Quotes, Scriptures, & the way to heaven

Just something I am passing on to a family member, thought I would share it with my three followers :)

Some quotes I love:

Remember when the Lord is silent in our trials that the teacher is always quiet during tests.

Don’t tell God how big the storm is, tell the storm how big God is.

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference (this has been my favorite prayer since high school).

Some verses I find encouraging:

Psalm 57

Psalm 1:1-6

Psalm 4:4

Psalm 55:22

Psalm 27:1

Ephesians 4:31-32

Luke 17:4

Isaiah 41:10

Deuteronomy 31:6

Matthew 11:28-30

Phillippians 4:13

John 16:33

2 Timothy 1:7

I love you and I hope these help!! 

One more thing I find important to stress, that we can only truly go to heaven and be saved if we have confessed that Jesus is our Lord and Savior and that he died for our sins.  I feel that this confession must be made out loud, using your mouth in witness to at least one other person.  There are many people who believe that Jesus is the savior, and truly worship him as one, but have never confessed it with their mouths; unfortunately they will not be saved and will not make it to heaven.  Personally, growing up, I don’t remember EVER confessing that Jesus died for MY sins and that God raised him from the dead.  I remember saying a bunch of “prayers” that everyone says at the same exact time that you know by heart and I rarely think about the words when I say them.  That won’t get us into heaven.  Rituals and prayers that are centuries old that we don’t say with our HEARTS, but we say out of tradition, will not win us favor in God’s eyes, for his grace, his gift of Christ, is just that, it is a gift.  We cannot earn the gift, ever, no matter how many Hail Mary’s we say or how “good of a person” we think we are. 

Romans 10:9

That if you confess with your mouth, "Jesus is Lord," and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. (NIV ß New International Version)

If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. (NLT ß New Living Translation)

Notice, these verses do not say: be a good person, do good things, be fair and kind hearted, and you will be saved. 

Romans 10:10 goes on to say:

For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved.

In John 14:6 Jesus said he is the way, the truth, and the life.  No one comes to the Father except through him.  That means that no one can have a relationship with GOD if they do not first believe in Jesus, and we cannot go to heaven except by being saved.

Okay, so enough preaching.  If you want to know more about this, I am always open to talk about it.  This is a hard subject for me to broach, because we all get a little bristly when we talk about religion and faith, and I just want to see you in heaven when I die!  I love you and I want you to experience the awesome love of God that Kris and I have experienced, even in all our trials.

My recent creations

Lately, I have been doing a few things that I saw on pinterest.  Well, actually, quite a few.  I mean, quite often I post stuff off pinterest, and just don't do anything with it.  Especially the recipes and crafts.  But, like I said, lately I have been, well, let's say motivated!!

So here's what I have been working on:

Lace shorts

This is for one leg, around my thigh (specially measured to me :) of course!)

I have been really wanting to revamp some of my jeans with holes in the knees into shorts with lace on the bottom (to add length and well as help give the short leg room and hide some imperfections).  I even had dreams about what kind of lace, how long I would need to buy, how I would cut it without fraying it, where I would sew it, the weird details to the dreams just keep on going.  Then I had a brilliant idea!  Why not crochet my own lace??  So I started researching patterns.  I was a little discouraged at first, so many of them were table runners and coasters and place mats.  What I wanted was LACE! But then I discovered I was using the wrong key word.  The key word is BORDER or EDGING. Ahh! All the results.  I spent like an hour just looking at laces.  I finally came up with about four patterns.  Now, when someone asks me how long it takes me to make something, I am tempted to tell them in the way I currently measure time: how many nap times did it take? (haha!) and how much after bed hours did it take.  So currently I have been working on the first "set" of lace (because obviously I want the same pair of shorts to MATCH right?).  I am literally almost done with it, I just have to finish the last shell in white, connect it together so it is a loop, and viola! I am finished with it!  Which is exciting, because as easy as the pattern has become (due to repetition, I don't look at the pattern any more), I am ready to work on a different pattern.  I think this first set is kind of loose.  In terms of loose, I mean, the lace has a lot of wiggle room, a lot of "holes", so it really isn't going to "hide" much.  The solution, I believe, to this, is to add a second layer.  Now, the question is, do I do it in the same pattern I have been doing and literally layer it on top of the first layer, but stacked, or should I do a different pattern?  The more I think about it, the cute I think it would be to use the same exact one just stacked.  I'll show you what I mean.



