Hope From Your Mama!

Today is the Winter Solstice. That means from today on, the days are going to get longer and longer!! Well, here is what Google taught me anyway... "The moment when the Northern Hemisphere is pointed at its furthest distance from the sun. This means winter solstice boasts the longest night and the shortest day, and often colder temperatures, too. But the good news? If you’re not a fan of winter, from each day on after the solstice, the days will get longer and warmer until the calendar hits summer solstice, June 21, 2015. Summer solstice marks the first day of summer, the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere." I don't even want to touch on the whole "Solstice vs. Christmas" crap. BAH HUMBUG! I don't think I'm the only one who has been suffering from the early onset of Winter? I really have not been enjoying the fact that it is almost completely dark by 4:30pm! Normally in the Summer, this is the time that the pool is just getting ...

I love movies!  Just getting lost for a couple hours in a whole other world. If it's a great movie, I leave the theatre with this dreamy feeling of belonging to a Different Place for awhile. It's wonderful. Maleficent was a beautiful world to get lost in. The movie is the re-telling of the Sleeping Beauty story. If you've ever seen the Cinderella story "Ever After" with Drew Barrymore, it's sort of like that! I loved that one too!! Maleficent is a Faerie who lives in a completely different world than the "Kingdom of Man".  This Kingdom is close by and she can see it from her home in the Forest. You watch her as she grows up and has complete freedom and joy to live and frolic in this Mystical world. I fell in love with this child Faerie and her world. A little boy wonders into the mystical woods. He is a poor boy without any parents. He and the Faerie form a wonderful friendship that continues to grow into Love. He shares with her that, one day...

I finally got to watch the movie Frozen with my daughter. She was able to see it a few times already and she was very excited to finally share it with me. I'm a huge fan of Disney and musicals! I was really looking forward to hearing the AMAZING voice of Idina Menzel who played Elphaba in "Wicked"!! She was the voice of Elsa in "Frozen" (pictured above, the blonde one). She did NOT disappoint! When the song "Let it Go" began, I immediately started crying. That's what some musicals do to me. Just at the beauty of it to me, it overwhelms me. I pretty much cried through the entire movie of Dreamgirls! Oh, Jennifer Hudson's amazing pipes just reduced me to tears!! I listened to it again... yup, it still does! "Jennifer Hudson in Dreamgirls" Then, my daughter said something during that song that made me completely lose it... "You remind me a lot of Elsa, Mom." If she only knew the power those words had for me... Imagine,...

I have found many golden nuggets of tips and advice in the form of lists or various quotes. I wish there were a way to tattoo some of these right on my brain! I have a friend who keeps a journal she calls "The Best of the Best". In it she writes down all sorts of quotes and things that she has found comfort and wisdom from. Relationships. What sort of tips and advice on relationships do you think you'd find in a "best of the best"? There sure are a lot of different types of relationships aren't there? I wonder if anyone has sat down and classified the differing types of friendships there are? There are Facebook friendships I have with people I've never met in real life and yet feel a real connection and genuine love for! Wrote about that a bit here... http://hopeanchorssoul.blogspot.com/2011/11/hope-in-social-network-world.html The casual friends you pick up through shared experiences like working on a community project or various functions, groups...

A friend posted a video of a pastor-type that I've followed for some time now.  Mark Driscoll.  If you don't know who he is, good lord, save yourself!!! Move on and do not read this!  Ignorance CAN sometimes be bliss.   I just have to tell you the dude drives me insane! Here is a much shorter video of a classic Driscoll way of thinking. Which I'm SURE was "taken out of context"... NOT. This was a sermon he preached shortly after firing a couple of his elders at his mega church... He has a lot of power. Too much power. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKDgEufMKvQ Here is the video I mentioned at the beginning of this blog. It's where he is answering some other pastor guy's questions to him... on YouTube. It's long and you don't have to watch it to catch the gist of my venting.... I'm going to criticize a bit here. Please forgive me my humanity. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMoEJvHS5x4 You know... I don't think Jesus CARES how cleverly ...

