Lead Me to the Cross

My mother in law shared the below poem with me from her devotional book...it is so good that I decided to pass it on.

“Father, sometimes I find it very hard

to take hold of the fact

that I am your beloved.

It’s difficult to grasp,

when I am so very much aware

of all the flaws,

that when You look at me

You simply see

someone that You have chosen

to call your child.

Utterly forgiven.

Totally accepted.

Infinitely loved.

And Father, thank You that I have no need

to try and hide

the way I am deep down;

those thoughts and actions

of which I am ashamed.

For You, dear Father, know me

through and through

and nothing

that I or anybody else

can say about me

will ever catch You unawares.

Only with You

can I know ultimate security

because You know the best

and the worst about me

and love me just the same

Just as I feel the sun, pouring down

out of a summer sky

warming the air

and bringing color to life

to all it touches,

help me to feel and understand

more of the wonder

of this undeserved,

unconditional

life-transforming

love.

To grasp the fact

that even I can bring You joy,

and most of all

enable me to love you, as I long to,

in return”
The mountains and hills may crumble, but my love for You will never end. Isaiah 54:10

Life changes – our circumstances change – but God never changes. His love endures forever!

Lead Me to the Cross

I hope you all are having a fabulous morning! The last two weeks have been insanely busy for me at work, but I was reminded to “ Do everything without complaining or arguing, so that you may become blameless and pure, children of God without fault in a crooked and depraved generation, in which you shine like stars in the universe as you hold out the word of life—in order that I may boast on the day of Christ that I did not run or labor for nothing.” (Phil 2:14-16) I find it very hard not to complain, when I am tired and exhausted. I really should be counting my blessing rather thinking of all the things that I can complain about. Seriously if we all took our time to think of our blessings, list would be endless. I would like to encourage you today to count your blessing no matter what you are going through in this chapter of your journey. List 5 blessings that thank God for them!!!!

1) Family
2) Health
3) Roof over my head
4) Food
5) Job

Good Bye

Hello friends,

I hope you all are having a fabulous day! Over the past month I have been contemplating if I should continue to blog. Finally I made the decision this week to quite. I know, I am sad as well. The problem that I am encountering with blogging is that it takes up a lot of my time. Because we do not have internet at home, often I have to travel 35 minutes on way to upload posts. If I am out of town or if we have visitors, I feel overwhelmed and stressed out about finding time to type posts and then finding time to actually upload them. So I decided that in order to spend more quality time with my husband, try cooking new recipes, and keeping our home in order, that blogging will have to go.

I want to take this time and thank you for visiting my blog. And for those of you who have blogs, I will continue to visit you.

Lead Me to the Cross

On my way to work, I began to pray that God would give me some sort of sign that He is hearing my prayers and knows my broken heart. There are days that I just can’t figure out where He is going with His perfect will, because quite honestly most days it just doesn’t make much sense to me. He has the power to redeem my parents from the pits of hell and He has the power to break my dad’s drinking addiction, yet for many years now my prayers have been answered. I didn’t want to test God, but I just wanted to hear from Him.

The day at work went pretty uneventful until I was headed to class in the afternoon. It was pouring outside and I began to converse with God. “Why is it so easy for me to believe that you divided the sea, yet I am having a hard time believing that You will redeem my parents from the pits of hell?”, I proceed to question God. As our conversation went on, it started to rain harder outside. When I looked up to the sky, I saw God’s answer!!!


I saw a beautiful rainbow (see picture attached), that reminded me that God is faithful to His promises. Even though I still struggles with understanding God’s will, I sure feel comforted in knowing that God never waivers from His Word.

"Be still, and know that I am God." - Psalm 46:10

Tightwad's Savings

Last week we enjoyed vacationing at Hilton Head, so I didn't do any shopping. This week I purchased a good many items without coupons, because I just wanted to try to make crab cakes...and can I just tell you that one bottle of crab meat is so unbelievably expensive?! I also picked up some potato chips because I was starving and ate some on my way home after grocery shopping.

I was excited to score inexpensive meat, because our freezer is running low on meat.

At CVS I picked up 4 toothbrushes, but my only one picture wants to download for some odd reasons. I also picked up 2 packs of gum. My total at CVS was $1.48 and I saved $36.40...woot...woot.

Total spent: $48.19

Total saved: $51.56

Time to recycle

picture source: swagbucks images

I have never made homemade gifts, however after reading Paula Deen's magazine will consider it now. Instead of buys expensive containers, you can use containers from baking soda, corn starch, bread crumbs, cocoa, tea, coffee, oatmeal, cookies, nuts to fill up with homemade recipes like cookies, pies and the list goes on.

You can pill the label off the container and cover the container with wrapping paper or paint. Lids can also be decorated with fabric or stickers.

Gifts from the kitchen will not only make your friend smile, but your wallet will be happy too.

It is time to smile

From time to time I love looking through my old pictures, which brings lots and lots of memories of good times. I can’t look through our engagement pictures without laughing. The day that we decided to take pictures, my husband, then fiancé, didn’t show up. I was so unbelievably upset that I thought that he was protesting against taking pictures. Thankfully his apartment was near the location for engagement pictures, so I stormed to let him know my piece of mind. We I opened the door of his apartment I was relieved to see that my husband was not protesting he was just napping. He decided to take a quick nap before the pictures and forgot to set the alarm. So when he woke up he had a huge line imprinted on his face from his nap.





