And They Said I Couldn't Garden

I have a black thumb.  There, I said it. I think I bring my family disgrace by such wretched and awful gardening skills. I was tempted to take a picture of the recent flower that died on me for you guys to fully understand the way that I am capable of killing plants. But I spared your eyeballs. You. Are. Welcome. 

We have a flower box that I begged my husband for below our window that faces the street. I envisioned red beautiful flowers thriving in all their glory. I asked for the budget to purchase those flowers and my husband said I better buy them some place that can return them in case they died. He knows me all too well. I told him to give me a year and if I killed them I would just buy fake ones and never bother with buying any living organism ever again.  He came in one day from the yard and tells me "honey your plant out back... [I looked at him as he caught my attention] .."IT'S thriving!" If you couldn't tell by the capitalized AND italicized word, he was smiling with sarcasm. Just as that plant had died a terrible death, so did my red geraniums in my planter box.  Mind you, I asked for plants that you couldn't kill. Oh these are resilient they said, you won't kill these, they said...  They hadn't even made it half the year and they all looked dead and so sad. SO I returned them and got fake ones. I did however manage to not fully kill two little bundles. So I thought I would plant them in my "once thriving with plants that I also killed round spot" for the longest time nothing was happening. All I saw were green leaves. That's a good sing though. Anything not brown in plants is good right? So I left them. Doug kept threatening me to rip them out, to replace them with a tree but I kept asking him to give them a chance. 

A few weeks ago as I pulled in my driveway a bright red color caught my eye! MY FLOWERS BLOOMED! My four year old got so excited with me she tells her dad, "Daddy mommy's garden is so beautiful". Ahhhhh bless the hearts of little children. So we named the flower FAITH. I am happy to report that because God has sent in some rain (because I have forgotten to water the thing) FAITH the geranium, has multiple buds of flowers and she is beautiful. Not only has she endured all sorts of adversity (ANY plant that can withstand my black thumb is a resilient survivor. ) But she in comparison to my FAKE plants now residing on my window box- looks stunning. Those fake plants do not hold a candle to her TRUE colors and spirit. Even though she doesn't look perfect, even though some of her leaves have holes in them, EVEN though some of her flowers are a little dried out, her beauty so radiates from the inside and has truth and life ringing through her that all of the other "perfect" looking flowers are left in the background and all I want to look at every time I pull in, is her. I know she didn't do it on her own. God has helped her and strengthened her. If he has done that for her what more can he do for us? 

Now something else that blessed my heart so much here is that the other day I went up to look at FAITH the geranium and to my surprise the plant that I for sure thought was dead next to her is now full of little buds that will flower in a few days. FAITH inspired her friend to bloom for herself! What an image. I hope to God that you are following my crazy mind here. When we abide in God and we allow him to help us have fruit, we inspire those around us to trust him to do the same for them. I hope that if you're feeling today that you are that flower on it's last days hanging by a thread, you've been beat up, you've endured your own version of my black thumb. I pray and hope that you hang on. That you ask God for his help and that you abide in his word and watch to see if he doesn't grow some amazing flowers in your heart.  He is willing and he is able! Bloom on lover muffins! 

Here's a picture of my FAITH and the fakies. Look for yourself, which flower would you rather be? 

Stay blessed and stay saucy! 

-Libier

Healing In The Pain

If I can be honest with ya'll I've been going through one of the most excruciatingly painful times of my life. It has been a very difficult season in my life and my families as well. When momma ain't happy ain't no body happy, has been a true and tried motto in this house. I've asked that God's grace would cover much of the crazy mood swings I've been having and I know that his grace HAS covered so much of my shortcomings this past year. 

I am going through a healing time with God. He has called me to the wilderness with him and we are sitting in a very dark, very painful and uncomfortable place Him and I. Before I started reading my bible a lot more consistetnly I didn't know that there was much of my life that needed to be changed. I think I was living in a safe reality that I had so carefuly created for myself. I was safe. I pretended to myself that I  was "content" with my place in life and I wasn't going to take many risks. As long as my little world spinned my way, I was fine. I did so much to try to control my life and that of my husband and kids, in order to not feel out of control.  But to be honest it was getting to be too exhausting and I could tell something was wrong, I just coudln't tell you what the heck the matter WAS. I was trying to fix things as they poped up instead of going to the root of my issues. 

