That Thing I Do Now - Vol 56

Happy Weekend, peeps!  I trust and pray that August is unfolding in all the best ways for you! All the wonders of Summer (and of summer coming to an end) can mix together and make us want to squeeze in all the living that the sunlit hours will allow! (Then again, a shady lounge chair and a pile of good books works wonders, too!)

I somehow managed to collect a Gathering of Awesome early on in the week, and slowly added a few more.  Be prepared... these posts today are such a blessing!



Happy Reading!

Enjoy! (Ya'll know to click on the authors' names to read their whole posts, yes?)

* This one by Kelli Woodford over at SheLoves Magazine with Mirror True...
"And this mirror? It lies to her.

See, because it is made of only cheap cardboard and shine, the mirror that hangs on my door is warped a bit. It distorts the images that it reflects until they look wider and wavier than their original form. My daughter doesn’t see herself for what she really is in this mirror—this one she has befriended—she only sees a poor, contorted similitude with an insidious secret:

The reflection she beholds is not proportionate to the truth of who she is."


* This one by Jennifer Dukes Lee over at InCourage.me with  A Prescription For Worry (The 2-Day Challenge)...
"I fired her this morning. Let me just say, we did not part on good terms.

“We have fundamentally different views about some things,” I said under my breath, before I sent her packing. “It’s not me, it’s you. You are a drain on my calendar, my work life, my mothering, my marriage, and my precious sleep.”

I confess: I have fired my inner worrier a few times before. And I have mistakenly hired her back again against my better judgment.


Because life on planet earth gives all of us plenty of reasons to worry."


* This post by Michelle DeRusha over at Lisa-Jo Baker's blog with When comparisons are choking the life out of you...

"We don’t need to tell ourselves, “If only I could write/look/talk/be like her, then I would be successful, then everything would be good.”

We don’t need to envy someone else’s status, or book sales, or rank, or title or dress size.

Because this, friends, is the Truth:  God’s kingdom, both in heaven and right here on earth, is a spacious place – infinitely broad, infinitely wide, infinitely deep, with room enough for everyone. God doesn’t want us to force ourselves into someone else’s place; He wants us to embrace a much bigger, much roomier place than that.

God yearns for us to enter into his glorious, wide-open spacious place." 

* This post by Bethany Bassett over at A Deeper Story on The Gospel of Corset Removal...
"I don’t know what I’d expected from that first exercise in belly breathing, but it certainly wasn’t a total spiritual overhaul. You can’t learn “the unforced rhythms of grace” in one area of life, see, without it affecting all the others, and once I learned to breathe deep, I couldn’t stop.

I began to inhale truth about the destructive religion of my childhood and to exhale story. I let myself drink brimful from the kindness in Jesus’s voice and sigh from satisfaction instead of angst. Before my eyes, the God who had always been breathing down my neck faded away, a pernicious mirage, until I could finally see the God who breathes life into clay lungs, the one whose breath had been carrying me all along. “So spacious is he,” writes Paul, and I stopped right there on the page, unwilling to read on until those words had inked themselves onto my soul.

So spacious is he.

I hadn’t known."

* This post by Sandra Stanley with a list to live a life by... penned by her daughter for High School girls (but it applies to all of us really!) Allie's Rules for High School...
"To give you a little context, Allie served as a small group leader to middle school girls on Sunday mornings at our church. That group is entering Milton High School as freshmen in a couple weeks. Allie has poured lots of time and energy into these girls over the past few years, and loves them so much. Having just graduated from Milton herself, she has a fresh perspective on exactly what they’ll be encountering over the next four years. She decided to put together a list of “guidelines” that she’s hoping will help them navigate the sometimes treacherous waters of high school.

As Allie began reading her list to me, I found myself crumbling (in a good way) on the inside."


* This post by Jeff Goins with The Secret to Having a Marriage that Never Goes Stale...
"Months before I got married, my friend gave me some important advice, something he had heard from a premarital counselor, I think.

They were seven sage words that I will never forget—the secret, I’ve found, to a happy marriage:

Always have something to look forward to

That’s it. That’s the secret. It sounds so simple and yet it can be the hardest part of a lifelong commitment."


This post by Glennon Melton where she tells you that Your Body Is Not Your Masterpiece...
"It is suggested to us a million times a day that our BODIES are PROJECTS. They aren't. Our lives are. Our spirituality is. Our relationships are. Our work is.

Stop spending all day obsessing, cursing, perfecting your body like it's all you've got to offer the world. Your body is not your art, it's your paintbrush. Whether your paintbrush is a tall paintbrush or a thin paintbrush or a stocky paintbrush or a scratched up paintbrush is completely irrelevant. What is relevant is that YOU HAVE A PAINTBRUSH which can be used to transfer your insides onto the canvas of your life -- where others can see it and be inspired and comforted by it." 



* This one right HERE where I talk a bit about The Slow Unwinding Gift of Island Time...
"This Summer - where God is holding me close and holding me tight in this In Between space... I am finding gifts all around me as I let go... and rather than all the Leaning IN that I have been doing, He is calling me to just lay back... and this slow unwinding gift of Island Time is seeping down deep into my soul."

And lastly, because - of course*... the video... I LOVE love love this Shout Out to Dads!

(*You know how I love me a Hashtag!)

Happy Weekend, ya'll!  Here's hoping you each find a little Island Time to lay back and relax!