This is the epic center of all things God Styled Life with Maggie P, I have written about my love for Jesus within these four walls and all things coffee, some of these sayings, pictures, etc.. are gifts from others and some are just things that were happenstance but all represent my love for God, this is my ministry office, my creative studio, print pressroom but most importantly this is my home, the home that God promised me many years ago, you see our sweet little house was once the Christian Preschool I used to teach at and every day for the 16 years I taught here I prayed that one day this sweet little house would be our home.

God honored my request 7 years ago, I remember praying as we went through the process and God honored my service of teaching those little ones about His love and word by allowing us to buy the very home it was taught in. The very house that taught the word of God to little children, is now the very place where the word of God is written about. Welcome to my God Styled Life! 

Saved To Serve A God Styled Life,

Maggie P

This is the top of the bookcase that is in our bedroom, I love to bird watch especially in the Winter months, the contrast of the brightly colored birds against the snow is especially beautiful. I love how God gives us beauty in every season, even in the gray times of life there is a beauty.

This bookcase is on the wall opposite of our bed so I can see it when I am laying in the bed at night or when I awake in the morning, it is a visual reminder of those things God has richly blessed me with, my family, His creation, and the memories made of our various trips that are in my memory jar pictured in the center and above the bookcase is the word BLESSED, this too is a visual reminder, it sometimes is easy for me to forget when I am down just how richly blessed I truly am.

Sprinkling reminders around our home is a very good way to live a God Styled Life, it allows those who we have in our homes to see God and it shows other without our words our deep desire to serve the Lord with all our hearts. 

Saved To Serve A God Styled Life,

Maggie P

In part two I said I would show you a way to make a portable quiet time basket, the basket pictured here is mine, in it, I have all the devotions I use on a daily basis whether it is for my morning or evening quiet time, journal book, notebook, books I am currently reading by Christian authors, ink pens, highlighter, yes I am one of those kinds of readers and most importantly a bible!

What I personally like about having a basket like this is that it can go with me wherever I go, I put it in my car and can make any place I go my quiet time space, but at home, it sits next to the chair it is pictured in. One of my favorite quiet time devotions to read is a book by Lysa Terkuerst called Embraced, it is 100 devotions to know God is holding you close. I don’t read them in order, I jump around a lot and sometimes I re-read the same devotion always getting something different from it. 

The next devotion I use in my morning and evening quiet times, I reflect on it in the morning then respond to it before bed, applying it to my day has really helped, it is called 100 Days of Bible Promises by Shanna Noel, several women at my home church are doing this study and have an online  private FB group where we share our thoughts and then every so often during these 100 days we get together in person and share how God is speaking to us through this book.

Finally, the book I am reading currently is called Anxious For Nothing by Max Lucado, he is by far one of my favorite Christian authors, I love that most of his books have a built-in study guide in the back of them. He writes in such a way that you just get it. So there you have it, you can use any type of box or basket and build your own portable Quiet Time necessities, just remember that the focus is on time alone with God and He doesn’t care what that looks like just as long as you are sitting at His feet and talking to Him daily.

Saved To Serve A God Styled Life,

Maggie P

In every season my favorite place to have my quiet time is my front porch, I love those days when God allows me to wake just before or as the sun is rising on the horizon, there is a stillness and sweet calm about the world as it wakes up from a nights slumber. Lots of times I just sit there with my eyes closed and listen to the birds and nature come alive, some mornings I can hear God through the wind as a gentle breeze blows the wind chimes on my front porch. 

My favorite place to sit in is the chair closest to you in this picture, there is usually a mug of coffee up with, my devotional books, my bible and sometimes if it is a little chilly a blanket. 

A God Styled Life is not just in our homes but on the outside too, it’s how we live our faith out loud and not just with our words. Since originally posting this blog post I have changed seasons and we are now in Fall, so the porch has taken on its Fall dressing. I think this is the season I enjoy most on my porch as it lends to cooler, but not freezing weather to relax and enjoy the start and finish of my days.

Saved To Serve A God Styled Life,

Maggie P

For the next few weeks as promised, I will be blogging about what it means to live a God Styled Life. My life in its self is nothing special but there are parts of my home, health, and things I do for peace of mind that lead me to a God-inspired life. I love my home and love creating vignettes that speak to my faith in God, this coffee bar in my kitchen is one example, the picture hanging on the wall was given to me by a dear friend, it is a reminder to me that God does indeed have a plan for my life! I love incorporating Gods word into my home decor. 

