So...if the Son sets you free, you will be Free indeed: John 8:36

I never thought too much about what freedom meant to me until this past weekend. On Memorial Day, followed by a rain shower was this rainbow stretched across the sky. In Old Testament times, the rainbow was a promise of freedom from God. People would never have to worry about God flooding the entire Earth again. Never again would God pull out an eraser to start over.

But in the past few months, God has pressed His eraser across the front page of my life. He's smudged out a few people, and allowed some major changes to happen within my family. All these things have turned out to be some of the best things that have ever happened, but it didn't feel that way at the beginning.

First, God took away both of my Dad's, not physically, but removed them from my life in a way that I can only trust that He knows what He's doing. What I realize now is that I'm free to live my life without concern for validation. Every woman would probably love to say she's her daddy's princess, but the truth is---I will never be. Most importantly, I don't have to be. I don't need to strive for validation anymore. I have promises from God that I've collected for years and can now claim them for my own. It is who I am in Christ that matters. I'm not just some little girl that someone adopted, or a daughter that was originally rejected and abandoned by her father.

Secondly, God reduced my husband by allowing his 33 year job to be taken away. Again, the initial sting was difficult, but followed by relief from corporate abuse. There are no more late night phone calls or striving for perfection to a boss who can never find satisfaction. Daniel no longer hears the comments from the critical-spirited, but looks forward to a new future full of promises that arrive daily.

Memorial Day brings about promise because of those men and women that have sacrificed their lives for our country's freedom. Unfortunately the labor of their love is not recognized by everyone and goes unappreciated. The same is true for a God who loved us enough to sacrifice His own son for us to have eternal life. Eternal life that's a gift, and it's free. I am free!

Click here: I Am Free :http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nR7bBEBIC9g&feature=related

Mean Girls

Most of us have probably had our fair share of mean girls in our life. In a recent broadcast of the Esther series by Beth Moore, Beth states: "Women do not often stand by their sisters, but compete with them." Specifically she speaks about how it's tough being a woman in a mean world.

"Some women are just plain mean. Mean girls will let you hang with them as long as it's all about them. Mean girls dig at other girls but they never do admit to it or take responsibility. Mean girls dress provocatively around other women's men! They can't keep their breasts to themselves. We don't dress by accident, we are very aware of what we're putting on before we leave the house. What I can't stand about a mean girl like that, is most of the time she doesn't even care about that guy, she just wants the power of knowing he would look and that he's your man but would still look at her. You know it, you have experienced it!"

Sometimes it's just a subtle glare, a cold shoulder, an obvious avoidance and other times it outright malicious behavior coming from the mean girls' deep rooted insecurity.

Whether you're a practicing mean girl or have a history of being one, (we've all been there at one time or another), it's important to know the good news: THERE IS A CURE ! For the mean girls of the world: deal with your mean spirit. Deal with this thing openly and honestly. Your meanness has a history, identify your threat. Start being aware of when you are the most likely to look around you and measuring yourself up to someone else. Who is your rival? Who do you consider to be your rival and how much energy are you wasting on it?

For the victims of mean girls: repay with kindness and love. Your response to meanness is what's important. The mean girls' response is up to her. Do not repay evil for evil. Live at peace with everyone and leave your wrath to God. Drive a mean girl crazy by being nice to her. No matter what, you do NOT bow down to her, but love her with the love of Christ until her heart sears with conviction.

We live in a harsh world, a place where life is not fair. Where hate threatens to devour hope. But God sees the plight of the oppressed, He hears the cry of injustice, and He takes every infringement of their liberty personally. And often, it's the weakest and most reluctant, He chooses to stand in His name, and to fight for what is right.

Yellow #5

God speaks through His word, through others, circumstances, occasionally through dreams, and one day He spoke to me through a song. I know it was from Him because only He would have known the perfect moment for my ears to hear something that I desperately needed during the brink of a total breakdown.

As a child, my favorite color was (obviously) yellow. My favorite church dress was made of yellow cotton twill, bought from the basement of a clothing store in downtown Lordsburg New Mexico.

"Miss Katheryn" was an elderly sweetheart of a woman, whom Stephen King would describe her as a "smoker's widow" ---with dentures. She'd drive up most Sunday mornings in the same pea-green battle tank and tap her car horn.

After a single honk, I'd prance out in my recurrent yellow church dress. Miss Katheryn would have a cigarette dangling from her lips and she'd talk and smoke at the same time.

"Good morning Miss Yellow!" she'd say. She had two favorite dresses that she alternated between Sundays. But, always the same lace-hemmed slip that hung lower than the dress. Miss Katheryn's slip problem was embarrassing for me, but I never said anything to her.

As soon as the preacher started his sermon, Miss Katheryn would nod off with a soft snore. When she started sounding like a train, my job was to poke my elbow into her side.

I didn't really understand too much of what the preacher talked about, so I'd get lost in the little yellow furrows in the fabric of my dress. I guess you could say that in such a young mind, I was tranced out with yellow, listening for Katheryn's train and God was being talked about throughout. To me, He was a very bright Yellow God. He was all yellow.

