The Claim - Work it Girl!

We just completed our first Gifted and Called seminar at Central Baptist this past weekend and what a blast was had by all….



There were grand “aha” moments, lots of laughter and most important of all, we applied God’s word to every aspect of what we discovered.



One of the best parts for me was hearing Dayna Olson Brooks, my fellow facilitator walk us through claiming our gifts. She described the good ole days of staking a claim on the prairie. The Canadian government was generous in giving away the land but once you claimed your little piece of the Prairie you had to work that land….it is not enough to have a patch of grass to call your own, you have to cultivate that land and produce something….


What a great snapshot of the gifts that God gives each of us…..once we have a handle on our patch of land (our gifts and abilities) we need to work that claim…sometimes the work is tough, thankless and the fruit looks pitiful BUT perseverance produces hope…. (Romans 5:4)



God has called us to claim our gifts and work them out for His glory….I am so encouraged to see women respond to God’s call on their lives….

 I love Hebrews 10:7…. “Then I said, “here I am – it is written about me in the scroll – I have come to do your will, O God”


May we all model Jesus’ words…

HERE I AM – I HAVE COME TO DO YOUR WILL, O GOD!

The Day After - thanks"giving" or thanks"indulging"

Today is the day after….. After the turkey and the pumpkin pie and all the extra stuff that I gave myself permission to eat. I ate more Mashpots (mashed potatoes) than I have eaten all year. All this excess stuffing that I ingested begs the question….am I still thankful? ….we tend to stuff ourselves to the gills and them complain about how we feel…..it’s an interesting cycle, We eat too much, complain about the result of the over indulgence, lose sight of being truly thankful and then turn around and do it again. We don’t learn from the past at all. We choose to forget past bouts of indigestion in favour of the promise of amazing mashpots and gravy.






As we crawled into bed on Sunday night Jerome moaned and groaned about his current state and conceded defeat with a telling statement about his intended behaviour on our upcoming cruise….”I guess this is how I will feel for a whole week in November”.






The point of this little blurb is simple. Sometimes we really don’t want to learn our lesson…sometimes we just want to keep on indulging in certain behaviours and habits and we just learn to live with the symptoms. I am reminded of our friends and fellow “indulgees” (yes, I made that word up…the computer tried to fix it and I over-road the program) in the Old Testament….They just got comfortable with all the stuff around them and even though the result of their behaviour and their choices brought God’s judgment on them, they chose not to learn the lesson God was teaching.






The question today is this: Will we learn from our past over-indulgences so that we can experience freedom in our future?






It is said so well in chapter 24 verse 23 of Joshua. “throw away the foreign gods that are among you and yield your hearts to the Lord, the God of Israel.”






A yielded heart is one that does not suffer from amnesia. A yielded heart seeks God first. If we fill up on Him, our chances of over-indulging on the stuff of this world will decline sharply.