Gratitude Archive

It seems like I hear more and more, “I feel so sorry for that person!” They go on to say that the person has cancer, lost their job, filed for divorce, are struggling financially, lost their home, lost a family member to Covid, crashed their car, and the list goes on.

We have been taught to say, “I’m sorry.” when someone gives us sad news and sharing with us what their struggles are. Haven’t we also been taught to pray for our brothers and sisters?

Ephesians 6:18 And pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying for all the Lord’s people.

I recently was blessed to share hearts and pray over women that were victims of violent crime in my community. I think this is truly the moment that I felt so many people pitying one and other. I heard volunteers tell victims, “It’s so awful what you have been through. That’s so hard.” It broke my heart because I approach this so differently. I didn’t ask a victim their story, I ask what prayers they needed and then I prayed with them.

Jesus taught us to love one another and pray for one another. There is no judgement or pity in love. We are not to “form” opinions on someone’s situation but to accept and love. I’m sorry if this seems harsh but most of the women I met that night were beautiful, strong women that just wanted someone to reassure them that they would be alright. They wanted to know someone else went through this and survived and moved onto a better life. They wanted prayers, not pity.

After praying deeply for these women I recognized that there are many different names of God. These names can be used when praying specific prayers. I always started my prayers with Heavenly Father because He is my Father in heaven. I now use some of His other names, powerful names when I pray. I would like to share a few with you.

The name Jehovah Jireh has become a strong Godly name in my prayers. Jehovah Jireh means “Our Provider”. He is the One that always provides that unexpected money to pay a bill we couldn’t pay or the One that gives us just the right words to share with someone in pain. Sometimes I have had no words to comfort someone and then Jehovah Jireh provided the right words with the most meaning.

Jehovah Jireh, I am coming to You today for provision. My bank account is drained and my pantry is bare but I know You are my Provider. You always make a way for me. You always show up for me and never let me down. Jehovah Jireh I trust in You and I know You are with me and will provide for me. In Jesus name, I pray, Amen.

Another name for God is Jehovah Rapha meaning “God who heals”. I am praying constantly to Jehovah Rapha for my dad and his cancer walk, my daughter and grandbaby in their walk with gastroschisis, my cleaning lady with continual health problems, a woman I met with a broken heart, too many to mention for healing from anxiety and depression.

Jehovah Rapha, I have many to pray for today. Many people that surround me are broken and need healed. Jehovah Rapha please comfort, strengthen, and touch my dad, Lexie, Mila, Amber, Jennifer, Kara, Danielle, Ms. Vee, Ryland, and Courtney with physical and mental healing. I know You only want the best for us so please allow these people to open their hearts and accept Your healing. I love and trust You and in Jesus’ name, I offer this prayer. Amen.

Next I want to introduce you to Our God, Abba. Abba means Father as well as Father I obey You. This is the sweetest most intimate name I use when praying. Just like I want to always make my earthly father pleased with me, I want this for my Heavenly Father. Abba is such a soft and comforting name. It is said in a breath type way Ahh-Bahh. If you say it slowly and genuinely if offers such a sense of innocence. When we pray to Abba, Our God, we are opening ourselves up to childlike prayer. Innocent, gentle, big-eyed prayer.

Abba, my loving Abba. You see me for who I am and You still love me unconditionally. I know I am nothing without You and even though I am in this broken world You never leave me. Every day Abba I sin and do wrong, yet You are always the first to forgive me and forget. I am grateful for Your love Abba and in Jesus precious and holy name, I say this prayer. Amen.

The last name I want to share with you is Jehovah Shalom, the Lord is peace. Goodness, so many times in the last year and a half I have cried out to Jehovah Shalom. Peace is the only way to combat anxiety and fear. Anxiety and fear are the ways Satan tries to control our thoughts and lives. Jehovah Shalom offers calming and beautiful peace. He can place peace in our hearts and minds immediately. I describe it as completeness, harmony, and “no worries”.