Several years later, Miss Katheryn was long passed away, and I was no longer that little girl going to Baptist Church in Lordsburg. Instead, I was a mother of three daughters, freshly divorced and living outside Seattle.

It was Sunday morning and I was attempting to mill through last years piles of clothes that had laid on the floor for the past several months. Depression and loneliness had consumed my days and nights. I subverbally uttered a few words of prayer in request for some strength to just get through another day.

I picked up a heap of clothing and a music CD fell from the pile. It had the word C O L D P L A Y written across the front to feature the band. The CD was obviously not mine, I hadn't kept up with the names of bands in decades. I was still stuck on Patsy Cline and the Golden Oldies from the 60's.

Nevertheless, I put the CD in my stereo and pressed 'play'. That's when the voice of God spoke. "Number five, skip to number five," with goose bump clarity. I had never heard number 5 song before, but it was a gift to me that day from a very Yellow God.

Look at the stars; look how they shine for you--And everything you do

Yeah, they were all yellow

I came along; I wrote a song for you--And all the things you do

And it was called yellow

So then I took my turn--Oh what a thing to have done

And it was all yellow

And Your skin, oh yeah your skin and bones

Turn into something beautiful

D'you know?

You know I love you so

You know I love you so

Click here for Yellow on #5 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CAME8GDRTfI&NR=1

Love---Amor----Amour-----Love-----Meil

My first grade Valentine's Party was a humiliating disaster. All the students were given sheets of red and pink construction paper for designing gigantic heart envelopes. On the day of the party we all exchanged Valentine's Day cards, each student taking turns placing their cards in one another's handmade mailbox.

I tore into my cards with excitement, in awe of all the hearts and little candies tucked into the envelopes. One by one I noticed a pattern of everyone's card addressed to me. In childlike writing was the same thing: a simple "to and from."

Little snickers, whispers and awkward glances darted towards me when each classmate arrived at my card and read my signature. On the back of every card I wrote: "I love you, Danna"

"You weren't supposed to write that!" the teacher snatched up my cards, "It's not appropriate."

Choking back the tears I ran to the bathroom and sat in the stall. After school I suffered more finger pointing and kids making faces at me.

That was my first "love disaster." The second one was my first marriage. You guessed it -- a Valentine's Day wedding, complete with a bouquet of red, pink and white silk roses and a headdress to match. A handsome husband who would betray me in the end.

The older I get, the easier it is to love my family and friends. Not a day goes by that I don't say or show love at least a hundred times or more.

However, ask me to love the unlovable and it's just not that easy. It seems virtually impossible to love someone that has caused severe devastation and pain, maliciously gossiped, or rejected me for someone or something better.

But Christ did just that. No greater love has any man than to lay his life down for a friend. In the Book of Mathew, questions get a little rough: For if you love only those who love you, what reward have you earned? Mathew 5:46

He's right of course. We are called to love the unlovable, even if we don't want to. We aren't commanded to enjoy it, but in the big picture the rewards are eternal.

Unconditional love is loving even when someone trespasses against you. It's forgiveness-- even when the stakes are so high that you think you'll never get past the humiliation of that first time you experienced rejection, loss or maybe even sanity.

If your unconditional love isn't good enough for the unlovable, I really want to be the first to say, "Who cares?" More than anything else, your dignity is safe with God.

You cannot out give or out love God, but it doesn't hurt to try. "Your Father who sees what is done in secret, will reward you."

Click Here: Love you So Much! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqXAQgbZEog&feature=related

Squeeze Me I Cry

A couple of weekends ago, Daniel and I drove through a small community at the base of Sequoia National Park. Several homes lined the hilly countryside, most of them had well manicured lawns and expensive decorative yard art.
As we drove on the snaked road, we slowly passed the house in the picture above. Seconds later I told Daniel that there was something about that place back there that stirred something inside of me.
Daniel knows me pretty good. He pulled over to the side of the road, turned the car around and headed back. We stopped in front of the house and I took some pictures.
"What is it about that house?"he asked.
I didn't know at the time.
That was a few weeks ago and I'd overly studied the photographs that were taken that day. The house looked pretty junky with stuff all over the yard and lots of trinkets in the windows. I edited the pictures, zoomed in and out, changed them from color to black and white, increased and decreased the contrast-- searching for whatever it was that spoke to me days before. Nothing! There was nothing I could do to pinpoint the feeling the house had given me that day.
I closed the album up on my desktop for several days and opened it back up this morning. Then---I noticed something strikingly obvious and the feelings of that day vividly returned. In every picture, I had virtually made my focal point centered on the doll perched on the pink flamingo.
In the playground of my mind, the little girl that owns the doll in this picture---is me. She teaches her baby girl that nothing is impossible and shows her baby how to fly and to dream big.
Flooded with tears and memories, I could see the little girl in me, playing with Baby First Step, my favorite doll, the only doll I remember getting for Christmas one year. She was just as real to me as anything else. I would carry her around and at nighttime, rock her to sleep, and sing to her: "Shake me I rattle, squeeze me I cry, please take me home and love me."
After my first daughter was born, and I held her for the first time I thought about that song so long ago. Over the next 12 years, I would have three little girls and that song never wore out.

