Living as a Victorious Christian Woman

I spent a three-day weekend cleaning and organizing the living room, much to the consternation of our dogs. Do they want clean, fluffy beds ... yes. Do they want to be able to see out the windows so they can bark at turkeys and deer ... yes. But do they want their furniture rearranged, their schedules altered, and their lives apparently ruined because of my efforts to make our home clean and smelling nice? Absolutely not. There's a second picture to the one here. Diesel is my biggest stick in the mud when it comes to my doing weird things at strange times without his permission. After staring at me with a scowl for several minutes, he retreated to the bedroom to pout. I rocked his little world with all my cleaning, and he wasn't about to sit there and watch me do it anymore. Isn't this how we often handle change in our own lives? God moves something, changes something, cleans something up, and we have the same reaction I just witnessed. We park ourselves in front of the sof...

After three months of not having any kind of decoration in my planner - and what a boring three months that's been - I'm starting my new 2025-26 planner this week. I can't wait to walk you through the first few pages because this has been a long time coming. I couldn't find a new July-June planner until the school supplies started coming out, so that was just a couple of weeks ago. My fiscal year at works starts in July, so this has been my go-to calendar for the past few years. Then it was time to pull out my sticker and wash tape collections and get to work. The month-at-a-glance pages are for keeping track of my blog posts and daily devotions for this site. I need a good bit of space to write, so I try to keep them pretty clean when I'm decorating them. For July, I was happy with the alternating long strip stickers, my favorite popsicle washi, and some strategically placed fireworks.  For the first week of July, I started with red and white banners on the left si...

This photo of our backyard early one stormy morning is the easiest way I can explain one of the most difficult struggles someone with fibromyalgia has to go through. You can see the trees, you know they're trees, but you can quite get them into focus.  That's what fibrofog feels like. Fibromyalgia is a chronic condition that presents as widespread pain, never-ending fatigue, numbness and tingling, depression, and - of course - fibrofog. I was diagnosed when I was 16, so I've lived at a 4 on the pain scale for most of my life. The difficult part of fibromyalgia is that it's not like a broken leg: you can't look at someone with fibromyalgia and see that there's anything wrong, you can't treat it (just manage it), and it weighs on your in every sense of the word. This frustrating symptom of fibrofog just blends right in to the other cognitive issues like depression, anxiety, memory troubles, and focus. The only way I can describe it is like looking through a sh...

Howdy y'all! Danny here, and sharing this super easy recipe for those of you looking for an awesome meal prep idea. With only 397 calories and 50 grams of protein, these chicken burritos are perfect for a quick meal and are sure to help meet those protein goals. Let's do this! Place chicken breasts in a slow cooker (as you can see I used four).   Add one can of Chipotle peppers in adobo sauce. You can also use green chilis or any other you like.  Then goes in the liquid. Call me crazy, but the coffee really gives this dish a wonderful flavor. If coffee isn't your thing, you can use whatever you like. Laura likes to use raspberry tea. Be adventurous! When it's done cooking, about 4 hours, let cool and drain the liquid, or you could end up with soggy burritos. Unless that's your thing, then, by all means, go for it! lol! I transferred the chicken and peppers to a different dish and shredded it all together. These tortillas are a great, healthy alternative and taste am...

When we go to the zoo, I'm content to sit at the lion habitat for hours. The lioness is my spirit animal, and the way the lion surveys his territory from the top of his rock always makes me smile. If you do a search for Scriptures about lions, you'll get an odd mix. There are a few instances where the lion is regal and majestic, but not very often. Most times lions aren't portrayed in the best light, and sometimes they're just used in combination with human traits, as with this passage from Proverbs 26. The slothful   man   saith,   There is   a lion in the way; a lion   is   in the streets.  As  the door turneth upon his hinges, so  doth  the slothful upon his bed.  The slothful hideth his hand in   his  bosom; it grieveth him to bring it again to his mouth. Proverbs 26:13-15 Fortunately, southeast Iowa isn't the first place you'd see a lion in the street, exploring its natural habitat. Perhaps unfortunately, I'm the kin...