Thankfully our photographer, Charles Davenport, was very patient with our late start and worked with us to mask the long line on Daniel’s face. We had so much fun taking pictures and were thrilled with the results.



Later on my girlfriends and I decided to have a fun outing before graduating from USC and once again Charles Davenport was able to capture the fun moments. He was snapping fun pictures that we were very pleased with!







If you live in South or North Carolina and looking for affordable, fun and great photographer to capture precious moments, I would highly recommend for you to contact Charles Davenport. I promise you won’t be disappointed with the result!

Four Cheese Macaroni

I hate the taste of cheese, but I enjoy eating cottage cheese and cheesecake! But my hubby loves mac and cheese, so I decided to give a try by using a recipe I found on www.allrecipes.com . When my husband sat down to eat dinner, I couldn’t wait to hear the verdict. My unbelievably picky husband loved my homemade macaroni and cheese. Yay…even though I never tried my creation, I was still a happy camper!

Ingredients:

1 tbs vegetable oil
16 ounce package of elbow macaroni
1 stick of butter
2/3 c. shredded mozzarella cheese
2/3 c. shredded cheddar cheese
2/3 c. shredded sharp cheddar cheese
2/3 c. shredded Monterey jack cheese
2 c. of half-and-half
8 ounces cubed Velveeta cheese
salt to taste

Cook pasta for 8 minutes until al dente. Once pasta is cooked, drain it and return back to the pot.

Melt butter and mix it in pasta

In a separate bowl mix cheese

Add half-and-half and 1 c. cheese mixture to macaroni and mix well.

Transfer pasta mixed with cheese mixture to a well greased casserole dish. Sprinkle remaining cheese on the top of pasta and get ready to bake at 350F for 30 minutes.

Every 10 minutes take the dish out and stir very well until Velveeta cheese is mixed well with pasta.

It's magic

We were blessed with a rent free house. We didn’t have to furnish the house, but we chose to put our own couch and a chair along with other minor decorations. With Pier 1 gift cards we purchased our own kitchen table, but decided to keep it in the box and use the table that the house already had.

One year my husband gave me flowers for my birthday and I displayed them on the kitchen table. Next to the vase I had several papers with my signed name. So you can imagine my surprised face, when I came home and saw a big mess on the table. Apparently the vase couldn’t hold the flowers and it fell over spilling the water all over the signed papers. When I picked up the papers, I noticed that my name was now imprinted on the table.

My heart was beating fast and I was wondering how in the world I am going to get rid of the mess. I remembered that not too long ago I used Magic Eraser to clean up some marks on the door, so I decided to try the Magic Eraser to get rid of the ink on the table. Believe it on now, but in a matter of a minute my name was no longer on the table. I felt relieved!!!

Since that incident I have used Magic Eraser for cleaning white cabinet, doors, sink, you name it. Have you used Magic Eraser?

It is time to declutter

I absolutely hate taking pills! Unless I have excruciating headache, which does not happen too often, I will not take Tylenol for minor headaches. The day that I decided to clean out our cabinet, I was surprised at how many bottles of medicine we had. Well, perhaps we had so many bottles was because I went overboard with free items when I first started to coupon.

If I do decide to take Tylenol, I am on a mission to search through what feels like hundreds of bottle of medicine. When I finally do find the right bottle, my headache by that time usually 10 times worst, because of all the searching that I had to do. So it was time to de-clutter.

I began to look at the expiration date on the bottles and was shocked when I found out that many bottles expired in 2009. Ooops! One by one the bottles began to fill up the trash can. Once I cleaned the shelf with medicine, I decided it was time to move on to spices.

Since I do not use too many spices in my cooking, I needed to clear up the shelf. I had about 10 bottles of spices that have never been opened and were acquired just because they were free. So I figured I can take all 10 bottles to work and share with my co-workers.

In less than 30 minutes both medicine and spice shelves were de-cluttered and I was able to actually see items that I use the most. So my friend, what are you waiting for? The best way to de-clutter is to actually get rid of items that you no longer use.

I am on vacation!

It has been wonderful to not worry about school work this week, however it has been most wonderful to finally go on a vacation and have time off from work and home responsibilities.

This week we are spending time at Hilton Head with my American family. I came up with a brilliant idea to take this week off from blogging and posting money saving tips. It is my hope that you understand my break this week and my desire to spend time with my family.

I love looking for house decorations while enjoying my vacation

We are on vacation right now and it feels wonderful! Beautiful weather, good food and family time have been so relaxing that I really would like to extend our vacation for a month or so. I am sure my boss at work would be keen about my idea.

One of the simplest things that I have been enjoying is TV. OK…I know sounds silly, but because we don’t have TV at our home, it has been fun watching home decorating shows with my American mom. Perhaps my favorite room that I can’t wait to decorate when we have our own house would be kitchen. Maybe I feel this way because I spend a lot of time in there trying to master bread baking techniques along with creating other yummy recipes.

So the decorating shows led me at night to search for different items online…I also must admit that I have really enjoyed having access to internet! I began my search with tables. My husband thinks that when we have our own home we will have two kitchen tables. I am still trying to figure out the theory behind him wanting two tables. But I decided to start searching anyways and came across some beautiful drop leaf tables. Perhaps if I had a million dollars we could then buy all the tables on the website.

Until I have a million dollars, I think we will stick with having only two tables per my husband’s request.