Jehovah Shalom, You are my peace. I am feeling anxious and I need Your comfort and reassurance of peace. Breathe Your love into my heart and mind to clear my anxiety and remind me that You never send mental unbalance to me. Protect me from the enemy and his wicked ways and bless me with Your peace, the peace that is life changing. Thank You Jehovah Shalom for Your constant stream of comfort. I love You and in Jesus’ name, I pray for peace. Amen.

There are so many name of God that I can share with you but I ask you to seek them out on your own. I found when I learned about God’s powerful names my prayers changed. My heart changed. My love for Him changed. May God bless you and thank you for reading my blog-LoLo

Cancer sucks. It’s invasive, it’s aggressive, it’s relentless, it has a mind of its own, it comes to destroy. I personally am surrounded by cancer and have been deeply entrenched in it this past year. I constantly have people asking me to pray for their friends because they have been diagnosed with cancer. My prayer list is long and it is growing longer every day.

I love my dad and my dad has cancer. A nasty and mean cancer. We have had many ups and downs during this walk. Many lab tests, scans, hospital visits, a blood transfusion, telemedicine calls that were too many to count. We have consulted with specialists, surgeons, radiation specialists, and so on. Cancer consumes our lives right now.

As a gratitude coach there are some days that I struggle with this walk. I am the “eternal optimist” some say but today is a tough day. Twice my dad has received weeks of chemo infusions that helped shrink the cancer and even remove it from one of his organs. The problem was his quality of life was awful. He was weak without an appetite, he couldn’t touch cold objects, he developed neuropathy and couldn’t feel his feet. This is just the tip of the iceberg.

I prayed for God to take the cancer away, to please gift my dad a miracle. This wasn’t God’s plan at this time. The cancer is still here but God did send a miracle for a short time. My dad has a BRCA 2 mutation which only 3-7% of pancreatic cancer patients have. This allowed my dad to take a new oral chemo that showed promise to slow or halt the progression of the cancer. While we didn’t get that result, some of my dad’s tumors shrunk while others grew significantly larger. Where is the miracle you may ask? The miracle was my dad was having a pretty good quality of life while on this drug. He felt pretty good every day. He was weak and anemic which was a known side effect but it was better than the other chemo side effects he had with the infusion treatments. My dad is no longer able to take this drug and going back on chemo infusions because we didn’t get the results we had hoped for.

Where are the blessings in this situation? As someone who absolutely trusts God and His will I found many. It has been over 1 year since my dad’s diagnosis, most patients live 3-6 months. My dad had a good friend that was diagnoses a few month after my dad was that is no longer with us. Rest in peace Gary Blakely.

Blessing, my dad has a genetic mutation so he could take the drug that allowed him to feel “pretty” good since March. This means almost 4 months of not being bedridden or battling cold/hot spells, or falling and not being able to get up and so many more detrimental things.

Blessing, My husband and I live 20 minutes from my parents and have a flexible schedule so I go to visit my dad and my mom often for coffee. Early in this cancer walk my dad and I were able to have a discussion about the end of life. He told me he was not afraid to die and was at peace with it. He said it would be harder on our family than on him. This assured me of his faith and knowledge of eternal life.

Other blessings include his insurance offsetting so much of the medical costs, as well as two medical teams working with him (one at MD Anderson and one at UT Southwestern), my mom is still living so he has her every day. My daughter, son-in-law, and grandson live 25 minutes from my parents so they can visit my dad and now we have another baby on the way. I cook meals for my dad to change up his diet so that warms my heart knowing that he enjoys this. I don’t know how many pounds of chicken salad I have made in the last year for him.

I have learned much information about pancreatic cancer and I am educating others for better treatment options and how to locate cancer centers. I was in my friend’s coffee shop one day and I overheard someone say her sister was just diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. I interrupted the conversation to start spewing everything I knew about the importance of genetic testing her sister and the tumor. That conversation would have floated right over me before, but now God perks my ears up when I can help someone on this journey.