"My wish for you is that you are held, witnessed and appreciated for all that you are in a way that heals all the times that you weren't. May you be totally seen, hea rd, and cherished. May you be so adored, that all your hurt and longing is forever washed away in a flood of endless love, flowing over from deep within your heart. And may you find a way to truly make the best of every experience, in the spirit of continuously improving the quality of your life, and the quality of the people in it. May you choose to only go up from here." ~ Thierry Maurel Suffering a wound is a terrible thing. There can be deep wounds or multiple wounds over time. They can occur in many different ways. Two people can be stabbed with the exact same knife in the exact same proximity of their body and have completely different damage done and completely different healing... Sorry, I know that's a bit of a gross way to start this off. Perhaps if you view this not as a physica...

Be free to be who you are. What comes to mind when you hear that? Well, I'll tell you what I think. I'm 45 years old and I still don't know "who" I am yet.  So how do you "be" something you feel you haven't even arrived at yet?  And yet, I heard a saying once, "Wherever you go... there you are."  I guess I feel that one fits my journey the best. Some people spend LOTS of time figuring out how to "arrive".  There are books published, blogs written and spiritual seminars held all in the hope of reaching that "Nirvana, Heaven, Awakening, Spiritual Maturity. Whatever you want to call it. Maybe I'm just too much of a pessimist.  I really don't feel I'm going to reach that in my lifetime. Yet, at the same time I feel I HAVE reached it, many times. Does that make sense? Wherever you go, there you are. I think one of the hardest things for me is how I sometimes really have to struggle and fight to be myself. I worry abo...

I know this title is a bit misleading.  I'm thinking you may be expecting me to share my thoughts on the "evils of divorce" and how to put an end to it. Well, that's not really my point of writing this. This post isn't to "divorced or divorcing people". It is actually to the people around them who are NOT currently going through this process. People like ME. As per usual, because my blog here usually addresses "Christian" issues, this blog also address the "Church" (that would be people who claim they follow Jesus).  So, if you feel you have your convictions all hammered out about divorce and you're comfy cozy with them. Please move on, this blog is not for you. We can always feel good about ourselves when we can demonize other people's struggles and things we don't understand. Allow me to start with a confession. About five years ago I formed a pretty close friendship with someone who had more or less been an acquaintan...

In my journey of tying to truly understand love and grace, and striving to live out my favorite verse, "The only thing that counts, is faith expressing itself through love." (Gal 5:6); I would have to say that my gateway drug, was Madea. A few years back, some friends invited my husband and I to come over and watch a Madea movie with them. We had no idea what to expect. Little did I know that a lot of my views of the world and God were about to be challenged and changed dramatically. Madea is a character created and played by an actor/director named, Tyler Perry. If you've never heard of this character, go out and rent "Madea's Family Reunion" or "Diary of a Mad Black Woman" and THEN come read this... Here is a little sample of Classic Madea: (Here he is playing two of his roles, Madea and her nephew who is a lawyer) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSpn_Ayh5YI What I love about Tyler Perry, is where he came from. (From Wikipedia)   ...

SUCCESS at a water park after a TERRIBLE experience at one last Summer. This started out as a Facebook post... I guess I had more to say than I realized. I woke up this morning thinking about how thankful I am that sometimes things get better for awhile. I DO say... "for awhile", because I know that they can also get "worse... for awhile" too!! Such is the cycle of Life. I usually refer to last Summer of 2012 as "The Summer of Hell"... It. Was. Horrible. Noah was CONSTANTLY hitting himself in the ear/nose/cheek chin. To the point of bruising! Numerous Doctor's appointments, a surgery, Specialists, opinions of others... NOTHING seemed to help him. We were powerless to find out what was hurting him and thus, how to help him!?? We couldn't do anything or go places as a family. We actually TRIED a family vacation... we ended up having to come home feeling SO defeated. Holly had some serious issues with anxiety she'd been struggling through. So...