Let Me Tell You How Much Money I've Raised!

Happy Friday friends and family! I hope this full week after the Holidays was productive and that you're alive! I am so grateful for 2015, a new start! Let me start by saying I sort of tricked you. To be honest I've raised $0 for the half a million that I want to raise for Bridget's Dream (If you need the beggining of this story click HERE)!

I haven't posted an update for a WHILE so there is a lot to cover. But I'm going to make it short and simple for you! Even though I still haven't raised any money yet there are soooooo many nuggets of hope! Nordstrom is STILL a big possibility, I talked to them this week but they were supper bogged down from the Holydaze! Sonia Kashuk actually has come on the HOPE waggon. I am waiting to hear back from their publicist, I am thinking possibly next week! I called Target this week and didn't have any luck getting a live person to talk to, only fun robots and they weren't very helpful, they kept hanging up on me. I guess they don't get programed with empathy or compassion.... I thought I would give up on Target and my amazing husband found a webiste called human.com where you can get an actual phone line with real live breathing people with pulses. I was able to get through three people and the third person knew the woman who does casting for commercials and print so she sent my request to her via e-mail.... MORE HOPE! THEN I followed up with Loui Vuitton... Can I just say I am utterly amazed at their level of customer servise. They have an incredible team of people. I talked to two very nice ladies and they both were super helpful. They e-mailed me saying that it takes approximately four weeks to review any proposals. So WE WAIT. THEN I wrote a proposal to Proctor and Gamble. Phew! 

Today though! I got my VERY FIRST YES! I don't know all the details yet so I won't be able to say whom! BUT I am freaking out!!!!! God is so good! After saying no, they changed their minds! God has given me a fierce persistance. It is not of me but of HIM! The old me would NEVER take rejection and tried again. I would just feel defeated and hurt that I had been rejected! He is a God of restoration and courage! I can't wait to learn all the details of how they are going to use me but this company is awesome and they are local. So stay tuned for all the details! 

I am in awe of the work God is doing in me through all of this. He is helping me trust Him more and more and know that in Him all things hold together. And all things are possible through HIM! I don't know when, I don't know how (and I've actually stopped getting butt hurt that GOD isn't giving me ALL the details because to be honest HE IS GOD - I am NOT. He can keep his ultimate plan and I just need to rely on Him one day at a time!) He is giving me a peace that surpasses my understandinig. Even though at times I fall appart in my head, even thougth at times I want to give up. I won't. I don't. Thank you for reading this! Stay tuned! If you feel called to, please share my story with your friends and family. Encourage someone to believe that miracles still exist. Me being alive is one of them! THANK YOU FOR ALL YOUR PRAYERS, GOOD THOUGHTS, ENCOURAGEMENT, LOVE, HELP. Your involment in this is as crucial. We all have a hand in this and I thank you for being a part of this in which ever capacity you are from the bottom of my very ELATED heart right now! I am fixing my eyes on Him so that I don't become discouraged. He is calling me to be strong and couragous. I would have never believed I would be couragous in my entire life!! I've felt more like a coward than anything else in life. I've realized courage comes when we know how loved we are. Courage comes when we do what God is calling us to do EVEN if we feel afraid. He knows we will never NOT feel afraid but we don't have to BE afraid because if God is for us who can be against us?! 

Stay blessed and stay saucy 

-Libier 

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.

Why I Write

Let me let you in on a little secret. I love writing this blog because I feel like I'm helping someone while doing it. Even if that someone is myself on days when no one reads the blogs. But I am far from always taking my own advise and I still need a lot of work in my walk with God.  I knew I had to start writing because God told me I had to. To be quite honest I never know what I'm going to write about. Let alone if I'm going to make ANY sense at all. You see, I was never a good writer in school. Shoot, you might think I'm not even a good writer now, that's besides the point. I now enjoy doing it and it makes me joyful. But anyhow. When I write all these things I truly feel like God helps me put the words together. Sometimes I will go back in time and read the things I write and think, wow, I should practice what I "preach".

I am in no way shape or form a  perfect person. I wish I could be on point all the time but I truly have many days where I am so deep in my own selfishness that I can't see past the hairspray in the room. However, the good part about writing a blog is that I keep myself accountable. I, at least have to try and do the things that I say most of the time. I guess I'm just writing this because I would never want any of you to think that I've got my whole act together and I can't take any advise or what ever. Because God knows that I am as far from perfection as Charlie Sheen is from getting back on any decent T.V. show (I'm sorry if you're a big fan). 

