeps into the dark horizon, I had an epiphany as I sorted through smiles of children, happy moments and dear memories. I am positive, no I HOPE it is certain that many others have had this same desire and idea, and I am so glad God whispered it into my heart as well. I share that you too may be inspired to participate!

I am going to start a new blog project where I will begin documenting 1000 gifts via photos I take personally! Awesome, right?

After being loaned the book One Thousand Gifts by a long-time friend and sister in the Lord, I was moved so deeply by Ann's words.  My overall outlook on life so drastically changed, that I decided I MUST begin a list of simple daily gifts I for which I am most thankful.  I walk through my day now, thanking God as I go often but do not always take the time to scribble the memory down, or snap a photo to remember it always by. God has blessed my family richly, but I intend to dig deeper, look closer, open my heart's eyes to new and previously un-noticed gifts and be thankful in every moment of everyday for the small glimpses of God in everything and every situation. Not just the "good" gifts, but every touch, word, moment, manifestation, and situation that our Creator lovingly lets come our way. 

"Eucharisteo – life-filling gratitude – the practice of which is exercised in recording blessings, one by one." 

I am SO thankful and EXCITED! I hope you will follow my blog; the one thousand humble photos of things, people, places and those little moments of life that I am thankful and grateful for. They will fill it's pages over the course of this coming year(and beyond) until I have at least 1000 "gifts" recorded. You can check out my up and coming blog Eu.char.is.te.o and maybe even be inspired to start a list for yourself if you haven't already! Let's all, friends, choose to be thankful. Choose to live a life drenched in life-filling gratitude. Let's all make a choice to live a life of eucharisteo soaked in gratitude,  giving thanks and praise to God in the midst of even grief, loss and uncertainty; for He Is all good, in all and holds all things together.Though darkness spots His rays of beauty, He is light complete. Always light. The kind of light that fills the deepest darkest cranny's of our scorched souls and brings life to our hopeless wastelands.

Blessings to you, and merry CHRISTmas!
Mommy

Mum's the WORD!

Secrets, just between God and us-I believe they make Him happy!

     Therefore, when you do a charitable deed, do not sound a trumpet before you as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory from men. Assuredly, I say to you, they have their reward. But when you do a charitable deed, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, that your charitable deed may be in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will Himself reward you openly.

Matthew 6:2-4

“A house is made of walls and beams;

a home is built with love and dreams.”

"How I want to see the weight of glory break my thick scales, the weight of glory smash the chains of desperate materialism, split the shell of deadening entertainment, bust up the ice of catatonic hearts. I want to see God, who pulls on the coat of my skin and doesn't leave me alone in this withering body of mortality... isn't He the face of all faces? He is infinite and without end, without jaw or sockets, everywhere eye. The face of the moon, the face of the doe, the face of derelict, the face of pain, His, the countenance that seeps up through the world, face without limitation, face that "plays in ten thousand places."


All beauty is only reflection.
And whether I am conscious of it or not, any created thing or person of which I am amazed, it is the glimpse of His face to which I bow down. Do I have eyes to see it's Him and not the "thing"? Satan came in the scales that gleamed, a thing of beauty, and he lured the first woman and she was deceived. Beauty, the disguise can slide dangerous. True authentic Beauty requires of us, lays claim to us, and it is this, the knees bent, the body offered in obedience. A pantheists god is a passive god, but omnipresent God is Beauty who demands worship, passion, and the sacrifice of a life, for it is He who owns it. Do I have eyes to see His face in all things so I'm not merely dazzled by the trinket, glitzy bauble dangling for the ogling, till it flakes and breaks and I strain for more to lie prostrate before?"


~One Thousand Gifts

Why are we constantly as Christians lifting up and magnifying the names of the vessels, those "good" outspoken saints and not the only worthy One, Jesus Christ, God, Spirit within us, Creator and illustrator of ALL things good?  Let's be amazed at Him, not his children! Let's scorn Satan and his tactics and leave the judging of radicals and sinners to the One true Judge over all and only One who intimately knows all men's hearts!

A notion

I am overjoyed
that it's not about
how good I am
but so much more
about how good
I am not and how
overwhelmingly
GOOD God is.

Oh, happy day it is when we grasp on to that concept and let it weave itself deep into the very fabric of our daily living.