Lara Love's Blog, page 84

Thank You God for Saying No

Dear God, thank you for every single time in my life you have ever answered my prayers with a big, “NO.” Father, I am so sorry that I have so lacked trust in you, that I have had such a self-pitying, angry, hurt, bitter, etc. response to you when you have refused to give me what I prayed for. Lord, you always know what’s best. And I have pridefully exalted myself and felt my will was best. Lord, I am so sorry! And I want to take this opportunity to say THANK YOU for every time you have in fact r...

But God I Am SCARED!

When I was a little girl, long before I believed in God, I was PETRIFIED of spending the night at friends’ houses. I didn’t want to spend a single night away from home. I would call my parents and get them to bring me home. I was terrified of going to sleep-away camp but finally did. I confess I have struggled with loads of fear, worry, and anxiety my whole life. Isn’t it something I write this as I am days away from packing up my special needs ministry dogs, most of my life’s belongings, my min...

Thank God for New Vision!

Praise the Lord, as I write this, I am wearing my new prescription reading glasses. I love them. I tried prescription reading glasses once before but had a bad experience with the company and ended up with glasses that ended up causing more trouble than good. My vision has gone downhill as I have aged, and I am sad to say I didn’t realize how bad things had gotten until I was editing a book I had written and realized my blurry vision was making writing and editing pretty hard. Still, it was a lo...

Thankful for God’s Warnings

Children aren’t always thrilled when they hurry off to run across the street to go play with their friends only to have their parents warn them about the traffic, tell them to stop and look both ways, and not cross until they are safe to do so. Oh, sure, they may be thankful afterward. But before? Not altogether likely! Nor are we adults always so thankful – as we should be – when God warns us to not do something. He warns us because He is Lord, King, Savior, and Creator, in His love for us, bec...

Intimacy with Jesus

Some people love and crave relationships with others. They yearn for intimacy with people. They hunger and thirst for intensely close relationships. They want to know and be known deeply by another or others. I have always been this way. I love, love, love intimacy. But it never crossed my mind in all my years of chasing after men, and relationships with them, and friends, and friendships with them, and whole groups of people and strong bonds with them that the intimate and only perfectly satisf...

Choose to Rejoice

    If there is anything I have learned about rejoicing it is this. God in the Bible calls us to rejoice CONTINUALLY, the way to rejoice CONTINUALLY is to REJOICE in the Lord and in our relationship with Him and His amazingness and endless goodness and blessings, rejoicing is a CHOICE, no matter the world’s woes and our personal struggles we can REJOICE when we turn our hearts and minds to the Lord and the Bible and His countless blessings, and we SHOULD CHOOSE TO REJOICE – ALWAYS!

      Rest a...

Thankful-for-Thanksgiving

The very most important aspect of Thanksgiving to God is that God be praised and thanked for His amazingness and awesomeness and wonderfulness and wondrousness and gloriousness, but there is something else that happens when we express to God our thankfulness in my experience anyway. There is such great joy in my heart, such passionate rejoicing, such great love and adoration I feel, such a feeling of blessedness when I take the time to thank the Lord! Might sound funny, but it’s true. I am thank...

Being Thankful in a Darkening World

It takes about 2 minutes of focusing on the world news to see the truth as God shows us in the Bible that the world due to the sinfulness of humanity is darkening, and it takes just seconds for many of us like myself to get swallowed up in negativity, anxiety, ungratefulness, complaining, self-pity, and the like. When we focus on the evil of this world and on the hardness of our trials and tribulations, we will get swept away by the darkness and do nothing more than contribute to it. But we have...

So Many Blessings

I was friends with a woman many years ago whom if I recall correctly had as part of her email address the words “so many blessings.” Now I honestly don’t know where she stood with the Lord and if she was a born again follower of His, and I at the time was a believer in the Lord but most assuredly not a totally devoted follower. But this message isn’t about where our faith in the Lord did or didn’t stand all those years ago. Nor is it about “so many blessings”. It’s about the fact God’s blessings...

Don’t Feel Like Being Thankful?

Sometimes I’m simply not in the mood for being thankful. I am irritable. Tired. Exhausted. Cranky. People are driving me crazy. I’m feeling impatient. Being impatient. I’m having a bad day. Too many challenges. God didn’t answer my begging Him for something I desperately wanted. I just went through another big loss. Whatever the reason, I have absolutely no desire to be thankful. In the past, I know exactly what I would have done. I would have been unthankful to God, unthankful to others, and ma...