I knew before I started reading my bibile that I had many flaws. I knew that. But I didn't know that God wanted to help me shed some of the things that were hindering me from knowing him better and from living a life full of adventure, joy and peace. FREEDOM was something I thought I had, until now. I KNOW God is setting me free as we speak. It wasn't until I was honest with myself and with God about the state of my heart that the healing began.  I didn't trust God. I wasn't free and I didn't show many signs of the fruit of His spirit. I knew I was being a hypocrite calling myself a Christian when the life I lead pointed the opposite direction. 

As I am healing, God keeps helping me understand each step when I am ready. Right now I am in the stage of acceptance. I am praying for God to help me have acceptance be the backbone of my healing. When I first learned that I had been sexualy abused I didn't want to belive the little girl inside me telling me there was something wrong. God exposed all the truth so it would set me free. It has been the most painful thing I've ever felt as a thrity year old woman to admit to herlsef that she has been badly hurt. But in accepting it, I have been able to experience peace.  I have been able to understand myself a little deeper and to KNOW that it was NOT my fault. It was not ME. THAT didn't come from me not matter how my body reacted. There has been an extreme change in my heart. I no longer feel angry all the time. God has allowed me to process my emotions in His loving arms. I struggle with anxiety and I have had more panic attacks than I'd like to admit. But through every one, the minute I allowed it to just be, the minute I surrendered ALL of my emotions to God; it was as if black tar was flowing from my heart outward into the His light and being changed into good energy instead of being stuck inside of me and coming out at non-welcomed times and places. I knew that if I didn't decide to heal with God on this, that it would eventually kill me. If it didn't kill me physically it would have mentally and emotionally. 

That is why I am trusting God to help me heal. But with healing, comes pain. I have been so badly hurt in my life that I am terrified of pain. The more I heal, the more accepting of pain I become. I welcome it because  I would rather be in pain and know peace and my savior than be pretending nothing is wrong and feeling hopeless, bitter and angry. There is healing in the pain. There is an end to the madness. My pain becomes energy to help someone else with their pain and my hope is that their pain will help someone else with their pain, and so on and so forth. I have learned that all of the things that happened to me have the opportunity to work for the good of me and other people. Genesis 50:20 Joseph said to his brothers. "You intended to hurt me but God intended it for good to accomplish what is now being done, the saving of many lives." I know that this is hard stuff to hear and to talk about. But the devil loves secrecy for that very reason. It isolates us and makes us feel like we're the only damaged one. That is a lie from the pit of hell! 

God has such a loving and compassionate heart he knows what we all have been through and he wants to heal us from all of our pain. In this life my pain may never go away completely. I know that I will remember the feeling I had when I started to heal, so I can empathise with another sister or brother of mine that has gone through the same thing. So that I can hold them tightly and tell them of how God has redeemed me and  that he will do the same for them. I actually don't want to forget. The people that have helped me the most in this trying time have been people that have also suffered pain and know how to give an encouraging hug and point me to Jesus. We will never have the ability to heal anyone in our lives, we have to realase them into the hands of Jesus;  but what we can do is what the bible instructs us to do which is "Mourn with those who mourn; rejoice with those who rejoice." Romans 12:15

I might be in pain right now but I am recovering. The one thing I won't do is give up. I heard Christine Caine say this today and I could not agree more. " The devil on his BEST day didn't take me out on MY WORST day." God has already won the fight. We need only to grasp his hand tighly and let Him help us embrace the pain of recovery. Because the devil will tell you that because you're in pain you are still not healed. NO FRIENDS! It's because we are healing that we feel pain. Praise God. 

By allowing God to help me heal the quality and amazingness of my life has doubled! I can now hold my head up high with the dignity that God provides me. I do believe that in heaven I will not experience any of this pain. And you won't either. 

 Stay blessed and stay saucy 

-Libier Reynolds 

What's Love Got To Do With It?