Don't ever, ever ... ever ... stop being curious. Look stuff up. Ask questions. Read new things. Be aware of your surroundings. Go from there. Yesterday morning I stepped outside with (was pulled outside by) the puppies, and we almost stepped on one of these beautiful webs. It was a cloudy, foggy, humid morning, and they were absolutely sparkling with dew. Looking around, I saw them everywhere. Something had been busy in the night because they definitely weren't there the evening before. But I was clueless. I assumed it was a spider, but I didn't want to assume so I took a picture and went to the interweb. (See what I did there?)  According to some experts, there are a few types of spiders it could be, none of which I had ever heard of before. One of my dearest friends is a naturalist, so please don't tell her that I don't know that much about spiders, please. But get this - the spiders who make them cling to the underside of the bowl-shaped web and hang there. Then...

Let's have some fun today and write a story together. Remember that game you'd play in youth group where one person says a sentence to start you off, then the next person can add any sentence they want and take the story in a new direction? Think creatively and we'll see what we can write for a number of different genres using the same pictures. My chosen pictures are of our holey tree. (Not holy - it's not saved.) This cavity has been home to a lot of things over the years, as you can guess by the amount of being that's in there. And unless you walk up and peek in, you'll never know what's inside because of the shape of the tree. So here is the first sentence of a story about my tree in several different genres. Pick one (or a few) and add to the story with your own ideas. If you come up with a story you love, please share it with me! Action & Adventure: After packing up her parachute, our heroine tucked the secret code book into the hole of a nearby tr...

May was a very good month for books in my world! And I was late getting this posted because I was wrapped up in the next book. I suppose that's the definition of irony to a bibliophile. It was also a variety of titles and genres this month, which always keeps my brain working and interested. Do you find you read different types of books to match your mood or your circumstances or what's happening at that moment? I can definitely tell the difference. On a trip to the book shelves at the thrift shop, I found a choose-your-own-adventure book based on a classic game from my childhood: The Oregon Trail. Part of a series that takes you from Missouri to Oregon with lots of adventure along the way, this story was just plain fun. There are 20 different endings, but only one is good - just like the game - so of course I had to back up and try different choices so I didn't die. Repeatedly. And I'm still working on it. Earlier this year I discovered author Lloyd Devereux Richards a...

To wrap up our five-month youth group series on words of our faith, we gave everyone a chalk marker and  had them pull out their Bible. They could pick any word they wanted to draw, and we had to use every ounce of our deduction skills to figure out what it was. Danny gave the example. He drew three "and" symbols. We figured it out. Then I asked him how many times it appears in the Bible...he's still counting. That, my friends, is my dragon. I started with the head and had to convince them Pac-Man's not in the Bible. While I never claimed to be an artist, I'm pretty proud of this guy, despite the fact that he's sporting a giant bouffant hairstyle. With the two examples out of the way, we could not have been more proud of our teens and the words they chose. Once they drew them, they had to explain where they'd found them in Scripture and in what story they were used. One girl only drew a single wheel before someone knew it was a chariot - she'd been rea...

In the human world, we're familiar with personality types and how they influence couples. On our last trip to the Blank Park Zoo, several animal pairs told a story, too. The lions are my absolute favorite animals, and I'm always amazed at the lion and lioness together. This time, the male was sunning himself on a rock for several minutes while we took pictures and oohed and ah-ed over him. It wasn't until we were ready to move on that we realized he was laying between us (the window) and her. She sat up, looked around, and leaned back against him, apparently content that she was safe and sound. The vulture pair nearby was working on their spring nest, and the female was very clearly in charge. The larger male was trying to arrange the sticks as he brought them over, but the female had a very different opinion about the nest-building process. He would put them down, she would move them and then squawk at him. Eventually he laid a stick near her, went to get another one, and ...