Influence of a Servant

I'm leading bible study tonight... here's my outline. It's loosely taken from Charles Swindoll's book Improving Your Serve.

Matthew 5:13-16

·         Implies personal responsibility

Salt of the Earth

            “You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt loses its flavor, how shall it be seasoned? It is them good for nothing but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.”

·         Who is He talking to?

o   Jews, multitude

·         What historical significance does salt have?

o   Leviticus 2:13 (flavor to God’s table)

·         In relation to us:

o   Mark 9:49-50

o   What does salt do?

§  Preserve

§  Heal

§  Creates thrist

§  Adds flavor

o   Special characteristics?

§  Loses its distinctiveness

§  Shaken or sprinkled

o   How are we to preserve?

§  1 Tim 4

§  1 Peter 5:8

§  Matt 7:15

§  Mark 16:15-16

o   Create thirst?

§  John 4

o   Add Flavor?

§  Colossians 4:6

o   Heal?

§  Luke 4:14-19 & Acts 28:27

·         If we lose out flavor?

o   Jesus says we’re good for nothing

Light of the World

            “You are the light of the world. A city that is set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do they light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house.”

·         Where does our light come from?

o   Psalm 27:1

o   Prv 13:9 – joy

o   Ps 119:105

o   John 1:4-5

o   2 Corinthians 4:6

o   Revelation 21:23

o   Imagine luminaries

·         In relation to us:

o   What does light do?

§  Dispels darkness

·         1 John 1:5

§  Gives direction

·         1 Peter 2:9

·         Ephesians 5:8

§  Attracts attention

·         1 John 1:7

§  Cannot be hidden

·         Isaiah 58:8

·         Unbiased – Prv 29:13

o   “This little light of mine, I’m going to let it shine…”

Note to Self...

Don't ever leave the most important bag for dinner at the grocery store when you and the husband are starving....only causes severe crankiness and Taco Bell purchases.

Garage Sale

I forgot to take pictures of our garage sale on Saturday but we had a great one! At least I think so... I was able to get rid of our old couches, clean out closets, and make room in our garage. I had a great time spending the day with Lindsay (tartlemondrop) and our friends/her brother & sister in law despite the frigid (50°) temperatures.

Thanks for all of your help!

It’s been months since I’ve blogged, I know you’re so disappointed! But I am going to try to do better! It's hard because I can't do it at work anymore and my home netbook is not efficient.

I’ve been busy, that’s for sure. After work, my brain hurts so bad I can’t think any intelligent thoughts. Fortunately, we’ve met our major work goal, so I think I may have time to breathe.

Even though I’ve yet to find my talent, I have been given a greater purpose – being a mother that raises a child to love and fear God.

Here’s a summary of what I’ve been up to:

November:

-          Made a banner for Susan’s shower.  I told Susan to keep the banner. Not necessarily for Eli, but proof that, yes, Emily made something.

-          25^th birthday

-     Painted our guest bathroom. Funny story: so it's about 8 am and my mom and I are taping and getting the tiny bathroom ready to paint. I had already gotten the paint can open and stirred it waiting to begin. However, my mom didn't know I had opened it... so she shook it! Purple paint went EVERYWHERE! It wasn't funny at the time so I couldn't take a picture without devestating my mom, so imagine the entire floor covered in a thick layer of purple paint. You can kind of tell the grout is still purple. The bathroom is so small I can't really show you the walls. haha.

            And even the walls and for of the "hallway." This is after cleaning up a little bit. We had to paint the walls here too to cover the purple.

-          2 year wedding anniversary

December:

-          Went to Great Wolf Lodge and the Gaylord Texan with my family December 16^th… for some reason I was exhausted the entire time

My mom, Krista, and Matthew with their parkas on during the ice show

-          Found out on December 17^th why I was so exhausted… I was 6 weeks pregnant! No matter what they tell you, you can still get pregnant after missing two days of the pill even though you’ve been on it for years!

-          Only used 3-4 tags that I made back in October for my Christmas presents.

-          I wanted to blog about gift wrapping, but the super cute Target paper gave me such a fit (and the fact that I cannot cut in a straight line to save my life), I gave up and used bags

-          I made the tray thingy for my sister. She seemed to like it, of course because I don’t like anything I do, it was just “ok.”

-     Sent out our Christmas card

-          Told both of our families of the good news. They, of course, were super excited. It will be the first  great-grandchild, first grandchild for Jay’s family. We told my family by giving my nephews shirts that said “I’m going to be a big cousin." I need to see if anyone has pictures.

January

-          My parents came and helped complete my guest bathroom and worked on the guest room. Once the room is complete I'll take pictures.

-          Started couponing. I need to get my grocery budget down drastically. I even went to a class presented by Tiffany at http://www.mylitter.com/

-          I’m in a recipe club now! We meet every month to exchange recipes. Thankfully I don’t have to actually make anything until December.

In the Future

-          I want to organize all of my “stuff” in the guest room so that the guests actually have room to walk around

-          I need to perfect my couponing skills

-          My best friend Molly and I are talking about a fashion blog. We both love fashion, but not so great at shopping for ourselves.  

Going through my “BLOG” folder on my work computer, I’ve realized I’ve actually written a lot of blog entries but never posted them! Oops! Maybe I’ll recycle them in the future.

My precious, precious nephews

My sister has two boys, Matthew, 11, Andrew, 7... obviously the most precious things ever!

I wish I had better pcitures, but I'm at work. Anyway, here are some conversations from my sister about their Valentine's day:

Me: Did Matthew have a Valentine today?

Sister: He got one on Friday from a girl, and she apparently told him that she was bringing him chocolate today.  I hope she does because he's been excited about the chocolate all weekend.  Not so much the girl, but the candy!

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Sister:

I’m going to try to leave here in time to go to Andrew’s Valentine’s party at school.  I wanted to make homemade cards for his class this year, but the day snuck up on me and I didn’t have time.  So it was just plain ol’ Transformer cards.  He did make one for Mrs. Clark though.

It was funny because I got an email saying to add someone else to the class list, someone named “Ngoc”.  He got mad because I kept pronouncing the name like “knock”.  He said it’s not “knock”, it’s NO-cuh!!!  He was very adamant about it.  He said “Ngoc is special. She goes to special classes”.  He was so sweet!!!

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Sister: See I'm telling you, Andrew is the Teacher's Pet!  I just got this email from his teacher.  

-----Original Message-----

You have the sweetest boy!  We are doing a graph with conversation hearts and as he was reading his he found one and said, "I am going to give this one to my Mama!". 

Goodness! I miss them!

haircut!

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what time is it?!

I cannot believe it's 2011! The holidays flew by. I feel like I've been too busy to think...especially intelligently. (I took me a while to think of how to spell that.)

I'm sitting in a Mexican food restaurant "watching UFC." But my title refers the clocks in my house. They're all on different times. For instance, right now it's 10:10 and my stove is blinking 12:00, my microwave is blank, my coffee maker says 3:23, our alarm keypad says 1:30 am, our alarm clock says 4:57, and we have to clocks on the wall that say 11:10. All of this to say... it's not my fault that I'm consistently late for work.

Do you have any New Years Resolutions? (even though I consider myself good at grammer, I can never remember where the apostrophe goes in New Years so I'm just gonna leave it off, k?!)

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