I remember being a young kid and enjoying helping my Dad move furniture and rearrange the rooms in our house, in part because he was always the one to move the furniture but he also enjoyed a different view of the beautiful mountains from our picture window in the living room, my favorite room in the house, to this day I still dream in color of that scene from our window, it reminded me of the line in the song America the beautiful, ” for purple mountains majesty” the sunsets and those purple colored snow-capped mountains are truly the stuff that dreams are made of. 

Having always been one to style my bedroom I shared with my sister for many years I made sure she held up her end of the work to keep it clean and organized, but she didn’t seem to understand my need for order and cleanliness which would lead me to do her fair share as well when it would really get to me. To this day I love all things decor and organizational, although at the time of this writing I am looking at a bit of clutter,  that is a blog of another matter.

So how does this all tie into a God Styled Life? I want God to be reflected in my home and not just in my kitchen but throughout my home, so I will take you on a tour of the vignettes of God inspired decor in my home and we will discuss creating God styled spaces and places.

Follow me for the next few weeks as we explore ways to show Gods presence in our homes, our hearts, souls, health and daily lives. Lets journey to our own God Styled Life!

Saved To Serve A God Styled Life,

Maggie P

This is what half of the other me my body carried for the last 33 years looks like now, I am at just about halfway to my goal weight, the necklace I have on in the picture I would never have been able to wear as it would have not fit around my neck. But I am not writing about that today, I am writing about the other person I have been carrying around for longer than I care to remember, so long that she almost needed a different name, you see she had issues.

Part of this weight loss journey this time around is teaching me truths about myself and how I ended up with another whole person on my body. I learned from an early age to be an emotional overeater, my Mom did it to deal with her emotions and so I followed suit when life got the best of me, but it was in college when things got really bad for me, I started dating a guy I had meant at orientation, we ended up being in the same  program and study partners our first semester. I was pretty nieve back then, but I thought I knew all there was to know about big city living, I was from Denver, Colorado but hadn’t lived there since I was 10 years old.

When we are young and nieve we tend to believe what we are told or at least I did, I believed that when my boyfriend at the time told me his parents would be home at lunch so we could go work at his house on our project, I believed him and when we got there that they must have changed their minds about coming home for lunch, they didn’t and they never did come home for lunch on any given day. Alone and in his territory he pounced and destroyed what trust I had in humankind, my no didn’t mean no to him and when it was all said and done, I pretended it never happened and began the downward spiral of  building my fortress, my physical protective layer so that would never again happen to me.

So I leave college and that experience behind, move back home and have a baby, my pregnancy was complicated and I gained even more weight, 80 pounds to be exact and there are health issues with my sweet baby girl, she comes a month early to the day, is born with a bi-lateral cleft palette and hair lip, can’t latch to breastfeed, I am a single Mom and one hot mess. At this point, we are in and out of hospitals and then when my sweet baby girl is about 3 years old she contacts spinal meningitis, we rush her to our family doctor who then transports her to our local children’s hospital( the very one our daughter now works for) but that is a blog post for another time.

What does this all have to do with my gaining weight and my now weight loss journey? I recognize that in the process of building the fortress around my body in the form of fat that I brought along all the emotions I buried with eating, I did finally get counseling for what happened to me, but I continued to use food to self-soothe when my emotions ran high. A whole other person later I met my now husband and what I didn’t count on was that he would love me from the inside, out. He went through some of the side effects of dealing with being assaulted, I wish to this day it was someone I didn’t know and I wish I handled the aftermath differently but I have no regrets of bringing my sweet baby girl into this world, God knew I need her and he provided a father for her who loves her and her Mom deeply but more importantly loves God. ,

On our wedding day, my husband gave me a letter of intent to adopt, our state requires a year of marriage and almost a year from our wedding day she officially became a Daddy’s girl, but truth be told she was that from the moment they laid eyes on one another. So half of the other person I have carried around is gone as is the baggage she carried with her. This year my husband and I celebrated 27 years of marriage and this past Spring we celebrated our Daughter’s success as Children’s Miracle Network’s Dance Marathon Person of the Year! An award voted on by her peers at the Children’s Hospital she works at and her previous hospital.

What I have lost in pounds I have gained in health, love and a new lease on life!

Saved To Serve A God Styled Life,

Maggie P

 

Once upon a time in a not so far away kingdom lived a princess, who deeply loved her king of kings, she was just an ordinary princess whose heart was to serve in the kingdom called Everywhere, the princess thoughts were set on things above until one day her thoughts became about self and her outer beauty and what another saw of her on the outside, this brought thoughts of self-centeredness to the point her focus was no longer on kingdom thoughts but rather of herself.