You can see I have put the second layer on the first, with the shells between the others.



Yogurt Melts/Bites

So then I decided that I wanted to try making the yogurt melts/bites/drops/whatever-you-want-to-call-them.  Now they were SUPER easy.  Line a cup with a sand which size zip lock back.  Pour a container of yogurt into the zip lock back.  Line a baking sheet with wax paper, waxy size up.  Cut off bottom corner of bag.  Allow yogurt to "drop" onto the wax paper.  Freeze (I don't know, maybe an hour? I just left it for a while and came back later).  Use a spatula and scrap off paper (comes up super easy).  Store in freezer.  Viola!  You have a nice little summer treat.  Few things I learned:

1. Use good yogurt.  I used generic, and you know how generic has that kind of funny after taste eating it normally, well, guess what!  It has a funny after taste when frozen too (imagine that!).



2. Don't cut a big corner off, or you'll have the same situation I had where it almost POURED out of the bag instead of letting me squeeze it to drop it on the paper.

3. If you are going to store in individual zip lock snack bags, error on the side of not enough.  I think I put too much (split the whole container into three snack bags) in each bag.  What makes me say this?  Well, about 1/2 of the way through eating them, they started melting.  The last few were soft in form and quite messy using your fingers to eat.

You can see that some of my "drops" are smooshed together because it came out way too fast!!





Frozen Yogurt Bites

 

String Eggs

So this one is simple.  Simply messy.  Mix one cup liquid starch (found in the laundry isle) with 1/2 cup of flour with a whisk, until smooth.  Unravel one of those embroidery floss skeins into the mixture (don't just throw it in, or it'll get all tangled, and it is quite a pain in the behind trying to fix when it is covered in goo).  Wrap the string however the creation strikes you around a water balloon.  Allow to dry to 6-8 hours.  Pop balloon and remove excess starch build up in between strings with needle, or I used a bobby pin.  I quite enjoyed this little project.  It took one nap time (roughly 2-3 hours), between set up with news papers (and I need to stress this, that is VITAL to doing thing, otherwise you will have a mess of this goo dried up on your table that will take A LOT of elbow grease getting off, I know this because my news paper didn't cover all the table I was working at and I had several drops dry up on me... ugh), make the mixture, blow up balloons, concoct a little stand for them to dry on (second time around,  I took plastic cups, cut down all the way until about 1 to 1/2 an inch left before base, cut around base- this is one stand, cut rings from the top portion I just removed and pinched them in the center to close them up because I am out of tape to retape them together, one plastic solo cup made about 6-8 drying stands), and then wrap my balloons creatively.  I stopped every so often to wash my hands, search the Internet for bathing suits (which is someone else I did from seeing pictures on pinterest, but  I don't need to make that it's own little paragraph), and do a few other little things.  I am quite proud of them.

Drying on my homemade "stands" (egg cartons and solo cups cut into rings)

Finished product! It is AMAZING!!

24 eggs made in all, it made enough for two bowls, one sits on my table, one in the living room

Cheese Animal Crackers

Now this, I am quite impressed with.  The pin lead to a blog where the lady made her own fishy shaped cookie cutter from a soda can.  I tried this.  I failed.  Haha.  Not fail because my fish looked weird, just cutting them out seems like a lot of work with this cutter, mostly because where the two pieces of metal met I tried taping them up, but cheese dough still got shoved up into it.  Oh well.  I had already bought a little package of mini cookie cutters that are animal shaped.  I got a giraffe, lion, dog, bear, elephant, and Noah's Ark.  Not bad combo really.  They were much easier to cut out the shapes with.  I need to keep this recipe.  It makes really good animal crackers.  They puff up quite a bit more than the Goldfish brand do, but they taste, in my opinion, way better.  The Goldfish always tasted kind of, uh, I don't know, overly manufactured??    Here's the recipe:

• 1 cup(s) all-purpose flour
• 4 tablespoon(s) cold unsalted butter, cut into small pieces (I used salted butter, but didn’t add any salt afterward)
• 8 ounce(s) grated extra-sharp Cheddar cheese (around 2 cups). Note: you can experiment with other cheeses. Some people have tried this and loved the results!
• 3/4 teaspoon(s) salt
• 1/8 teaspoon onion powder (note: this is optional since it isn’t part of the original recipe, but I decided to add anyway since I used it)
• 1/2 teaspoon(s) fresh-ground pepper
• 1 teaspoon baking powder

