i capture......Sweet.

I have thought long and hard about this one. I had idea's in my head of drizzling honey over fresh bread....oh how sweet and yummie. We had fresh home made honey wheat bread for dinner last night and I did drizzled a boat load of honey on it, but I passed up the picture opportunity. I should also mention althought it does not seem like the "rules" of you capture to have fresh new photo's I did want to keep the photo's I posted new. That is the challenge for me to learn to see hope in an ordinary image. Anyways, with that being said...this week I departed from my ideals because when I saw the word of the week was sweet all I could think about was my "sweet spot".

The sweet spot is a golfing term. I first heard about it when I started reading Max Lucado's book ' Cure for the Common Life.' Max Lucado describes it as, "A zone, a region, a life precinct in which you were made to dwell." Your sweet spot......well this is the likeness of mine.

This picture was taken in Zambia,Africa on a missions trip. I can tell you that there is no other time in life when I feel more fulfilled, more myself, more happy than when I am leading these trips. Its an integral part of my being.

With that being said, it has been a supreme struggle for me to be locked out of it at this time in my life. To say its been a hard transition to this stage in my life is an understatement of epic proportions. I guess that is why I was drawn to a book called 'Cure for the Common Life.' Ya, feel me??????

So how do you submit to an alternative phase in your life? I can't say it has been easy but there is something I heard that I have never been able to shake. Its one of those spoken thing that has reverberated in my heart and mind and has given me and angle of hope which has surpassed my understanding and given me peace.....

Its a quote from Martin Luther King's speech in December of 1956.....

"Whatever your life's work is, do it well. Even if it does not fall in the category of one of the so-called big professions, do it well. As one college president said, "A man should do his job so well that the living, the dead, and the unborn could do it no better." If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, like Shakespeare wrote poetry, like Beethoven composed music; sweep streets so well that all the host of Heaven and earth will have to pause and say, "Here lived a great street sweeper, who swept his job well." As Douglas Mallock says:

" If you can't be a pine on the top of the hill Be a scrub in the valley-but be The best little scrub by the side of the hill, Be a bush if you can't be a tree. If you can't be a highway just be a trail If you can't be the sun be a star; It isn't by size that you win or fail- Be the best of whatever you are. ""

So....I've had to step back and see myself, as who God made me....and for such a time as this (Esther 4:14). God has made me a mother, a wife, a friend and a daughter. All those things stretch me but there are area's where I can rise to the occasion even if they are little things. Zechariah 4;10 says "do not despise small beginnings" (or middles)

God is so good to me to have allowed me to experience what I did on that day in the photo above. May be he had a plan to pull me through the quieter dimer moments in life with the memory of those days. May be he offered those times to me to challenge me stand taller where he has placed me now. May be when scenes flash at me from my life the snapshots of my life here and now are the times I'll only see one set of footprints in the sand.......

So, for now...I'll be the best coupon shopper I can be. I can't believe how many people I have taught to coupon shop, or helped along the way. I've had to step back and allow myself permission to call this good. You might not think is stands up against the picture from above but it "isn't by size that you win or fail......"

So all you stay at home mom's out there struggling to make it through a day with purpose....All you working moms struggling through the day with a mountain of guilt. Single and wishing you were married, married and wishing you were single.....(oh my how the list could go on......) put it down. Let it go. Today. Today be the best you can be every single minute of the day God has you where you are. It isn't a mistake. God has not lost tracking on the google coordinates of where you are. He hasn't. Really. he knows and He is waiting for you to hear him whisper in your ear in his still small voice....."perhaps you were made queen (of coupons.......) for just such a time as this."