I'll Stand

Day 5- In the 100 Reasons for Joy challenge:

My top reason for JOY today - Jesus!  He's the top reason every day, but today I'm writing specifically about Him.

Joy #18 - The band at our church played "I'll Stand" by Hillsong today. (scroll a little lower to hear the song) I often think if non-believers could just be present during such a spirit-filled experience like this, they'd be convinced.

You can feel the Holy Spirit in the room. It moves me to tears.

And I'm so grateful and humbled and amazed at all Jesus did and continues to do for us.

The feeling of honoring and praising Jesus with everything you have, surrendering all and just recognizing His amazing gift and grace. Seriously, it's better than any worldly substitution people try to find.

If they could only feel and know this love and His truth, they'd be forever changed.

The sermon was awesome too. As soon as a link is up I'll add it here. It was the end of the book of Romans. The pastor, began the sermons on Romans in September 2008. What a testimony to how he's teaching the word of God. We only began going there in January of this year. I feel so blessed to have found the church and have been amazed at how God guided me there and how topics I'd be ruminating on in my mind would then be discussed that very Sunday. God is good.

I'll stand with arms high and heart abandoned. To the one who gave it all!

Take a moment to really soak these words in.

Joy #29 is much more frivolous than 28.

We found this adorable gingerbread kit at Target on Friday.

For 10 dollars I thought how adorable. There were five houses, one for each of us.

The kids figured out whose house would be whose to decorate. There was a moment where it seemed there might be fighting, but all was well and each house had a happy builder.

I promised Sunday afternoon we'd put them together.

I was joyful, until I started the actual pasting together part and realized the white frosting wasn't so pretty, it was rather sticky and drippy and didn't come out anything like the picture perfect one on the box. And I'm a pretty detailed steady person.

So the kids designated me the builder and them the decorators.

I promptly found myself elbow deep in frosting drips and roofs that kept caving in. But we powered on. I was apologizing to them, saying I'm sorry guys, this isn't really the way it looks in the pictures.

I was getting kind of grumpy. The joy of that beautifully crafted picture on that box was completely obliterated by the gooey mess I was constructing. And the kit didn't come with everything you see on the picture. Grrr to the false advertising.

But my kids all didn't care. You see they were having fun licking the drips and couldn't wait to cover their village with sugary bling.

They were JOYful to just put their personal touch to each little structure.

They didn't care that it wasn't picture perfect.

And their JOY is what brought me joy.

I seriously was ready to call it a wash and let them dig in and eat the whole thing (not really) half way through.

But we persevered and the finished result is rather nice, in a droopy, colorful sort of way. I half expect the roof on a couple of them to be caved in by morning.

But the joy of working together and seeing them patiently wait their turn, that was priceless!