I also have so many wonderful friends texting me and checking on my dad. My support team is amazing unlike no other. My husband comforts me in those dark, unsure moments. He is always there to help my dad with things he can no longer do yet still needs to have done. I do my mom’s haircuts and hair color at their home so dad isn’t left alone. I was a hairdresser in my younger days so this skill comes in handy now. It’s like God knew our family needed to be brought closer together to show our faith to God and each other.

I have blogged many time that when I need to feel God near me I somehow see the number eleven. It may be a license plate, the time, or even the weight of my produce. As I was finishing this blog I saw this. I am also including my email count on my phone that just happened as well.

My tears are currently dry because I am counting my blessings and trusting in God to handle this walk. He is always with us and going before us when we have faith. I don’t know where this new round of chemotherapy will take us, what results we will get but I know we are better walking with God and breathing in His goodness and blessings in every situation. Our Heavenly Father is comforting me that this is not the end for my dad.

Please pray for my dad as I am always praying for each of you. All my love and gratitude-LoLo

Why, you may ask, am I celebrating graduating Bible school as a toddler? I am celebrating because I don’t have many memories of attending church or celebrating God’s love. As I was cleaning out my office, I found my baby books that my mom gave me several years ago. I must admit I put them in a cabinet for safe keeping but never read through them.

I have told the story many times about my mother being raised in the church because her father was a Methodist minister. Her family, being a pastoral family would be transferred to a new city and a new church leading her to going to 11 different schools in 12 years. Or was it 12 schools in 11 years? She saw a lot of behind the scene politics and things she felt was unrighteous. She believed then and now in God but pulled away as an adult. This led to our family not attending church regularly throughout my life.

My dad went to church regularly as a child. He was raised by a single mom and his grandmother and developed a deep faith. I have learned much about his faith as we have been taking this walk of pancreatic cancer together for the last year. His heart is very rooted and grounded in God as is my mother’s.

When my older brother was born, my mom wanted to baptize him but my dad said he preferred that he made his own decision on baptism when he was older. This would be the same for any future children. My mom believing a child needed baptism snuck my brother out and had him baptized secretly. This of course cause much tension between my parents. When I was born I think my dad made it very clear that I was not to be baptized and thus was not.

I have struggled mentally and emotionally as a child and as an adult feeling that my brother had some type of favor that I didn’t have because he had been dedicated to God and I had not. I know that probably seems silly to those understanding what baptism truly is but to me it was a deficit within me.

As I now understand that my dad’s decision was truly the best for me, as I understand the commitment decision that goes with publicly announcing you are God’s child and you have accepted Christ as your Savior.

Oh well, back to Bible school. Since I really have few memories of attending church, this baby book really offered me a comfort knowing I had been in church and participating. I was a small 4 year old child learning about Jesus in a religious setting. My parents both must have agreed on this Biblical training at a young age. I felt a small dark spot turn bright that was buried deep in my heart. I keep using the word silly but I could interchange that word with ignorant, foolish, unknowing and many more. My perception of where God is, being in a building surrounded by others is just that, ignorant, foolish, and unknowing because He lives within me in the Holy Spirit.

It’s silly (again, that word) really that I thought less of myself for over 40 years feeling I hadn’t ticked off the proper boxes to be a Christian in every sense. Thinking that one person in my family had found God’s favor because they were baptized and I wasn’t is so not true. I know so differently now.

I was baptized when I was 36 years old along with my daughter, Lexie after my divorce. It was the right time and the right decision. It was when God wanted me to be baptized, not when a parent chose. It made it special, meaningful, as well as peaceful. It made it God’s plan.

If you feel you haven’t fulfilled the checklist to be a Christian, I want you to know there isn’t one. Accepting Jesus as your Savior is all you need and the Holy Spirit will guide you. Don’t waste any part of your life feeling you are not worthy or don’t have God’s favor because you are and you do. Look in your heart and find your Bible school graduation certificate, whatever that may be to you and be healed. My love and gratitude-LoLo.