Directions

1. Pulse the flour,onion powder, salt, pepper, and baking powder together using a food processor.
2. Add the butter and cheese, and pulse until the mixture resembles coarse meal.
3. Pulse in 3 to 4 tablespoons of water, 1 tablespoon at a time, and only enough so that the dough forms a ball and rides the blade. Remove, wrap in plastic, and chill for 20 minutes (I put it in the freezer for 20 minutes and in the fridge for 10) or up to 24 hours.
4. Bake the crackers: Heat oven to 350 degrees F. Line 2 baking pans with parchment paper or silicone baking mats and set aside. Roll the dough out to 1/8th-inch thickness, using flour if necessary to prevent stickiness. Cut out as many crackers as possible.
5. To add character to the fish: break off an end from a side of a toothpick so it is blunt. Use that point to make the goldfish eyes. To make the smile, lay the toothpick down on its side, press, and drag. If you try to use the toothpick point, it will ruin the smile.
6. Optional: Refrigerate for another 15 minutes or so to make sure they won’t spread.
7. Place them on the prepared baking pans. Bake until golden and crisp (13-18 minutes). Transfer to a wire rack to cool.
8. They are best when completely cooled and the next day in my opinion. Store in an airtight container for up to 1 week.

OMG! These are SO good!!!

Fruit Roll Ups

So, my very last pinterest fulfillment is the fruit roll ups.  The recipe calls for using a dehydrator (which I do not have one), but the comments on the blog some people say they use the oven and it works just as well, just use your oven at the lowest setting.  I am excited to see how it turns out!  I made strawberry and peach roll up.  So basically, I used 3 cups frozen fruit, thawed and 3 cups unsweetened apple sauce, a capful of caramel extract, and a few shakes of cinnamon.  I will let you know how it turns out.  Basically by baking it at the lowest possible temperature for who knows how long (I am thinking probably 2-3 hours), it dehydrates it just the same, but makes one big roll!

*Picture pending!!*

I think I am eventually going to make a post of nothing but pictures of my little crafts!!

Pickles

It has been a while since I blogged, well it feels like forever. Maybe just two to three weeks?  But I want to blog about something that is very near and dear to my heart: Pickles! A some what funny (to me any way) little story about pickles.

So every night I get up maybe 4 or 5 times due to the meds (from the surgery, remember me mentioning that in previous blogs?), usually about 2-3 hrs apart.  Last night at my 2am awakening, I felt like having a pickle.  I knew we didn't have any in the fridge as the keeper of the inventory of the fridge.  So I went to our little food pantry shelving area, and looked at the underside of the second to highest of the shelf (much easier to spot a pickle jars bottom than to try to see around everything, or get a chair only to be disappointed).  Much to my delight, I had foreseen my need for pickles and had a pretty decent jar of Mt. Olives Kosher Snacking Dill Pickles waiting to be enjoyed.

Okay, before I go any further, a little background history is in order so this tale could be just a bit funnier.  My surgery was on the left side of my back, going into my left lung.  It follows the curve of my shoulder blade and I joked that it appears that the doctors removed one of my wings.  As a result, my left back, oh probably 5 or 6, ribs were broken to access the lung.  If anyone has broken a rib, I think maybe they would sympathize starting now about this ordeal.  For those who haven't, it really isn't all that bad, until you try to take a deep breath, or cough, or laugh, or stretch, or twist, or reach, or sleep on your back, or sit on a couch or chair, or ride in a car when it feels like the person is throwing you into the car seat and slamming on the breaks (which Kris isn't, it just seems that his driving is exaggerated due to the injury), well I guess basically anything.  It feels like someone has beaten me within an inch of my life, just on my left side back AND front ribs with a 2x4.  Yes, that's accurate.  The pain meds help a lot, but because I am afraid of becoming addicted to the medicine, I limit myself to a pain pill only when I absolutely need it.  My goal isn't to be 100% pain free 100% of the time, my goal is 100% pain free for a while, then about 75% pain free for a little while longer, then 50% pain free for some more time, when I get down to 25% pain free, that's when it is time to take another pill.  By doing this, I stretch the amount of time I need to take a pill, the amount of time my body needs to cope between pills is slowly being increased, allowing for, gasp, you guessed it, some pain in my life, but eventually it will be manageable with maybe one dose (my goal is NONE) of over the counter pain meds.  And this does work.  Within two weeks, I think, of returning home from my last surgery, I was taking only Tylenol, and by time a month had come and gone I was only taking Tylenol in the morning ONLY if the pain hadn't subsided within the first hour of being awake and moving around.  Now this rib thing feels like a different story.  Like it is possible that it is going to take longer than two weeks to ween me off the meds and possibly longer than a month before I have few rough days surrounded by lots of good days.  Here it has been a week since I have been released from the hospital today and I have only managed to spread my meds out once every 4 hours, and starting tomorrow I will attempt every 5 hour for a few days, and if I reach 4.5 hrs and just can't take it, then that's cool, I will take a pill.  I guess on the other hand that isn't bad considering when I was released I was taking a pill every 2 hours.