One of my first experiences with love, aside from family love, was my first boyfriend Zachary. He and I had this captivating love that started as explosively as a firework and ended just as fast. We had been in our relationship for a week and had already said the “I love you”s. Sadly, he had to move to Oregon because his parents were making him, (of course it wasn’t his idea, he was too in love with me to move) and so our love ended. It was the summer of fourth grade and I just knew my life would never be the same. We couldn’t keep up a long distance relationship, so we said our goodbyes. He left me with a love letter and a rock shaped as a heart- awesome! I cried my little heart out. I really didn’t know if my life would go on. I just recently read some of my journal entries from this very tumultuous time in my life and I couldn’t help but laugh, but in my ten year old me’s defense, what I felt for Zachary was the kind of love that cultivates in a week and you literally have no idea if your heart will ever be able to love again. Obviously, my heart loved again… again and again.

With every relationship I learned something about myself. Sometimes it would be something wonderful and others it would be just terrible. Baggage I wouldn’t want anyone else to know about me.  So I moved on, hoping that the next relationship would not expose the nastiness inside of me. But that’s the funny part about relationships. Someone will always make the little “monsters” in us come out to play when we least expect it. My experience of love without God in my life was conditional and self-seeking. It wasn’t until I got married that I realized that I was meant to love differently. No matter how many times my heart got broken, I was made to love time after time because love is a choice! The fireworks that I felt with Zachary when I was ten were the same fireworks I felt with any new boyfriend and especially my husband. However, the fireworks fizzled and that feeling of butterflies in my stomach was always something of the past. There had to be something else driving that love so it could sustain itself. The choice had to be to remain interested and wanting to make my husband feel respected and loved.  Not wondering what he has or hasn’t done for me lately (For the record I just want to say that what I just described is my ultimate wife persona. She is with me from time to time but other personas enjoy playing as well. Such as the nagging persona, the hormonal persona, the “You-don’t-care-about-my-new-haircut-so-that-means-you-don’t-love-me”persona, so on and so forth. I am not at all a perfect wife. I wish I could be, but this “choice” is ultimately the best version of me). Being married has sure taught me a few things about love.

June 2007- church bells are ringing!  We came home from our honeymoon and normalcy settled in. I felt a sense of uneasiness. I had no idea what I had signed up for. I thought that love and marriage were these perfect little butterflies that would flutter around the house everyday and we would always be smiling and he would always be my knight in shining what-cha-ma-call-it. We courted for only 5 months, got engaged, and in 5 more months we were locked in. So, you can see we didn’t know ALL the icky-ickies about each other yet, yet being the KEY word here. As our first year of marriage pressed on like a supercharged train, we went along for the ride. Finding many joys in the marriage as well as many dark moments in which we needed a higher power to help us! At one point in our marriage, I was having problems with an issue I’ve been battling with for a long time and I remember being so shattered inside that at that moment I thought I was unlovable by anyone. I was scared for my husband to see my brokenness. I thought that if he saw me this weak and sad he wasn’t going to want to be around me anymore. Skeletons of my past kept me captive and unable to move forward with my life. Horrible circumstances not fair for a young girl to have gone through haunted my thoughts. I was working out with God what had to be cut loose in order for the healing process to begin. I wanted to forgive. I wanted to rid myself of all the pain I felt inside. I got closer to God because my life depended on it. It wasn’t easy letting go and letting God’s love cover me like a blanket of hope. It wasn’t easy forgiving. When I made the choice to lift up my problems to the only One who can heal all, my salvation began. It was still very difficult for me. I can vividly remember one night crying in the shower. My husband heard my sorrow, got in and just held me. We didn’t speak one single word for a long time, he just held on to me until I cried out my very last tear. At the beginning, my tears were for how broken I felt inside and then they became tears of joy-joy for the love God had just displayed for me through my husband. That day my husband proved to me that he loves me beyond my looks, he loves me beyond the moments when I’m funny and kind and deserving of love. He loves me whole-heartedly.