Recently I have faced much opposition on my belief that every word of the Bible is true. I have heard people say, “I believe the New Testament but the Old Testaments story are too far fetched. I think of them as allegory.” Okay, I had to look that word up. Allegory, a story, poem, or picture that can be interpreted to reveal a hidden meaning, typically a moral or political one. Another person told me, “It is your place to doubt and question the Bible. You should never take it at face-value.”.

Hmm, I stand in my belief that it is all true. Let’s look at the allegoric approach of the Old Testament. So if the person that told me this believes half of the Bible to be true yet struggles with the Old Testament being “stories” instead of truth, I need to determine if this is a bad thing. So it is my understanding that allegories are not truths but stories to teach a message. Let’s say for example, Jonah being in the whale’s belly for three days. This person feels that it’s an example or story of how we can become trapped when we turn away from God. I feel that as well, but truly we are told this happened because Jonah refused to follow God’s plan. Jonah made a conscious decision not to do as God told him.

I haven’t been trapped in the belly of a whale because that really isn’t conducive to living in a metroplex with no oceans nearby. I also don’t like being in the ocean either. I do feel that we hear stories of people trapped in caves, without food, water, or means of communications to call for help and have survived. What about Alan Ralston that cut his own arm off to survive? https://www.voanews.com/arts-culture/127-hours-tells-true-story-mans-determination-survive-after-hiking-accident We hear their stories of coming out of the impossible just like Jonah did. Am I to say that a man couldn’t survive being in a whale’s belly and be regurgitated alive? No, because some things I am unable to wrap my mind around and understand. I believe this story because of my faith and understanding God’s infinite power.

There are many things I don’t understand or haven’t seen that I know to be true. I have never seen a billion dollars but know it exists. We don’t know how baby eels are made because they have never been seen them mating or giving birth yet eels exist. We don’t see air yet it keeps us alive. We can feel the wind on our faces or hear it in our ears yet not see it. Am I to say a man didn’t get swallowed by a whale and survive, I think not.

Now let’s look at the man who wants me to question and doubt the Bible to prove it is true. He states that since the Bible was not written by one man in a timely fashion it has to be distorted and not factual. God inspired prophets with His words and wisdom.

2 Peter 1:20-21 But know this first of all, that no prophecy of Scripture is a matter of one’s own interpretation, for no prophecy was ever made by an act of human will, but men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God.

Also, there were no television, electronics, or “fake news” that we have today eliminating many distractions. Women did not read or write and it was important for the correct telling of the Old Testament through word of mouth and many times throughout the day. Prayers were recited and remembered. If you asked me what I remember from being 25 years old, I would probably say, “Nothing much.”. Nothing eventful happened that year for me. Now, ask me what happened when I was 29 and I will tell you a complete story. I became pregnant and enjoy nine beautiful months of pregnancy ending in the birth of my beautiful daughter. That year was impactful for me and remains vividly in my memory. I imagine those walking in the time of Jesus remember this time very impactfully too.

We do have evidence the Bible is truthful because we have many manuscripts that are proven to be copied accurately. The New Testament is incredibly accurate with minor differences that does not change Christians beliefs.

The Archaeological Study Bible shows archeological proof that the Bible show historical reality of what is written in it. This book has over 2,000 pages of archeological documentation supporting the Bible.

We also need to remember it can be shown that the four Gospels – Matthew, Mark, Luke and John – present an accurate record of the life and ministry of Jesus. Jesus even tells us in John 10:35, “the Scripture cannot be broken”.

John 10:34-35: Jesus answered, “It is written in your law that God said, ‘I said you are gods.’ This Scripture called those people gods—the people who received God’s message. And Scripture is always true.“

You may disagree with me and I respect that but I will still stand in my faith and trust in God’s Word, the Bible. May God bless you this day. My love and gratitude-LoLo