So back to my pickle story.  I see the pickles and what does any person automatically do?  I reach up for them.  With my dominant hand.  Which happens to be my left hand.  A little zing of pain reminds me that I can't use my left arm for anything (might as well put the darn thing in a sling), so I drag the chair over with my right hand and pick up the jar of pickles with my right hand and help balance it with my left.  I put the chair back.  By now my mouth is salivating, dreaming of the salty goodness about to enter it.  I take off the joke of a plastic seal around the lid.  I attempt to use my left hand to unscrew the pickle jar.  Up until now, everything in my life has been predominantly left handed with few exceptions, such has, I learned to use a can opener twisting with my right hand (the intended way), and I drive using my right hand mostly on the wheel, and I use my right foot for the gas and brake petals, and I find it easier to kick a soccer ball with my right foot, but that's about it.  So I go to open this pickle jar and my back shrieks in protest from the exertion I just put on it.  Oh yea, I think to myself, can't use that arm.  So I twist with my right hand.  I wish I could say that was the end of my story, that the pickle jar opened and I was rewarded.  Nope, sorry, not going to happen.  So the lid does not budge at all using my right hand.  Really?!?! Am I this weak that I can't even open a stinking pickle jar?  Then this thought crosses my mind: "yes I am, because even when my left side is not injured, I have to, about 50% of the time, get Kris to open jars, bottle, etc".  So I remember some old wives tales on how to open a stubborn jar.  I tapped the jars lid on the counter around the edges, not exactly an easy feat considering I only have 50% of my strength, and it isn't my best strength. I try again.  I try with my left hand JUST in case tapping the lid loosened it just enough but my right hand sucks that much.  This goes on for like 5 minutes, using a butter knife to tap the lid, to tap the bottom, using one of those wine gripper tools, everything I can think of, all the while, alternating between left and right weak hand/arm strength.  Then I decide that maybe the problem isn't in the lid so much as the grip on the jar while trying to turn the lid.  So I sit on the floor, put the pickle jar between my bare feet, and try again.  And again.  And again.  At this point I am almost CRYING from frustration, with thoughts crossing my mind such as: if I break the pickles jar I can just pick out the pickles I want from the glass and get my pickles, and maybe I should go wake up Kris to open the jar, and maybe I don't need a stinking pickle after all!  I think I probably gave up three times, only to come back a minute later to try again.  In all, it took me 15 solid minutes of brute strength to open this pickle jar, and honestly, the reward wasn't that great.  Not since my back was hurting now, and I was already almost crying from frustration (sometimes those feelings are hard to rid even once you have succeeded at something).  I have since considered writing to Mt. Olives, thanking them for their superb ability to maintain sanitation and shelf life for their pickles, but maybe they could consider making a jar that is easy to POP for those less fortunate, less strong, possibly elderly (like my grandma who has rheumatoid arthritis so bad that her fingers are bend sideways and she has a hard time even picking up a cup without an handle).

So that's my pickle story.  It is kind of funny.  In a very pathetic way.  I guess you just had to be there to find it funny (I can laugh now, a day later about it, having told the story to Kris and mom and both of them getting a laugh out of it). Pickles.  Mmm, think I will go eat a few now that they are already opened...