knowing.

Good morning ya'll! Jessi here. 
My sweet friend Jacqueline is guest posting 
this morning and I for one, couldn't be more thankful!
Enjoy and go give Jac a hiya over at BabEblessings! 

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Lately I’ve been questioning myself a lot on a lot of
things. My self-confidence has been super low, and postpartum hasn’t helped
much in that department. I’ve been searching the world around me to get my
confidence back instead of searching the word. Until I remembered something a
wise woman once showed me.

My best friend’s mom is such an amazing woman for Christ.
She worked children’s ministry at my church for years. I don’t think I’ll ever
forget waiting for Sunday mornings so I could hang out with Aunt Jayne again. The
past few years she’s lead a table at the weekly women’s bible study at church
and each session reminds us of who we are in God’s eyes, and who he created us
to be. She would give us a list of things the bible said about us, and then
gave us the great suggestion of ‘hopping’ through the bible reminding ourselves
of what God said.

So I pulled out my bible and found the list, and got to
work. I highlighted each verse and beside it wrote the next verse to go to next
to it. It reminded me of who I am, and what God says about me. 

It also brought me to some realizations.

 The light of the Gospel shines in me, am I letting it out? Does it shine
to the world?

 I am more than a conqueror, so why do I keep letting things conquer
me?

I have the mind of
Christ – so if Christ says it, and everything he says is true, then I need
to start believing it and standing on it.

I know I’m not alone in this, I know a lot of us are going
through trials right now and we have lost sight of who we are in Christ. It’s
so easy to look to the world to try and find validation. Am I a good mom? Am I
a good friend? Am I a good wife? What do my friends think? What does my husband
think? What do my parents think? Questions I seem to ask every day, but instead
of looking to them, I need to look to Him.

I think the one verse that has stuck with me the most is 2
Timothy 1:9. Who has saved us and called
us with a holy calling, not according to our works, but according to his own
purpose and grace by which was given to us in Christ Jesus before time began.  It’s not about our works, it’s about our holy
calling and his purpose working through that calling. He had our purpose mapped
out for use before time began. Just thinking about that gives me peace and
makes me feel so great. God set my purpose in action before time began. He knew
I would be here, and who I would touch and what I would do.

Here’s a copy of the verses and what they say. The original
is from Joyce Meyer, but it’s been changed and added to quite a few times. 

Knowing

I hope you take even just a moment to remember who you are
in Christ, and what the Father thinks about you. I know you’re pretty awesome!

 

chosen, part 1.

some precious lady friends. 

Hey ladies!

So, last week – I had the huge, huge, huge honor of leading a breakout session at the Chosen Conference in Charleston, SC. Chosen was a conference for all women – to point them to Jesus and to celebrate the fact that He calls us to Himself, chooses us for His glory and His pleasure and His purposes. It was such a sweet time and I was really overjoyed to get a section of that time to breakaway with some women and discuss the idea of how our being Chosen relates to how we can speak life. And specifically, how we can speak life to other women online.

is there anything better than a group scripture doodle session ?

Through that little session, I shared my story of how the Lord has walked me through accepting some influence He’s given me, called me to speak life to women, and then how He’s teaching me to be quiet and say something. I am still seriously in the midst of figuring all this out, but I thought it might be good to share with some of ya’ll these pieces of the story – since I really think He wants us all to be walking in newness of life, speaking life as much as possible. Not for our own glory, or so that we’ll be known as women who speak life – but because if we’re in Christ, we know LIFE. And why in the world wouldn’t we want to share it?

just SOME of the hundreds of volunteers who put on Chosen

So here’s where I started sharing my story with the ladies:

I always knew I had a struggle with being dramatic. Drawing attention to myself. Talking too much. Over the years, the Lord has helped me – it’s still a struggle, it’s still very much something that you’ll notice when you meet me, but I’m believing that the Lord is healing, slowly:). Anyhow, it was that issue that kept me from blogging, inititally. I knew I had a problem with attention seeking and talking about myself, and blogging seemed like the fast track to feeding that problem. Until a met a woman who said she wrote a blog with the intention of ministering to other women. It didn’t really matter if my heart agreed, I saw an open window and an open excuse, so I started myself a blog.

your truly doing some VIGOROUS hand talking

I started (my old blog) Babes Having Babes in 2007 and wrote about um, I’m not sure what. My hair, outfits, my cute little baby. Sometimes I actually WROTE. I think about eight people read it and I don’t remember how they found it. And then some things started to happen. I got pregnant again really quickly after having a baby, that precious baby was diagnosed with a fatal genetic disorder and then cleared of having it, we decided to move to Seattle to run a maternity home, we moved cross country, we had that precious second baby, we told hilarious and wild and precious stories of working in the maternity home, we got pregnant with a third baby, the Lord called my husband to church planting, we had that handsome prince of a baby. And all along, more and more people kept reading. Maybe to keep up with the crazy things the Lord was bringing about in our life, or maybe just to see if the train was gonna wreck, or maybe to see if I’d ever lose the baby weight – but they kept reading.

one of the precious rest spaces in the "boutique" at Chosen. So fun! 

And in the fall of 2009, I realized that the Lord was giving me some influence with women. I was pretty much landlocked, at home with three babies under three, very little money, and sharing a car with my husband. I was thousands of miles away from my former community, and my real community – the women I was doing life with were just as busy as I was. But here were these women, online, who I could sit down with at naptime and interact with. Pray for, laugh with, be challenged by, and share what the Lord was doing with.  I had a voice with them and they were on my heart, and that was a God-given influence that I couldn’t create by any means of personal promotion and that was precious. 

But, what in the world did He want me to do with it? 

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I'll finish up talking about the rest of the breakout over the next week or so. 

I do want to say - just as soon as the dates are released, you're going to want to mark your calendars for the Chosen Conference 2013. 

I'll be there FOR CERTAIN. 

Seacoast Sisterhood, thank you for a wild and precious weekend. 

Father, thank you for pouring out your Spirit.