I hope you know that I'm in this as much as you are and if you ever need any prayer or anything please don't feel weird, contact me. I would love to pray for you. We are faced with such difficult spiritual warfare in this life and we need to join together as brothers and sisters in Christ and help one another out. If we don't who will?

Stay blessed and stay saucy! 

Stand In Awe!

Today I wanted to just sit outside and look up to the sky and just be. Just sit there and feel how amazing this life is when I allow for silence and peace. I wanted to turn off the i-phone and just concentrate on one thing. But of course, my want was pushed off by "life"-a makeup session I was running late to, a crying baby wanting food and mommy, and the fact that I had to throw the 'diaper genie smelly cargo' away in the big trash can. I put my baby girl in a safe place and ran outside to throw out the trash and in that moment my body just froze, even though I was in a big fat hurry and my mind wanted to just throw out the trash and jet out, I couldn't! I looked up to the heavens and the beautiful picture that God was painting for me in the midst of the amazingly smelling trash bins crossed with that fresh morning air, yumm-O!

 I stood there for what seemed like an hour, (in reality it was only probably about 3 whole minutes). Alas, in that time I felt the warmth of the sun beaming on my face- I smelled the crisp air of the morning- I heard the beautiful sound of the birds singing me a song written specially for me- I looked at one of the most beautiful pictures I have seen in a long time. Fall colors displayed in all their glorious-ness. Yellow, vibrant orange and brown leaves on an amazing tree in my neighbors yard, paired with the blue sky and the clouds. I took thousands of snapshots of this picture in my mind so I would never forget it. I let the world pass me by for three whole minutes and I thought nothing, I said nothing, I did nothing. I have been wanting to enjoy more of what God has created for me and wanted to try to slow my roll a bit so as to enjoy being in silence. I want it but it's very difficult to happen when I get all wrapped up in the "things" that I need to do. I was grateful for that force pulling me to stay and just be in awe. I am looking forward to being able to set aside time to be able to just sit in awe more often.

What I took from this mini-three minute vacation, was that I CAN have that and I'm sure I'd probably be more at peace on a daily basis if I were to allow myself these moments.

Today look around for the beauty of the world. You can find it in the midst of a smelly trash bin, trust me, I know!

Stay blessed and stay saucy ya'll!!!

In Life-How Do You Want To Live?

In life, if you do nothing, no one will ever criticize you or make fun of you. You might not have to endure any hardships, you won't be ridiculed, or bullied. If you have no opinions or ambitions you might live a very "peaceful" life where the world just seems to revolve around you. In life, if you have nothing to live for, there is nothing to lose. If you don't fight with anyone, there is no saying sorry or having to apologize. If you live your life for yourself, things are so much easier. If you don't make any goals, you can't ever let yourself down (or anyone else for that matter). If you don't dream there is no chance of ever getting hurt.  In life, when you play it safe you're the kid without any bandages on your knees. When you don't make any strides at a better life for yourself you always know what to expect. There is nothing that can go wrong? Right?


In life, when you do something, many people (especially the trolls from the paragraph above) WILL make fun of you, bully you, tear you down. If you have an opinion or ambition you will enter a world where you have to defend your point of view at all cost, you will have to find peace INSIDE yourself because peace will not be a constant in the world around you. You will see yourself as a part of life revolving around the universe and thinking of others. If you have something to live for, there's so much you can lose. If you fight for your relationships and for what you believe in (and I certainly do not mean beating someone up to think the way you do, that's the opposite of what I mean) you live a life of ups and downs, you have to put your "pride" aside and say sorry when it's due. If you make goals, you might let yourself down many times and have to pick yourself back up. If you dream, there is a huge chance that at some point your heart will be so broken, you'll need some crazy glue to put it back together. In life, when you go outside of your comfort zone and face your fears, you're the kid that has a bright yellow cast with a thousand signatures. When you're self reflecting and you're always trying to better your soul, there will always be times of uncertainty and fear. But you will eventually ALWAYS find your way, God will help you find your way. 


Which of these two ways do you want to live your life?


Stay blessed and stay saucy!