Let’s jump ahead three years. It’s a hot August midnight; many contractions have been had. Too many if you ask me. I have been in labor for over thirteen hours and still no sign of this baby! Where is she!?  I was hungry, tired, and plain bored. I thought this show was going to be on the road much faster than it all went down. I was mad at my husband because he had just gotten to eat the most amazing smelling tri-tip barbecue sandwich, and the sweet smell of the barbecue sauce impregnated the room. Did I wish he would have fasted with me through this terrible two day ordeal? YES. Did he? NO. Anyway, I’m not bitter at him anymore, but not any-less either...  After being in pain, exhausted, feeling cheated with food, and bored to death, three o’clock came around. Guess who was ready to make her appearance? Who would have guessed that an hour of pushing a watermelon out of your what-do-you-know would feel like an eternity!  At 4:17AM, my little 8 pound, 21 inch slimy nugget got put on my chest. In that brief moment my heart grew about fifty times over. After having what seemed like hundreds of people in our room we were all of the sudden alone with our baby girl. It felt so bizarre, Mark 10:8 was apparent, “And the two shall become one”, and that we did! Whoa, I was in utter bliss and disbelief. I never, ever, in a bazillion years could have ever been prepared for the love I felt for my daughter.  Even now after a year of being a mommy I have a hard time containing all the love I have for her in my heart. I know that the way I love her is just a little preview of what God’s love is for me!  Dang!

I’ve been feeling love from my family ever since my mother’s first sign of morning sickness.  This incredible love fest has continued throughout my life. I have been so blessed to feel so much love from so many people! However, I will say that the one love that has made me fully understand what it really means to love is God’s love for ME. It is really easy for me to love people, when they are behaving in a way that I perceive as deserving of my love. It’s so easy for me to act loving to my husband when he brings me flowers and he rubs my feet. It’s amazing telling my little baby girl I love her when she smiles at me and hugs me. It is not so easy when they are being rude and mean, but that is what it means to really love, when it’s not conditional upon people’s behavior. God loves me even in the moments when I feel unlovable. He loves me in the moments when I least deserve it. He loves me in the moments when I feel completely broken and shattered. That kind of love is what I am striving for. I have felt love, I have experienced love, but I never fully understood it until I understood how profoundly God loves me.

My Deepest Darkest Secret

So to contrary believe (in my head), I'm not perfect. *Gasp* *Gasp* I like to think that I could be... (fat chance, haha!) However, I'm personality type A and I'm always trying to better myself inwardly as well as outwardly. I'm constantly thinking of how I can be better, so when I mess up, I feel like running away to Zimbabwe (I don't know why that popped in my head, maybe I subconsciously wanna go there). When I do something wrong, I literary want to just dig a hole and stay in there until I and who ever I wronged forgets the whole ordeal and we can move on with our lives. Well, that behavior becomes difficult once you become an adult. My husband has forbade me to dig any more holes in the back yard... Folks are you ready for this. I made a big mistake recently and I was dishonest with someone very close to me. I HATED the fact that I sinned, but I ABHORRED the fact that it affected someone else. Now I've always been one to think that honesty is the best policy but, I am human and there are many "distractions" in the world that can make even the most goody-two-shoes stray and become a barefoot, bad-dy (just like this joke). I made a mistake and I had to fess up to my dishonesty, yikes!

 Sin, even the littlest one, can be like a super clean windshield with a small dollop of bird crap. Even though your heart is for the most part "clean", your gaze STILL draws to the inevitable bird poo in the midst of your clean windshield. Even when you're trying to pretend there is nothing there, if you ignore your sin and don't bring truth to it, you further yourself from God more and more with each passing day. You can think it's no big deal, all I did was tell a white lie, but God knows and more importantly YOU know that you've done something that is apart from good. That division starts small but if you don't snip it in the bud, you end up with splotches of crap everywhere. Those splotches become more and more accepted by you and your peace and relationship with God starts to waver. NOT because God is pushing you away, but because in the back of your mind you KNOW you've done something wrong and YOU are the one pushing  It would have been easier to take a little Windex and clean off the first little dollop, and just maintain the mess on an ongoing basis. Let's face it we all can have messes on our windshields, we are all bound to. But the faster you come to God with those sins and you let him wrap his blanket of forgiveness on you the faster you'll be taking care of your heart. This is what I was battling with for a while and I finally listened to my conviction to come clean and I have suffered the consequences of my actions, my beloved someone has forgiven me and I feel like I can move on to the next splotch.

I have accepted that I am in no way shape or form perfect and I will probably always have a little poo on my windshield. However, the stronger and stronger I get in my faith, the faster and more conviction i feel toward any sinful nature in my heart. Thank God for His forgiveness. He forgives us faster than we ever will.

Stay blessed and stay saucy!!