Click Here for Song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROogzTnwGA8

A Life Without a Heaven

This past weekend, Daniel and I were walking on a downtown street in a town on the coast of California and we heard a song coming from a boom box that was being carried in a baby stroller by some peace demonstrators. It was one of those songs that just the sound of the music makes you want to hang around and enjoy it. The song was called "Imagine" by John Lennon.

Long after we had left the downtown area, I couldn't get the song out of my head. All day long I was either humming the tune to myself or trying to remember the words. Eventually I got back to my computer and looked up online, the lyric to Imagine.

Part of the song went like this: Imagine there's no heaven, it's easy if you try. No people below us, above it's only sky. Imagine all the people, living for today. To hear those words combined in a unique Beatle's tune was magical, but to actually read them was depressing. How fitting, I thought, that this song is in our generation and demonstrates much of the way many people view life. A life wrapped into a song of living life for today only --- and without a heaven.

It's dangerous to mock God, because some really bad things are going to happen. It's the cost of free will. A person can either obey God and leave the consequences up to Him, or they can reject God and suffer the consequences completely alone. Here are some men and women who mocked God:

John Lennon
Some years before, during his interview with an American Magazine, he said: Christianity will end, it will disappear. I do not have to argue about that. I am certain. Jesus was ok, but his subjects were too simple, Today we are more famous than Him (1966). Lennon, after saying that the Beatles were more famous than Jesus Christ, was shot six times.

Tancredo Neves (President of Brazil ):
During the Presidential campaign, he said if he got 500,000 votes from his party, not even God would remove him from Presidency. Sure he got the votes, but he got sick a day before being made President, then he died.

Cazuza (Bi-sexual Brazilian composer, singer and poet):
During a show in Canecoo ( Rio de Janeiro ), whilst smoking his cigarette, he puffed out some smoke into the air and said: God, that's for you. He died at the age of 32 of AIDS in a horrible manner.

The man who built the Titanic:
After the construction of Titanic, a reporter asked him how safe the Titanic would be. With an ironic tone he said: Not even God can sink it; The result: I think you all know what happened to the Titanic.

Marilyn Monroe:
She was visited by Billy Graham during a presentation of a show. He said the Spirit of God had sent him to preach to her. After hearing what the Preacher had to say, she said: I don't need your Jesus. A week later, she was found dead in her apartment.

Christine Hewitt:
A Jamaican Journalist and entertainer, said the Bible (Word of God) was the worst book ever written, in June 2006 she was found burnt beyond recognition in her motor vehicle.

Click here for some Imagination with eternal value:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxt5TsmEZaY

Life Principle #8--Fight every battle on your knees and you win everytime.

Whenever I read the 30 Life Principles by Charles Stanley, immediately my eyes are drawn to # 8. All the principles come together as being equally important, but for me, the eighth one is like a revolving door. If I'm not careful to exit out the other side of this door, I might find myself spinning out of control.

It's all about what God hates the most. Pride. Pride is essentially self-worship. There is nothing in this world that we could accomplish on our own if not for God sustaining and enabling us. Pride keeps many people spiritually bankrupt. It is God's promise that He opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble.

A good example of self-worship gone bad is the story of six of the wealthiest men back in 1923. They were Charles Schwab, president of the largest independent steel company at the time. He lived on borrowed money the last five years of his life and died penniless. Richard Whitney, president of the New York Stock Exchange. He served time in Sing-Sing prison at the end of his life. Albert Fall, a member of the president's cabinet. He was pardoned from prison at the end of his life so he could go home to die. Jesse Livermore, the greatest bear on Wall Street. He committed suicide. Ivan Krueger, head of the world's greatest monopoly at the time. He also committed suicide. Leon Frasier, president of the Bank of International Settlement. He, too, committed suicide.

If any fight seems worth fighting for, try stripping the pride away first and if there is anything left after that, then do like Joshua did. The Battle of Jericho was a perfect example of fighting a battle on your knees. God spoke to Joshua telling him to march around the city once every day for six days with the seven priests carrying ram's horns in front of the ark. The walls of the city collapsed on the seventh day, and the Israelites were able to charge straight into the city. The city was completely destroyed. Only Rahab (yes the prostitute) and her family were spared, because she had hid the two spies sent by Joshua.

There are so many people's lives that are reflective of how humbleness is exalted. Christ could have been born in castle, but God chose a stable. He could have ridden into town clothed with fine linen and carried by servants, but he dressed simple with sandals and bridled a donkey.

He gave the best Christmas present over 2000 years ago. Eternal life -- a totally free gift. Sadly most people don't accept the gift because of pride. To think they may need a savior is perhaps too humiliating.Fighting a battle on your knees is probably the most humbling experience of all. In a worldly way, you are admitting defeat. But when God speaks, He speaks.

The Lord is a warrior, Exodus 15:3