Homemaking Link Up Weekend

This is where I'll be this weekend:  Wallowa Lake in the beautiful Eagle Cap Wilderness of Eastern Oregon!  My friend, Audra, and I are headed up with some other friends to spend Friday and Saturday at a scrapbooking retreat!  I'm hoping to come home with a couple of cute card tutorials to share with you all!

I should have a few great pictures to show off too!

While I'm gone, how about linking up with my Homemaking Link Up Weekend?  I'll come visit you when I get home!

April Showers Rainy Day Activity #CBias #SocialFabric

It's been sunny and gorgeous all week here in Eastern Oregon.  That is, until today!  The Coller kids woke up to a rainy day and needed something extra fun to do while waiting for the sun to come out again!  Normally, we homeschool on weekdays, but today I needed to do a few necessary things around the house since I'd been gone all weekend.

Last night, Cainan and I went to Walmart to shop for project supplies and TCBY frozen yogurt---just in case we needed a rainy day project.  Whadda you know?  We needed one today!  To see more of our shopping trip, what we chose, and the other fun things we saw and did, visit my Google+ album!

We wanted to create a spring-themed project that also used the frozen yogurt theme, since we would be having a TCBY frozen yogurt party after we were finished with the craft.  We decided to make something that we could reuse over and over---so we made a Bean Bag Toss!

     
We bought a large Elmer's Tri-Fold Display Board and made holes in it with a razor blade. Then we decorated it to look like a great big frozen yogurt cone.  The glitter sprinkles were made using Elmer's Glitter Paint Pens.  We made one side a list of Rules and the other side a list of High Scores.  The scores are written on sticky notes so they can be changed out as scores improve!

Earlier last week, Lynzie made some bean bags in preparation for the game.  Aren't they adorable?  She made them to look like scoops of TCBY with sprinkles on top!  She used felt pieces, beads and beans!

Everyone had lots of fun playing the Bean Bag Toss game!

We taped lines on the floor at three different distances from the board so everyone would be challenged.

Rule #4:  Only those old enough to read the rules have to obey them!

After we were finished with our game, we had a TCBY tasting party!  Have you seen the new line of TCBY frozen yogurt treats that Walmart is carrying? 

Cainan chose one of each pint that our store had in stock and the kids got to try them all!

It cracks me up to see the kids' faces when we give them a big treat like this.  They RARELY get sweets!

What a fun way to spend a rainy day!

For more information on TCBY's grocery offerings, visit:

TCBY Website

TCBY on Twitter

TCBY on Facebook

I am a member of the Collective Bias™ Social Fabric® Community.  This shop has been compensated as part of a social shopper insights study for Collective Bias™. #CBias #SocialFabric All opinions are honest and are my own.

#TCBYGrocery

What Will Your Legacy Be?

Proverbs 27:6: "Faithful are the wounds of a friend, but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful."

Talk about prophetic!  How can we help but read this and picture our wounded Savior and Friend, Jesus, the Ever-Faithful One, contrasted with the deceitful and weak Judas who betrayed Jesus with a kiss?

Judas didn't leave much of a legacy.  In fact, if you had to chose one human being in the Bible who was most unfaithful and least deserving of Heaven, who would you choose?  Many of us, without much thought, would choose Judas, right?  After all, he claimed to be a follower of Jesus---which implies devotion, respect, love for Him---yet he easily betrayed the Lord for pennies.

***Enter Sarcasm***

Wow---I'm SO glad that I am not like him!  I would never do something as dishonoring to the Lord as Judas did.  I mean, can you imagine having unlimited access to the King of Glory---God in the form of man---and then throwing it all away just because you were afraid of what others might think about your association with Him? 

**cough**  **cough**  **cough**

Can you comprehend the thought of receiving any amount of compensation for betraying our Lord?  Judas's 30 pieces of silver were equal to about four months worth of wages.  Would that be worth it to you?

The truth is that we're all Judas.

How often do we betray Christ by distancing ourselves from Him?  Like Judas, we become disillusioned by the contrast between what our Christian walk really is and what we think we're entitled to.  When Jesus doesn't do things in our lives the way we think He should, we want to take matters into our own hands, like Judas did, and make it happen!  Of course, when we take action on our own, it pretty much always backfires---like it did with Judas.  When he betrayed Jesus to the authorities, he wasn't trying to get Him crucified.  He was trying to force Jesus into displaying His power and real authority---he was trying to start a revolution.

When we step outside of God's plan and direction, we're not usually trying to deliberately disobey Him.  We just want to get the job done faster, so we think we'll help Him out a little.  This only causes us to fall into a pit of our own making---one that is far from God and far from his plan.  We actually become enemies of God.

Often times, we find ourselves accepting the world's compensation for sin (betraying Jesus), when we know there's a better reward to be had for faithfulness.  Even though we've experienced Christ, we still gravitate toward what is comfortable or what we feel is safe.  Our head knows that God's ways are right, but our foolish hearts too often yearn for things that are less than God's best.  Like the "washed sow" who returns to her mud pit, so we often go back into our old ways---even after being cleansed by God's saving grace.  We allow the loud voice of the enemy to drown out the calm and quiet voice of God that says, "just wait---I have a plan!  Trust me."

If we want to avoid the same pitfalls as those of Judas, Peter, and others who walked with Christ yet denied Him later, we must be changed.


There are many verses that we know so well---so well that we often dismiss them.  We can rattle them off verbatim, but we haven't taken the time to get them into our very being.

"And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect." Romans 12:2

Don't get me wrong:  it's essential that we know Scripture by heart.  However, we must make sure that these truths are actually in our hearts and are manifested in our actions.  How do we avoid the pitfalls of denying Christ and, instead, leave a legacy of faithfulness?  We stop conforming to the world.  Often times we think that this means we shouldn't act or think like the world.  It's more than that, though.  In addition, we shouldn't be concerned with how the world perceives us---when we know in our hearts that we are following God.  We must let God renew our minds and allow him to focus our thoughts on that which brings him pleasure.  Trust me, this is not going to look anything like the world we live in.  But, it just might make the world desire to know Whom we've got living in us.

This article was written for The Christian Post, Issue 58.