One day while walking along the river of peacefulness, she decided to wade in the waters and reflect on life, and life was full of selfish needs and wants, never had the waters she walked through felt so rough and more like a raging river than a lazy river. The princess waded and before long her feet started to stumble over the rocks and stones beneath her.  This was not the calm usual wade through the river of peacefulness it had been in the past, her heart was in much turmoil and constant discontent, her vision for what was ahead was blurry, rather than enjoying the coolness of the water on her legs and feet and  the beauty of the kingdom’s countryside she continued to stumble and at times would fall, so much so that her feet had open sores and bleed.

On this particular day the princess waded were she had been warned not to go, the raging rapids that lead to the waterfalls of emptiness, this was so far away from the kingdom she would no longer be able to hear her king of kings voice when he would call out for her to come home because it was getting late, however the princess continued making her way down this forbidden path and came to where the peaceful  river and the raging rapids met, at first it seemed the water was so much cooler there so the princess put her foot ever so slightly into the cooler waters on the edge of the raging river and that’s all it took, next thing you know the princess is being swept down the raging rapids and heading straight for the falls of emptiness, she cries out; oh save me my king of kings but he does not hear her because she is so far away from the kingdom of Everywhere her voice can’t be heard.

As she falls over the edge of the falls of emptiness she lands into the pool of loneliness where walls of towering rocks surround her and she floats on the pool’s surface as the day turns to night and the cold darkness settles in, it is there that she cries out for the king of kings to come to save her, unknown to her he has already sent a search party and as they ride through the night looking high and low the king of kings is already there and hears her cries, at first he does not answer  as her words are too faint to be heard  but as the night wears on and the cold harsh air touches the princesses skin she begins to shiver and cry out even louder, oh my king of kings please hear my cry, I have gone where I should not have gone and now as I float in the coldness of the dark of night I long to only feel the warmth of your presence, to hear the calmness of your still small voice and feel the love of your tender mercy as you wrap me in your arms to carry me to safety.

From the darkness come a small light and a still smaller voice saying I hear you, my child, I am here, is that you my king of kings? The princess asks through her sobs, yes, it is I and I am here to save you from the pool of loneliness all you need to do is cry out and I am with you, my child and at that the princess let the tears flow as she cried out to her king of kings, gently he lead her to the shoreline and put his loving arms around her and carried her back home to the kingdom of Everywhere.  The moral of this fairytale is this, there will always be stumbling stones in your life, but God will always give you the option the turn those stumbling stones into stepping stones, but that choice is yours to make, which will you choose?

 

My husband Steve and I enjoy traveling together, one of our favorite place to go is the beach, most of our vacations are at the beach. For me, a beach is a place I am reminded of the power of God’s creation, how he created this world for our enjoyment and it is also a place to dream.

For our 25th wedding anniversary, we traveled to Port Saint Joe, this is one of our favorite Florida destinations, we had a front-row seat every evening, to a beautiful art show of Gods doing. Steve and I also used our time away to vision cast our dreams, what would it feel and look like to see those dreams come true! One of our big dreams is to someday own an income property on or near one of our favorite Florida beaches, while that dreams reality may be a ways off one of my personal dreams is now becoming a reality, God prepared my heart 12 years ago to become a speaker, writer, and event planner for Christian women, I have been doing the event planning for the last 6 years , but now God is opening doors for me to write and speak and in doing so is preparing my life as such in other areas.

Never give up on the dreams God has planted in your heart, His plans are always better and He will always shape those plans in the way He created you. The other thing He does is that He prepares you, notice I said 12 years ago, I wasn’t prepared at that point to go out and make those dreams a reality, God used those years as preparation for what was to come, in Ephesians  2:10 it talks about how we are Gods workmanship, we are created for good works which He prepared beforehand so that we may walk in them.

In Psalms139:13-14 God shows us that from our very beginning He created us, it says; “For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well.” Did you get that? We are to praise Him! The very one who created us also knows the plan for our lives and He will reveal and show us that plan in His own time, the very dreams we dream are from Him, He plants them in our hearts then waters them until it is time for them to bloom.

In Jeremiah 29:11 God says; “For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.” God is a God of dreams and hope, His desire is always for our best.

What dreams has God planted deep in your soul?  Will you trust him to see them bloom?

Lord, remind us that know we are fearfully made, that your plans are always for our good and that the dreams in our hearts were planted there by you, help us in our doubt and to always to turn to you. In your name, we pray. Amen.

Saved To Serve,

Maggie P