Essay: Why I Want to Attend Elevate

So in case you haven't heard, Ryan and I are about to move to Texas to train for 18 months to move to Portugal! In Portugal, we will be working at a place called The Haven where missionaries, especially those living in oppressive countries, can come to rest, relax, and rejuvenate. It is our hope and desire to be a lifesource for those believers who are doing God's work so faithfully. But before we get to Portugal, we get the amazing benefit of a year of discipleship (which is called Elevate) and then six months of church-planting school (called 24:14). Here's the skinny on Elevate:

Elevate is a discipleship training school ready to equip you to live a life abandoned to Jesus and help you discover your God-given purpose. Serving the local church, Biblical instructions, and spiritual disciplines are key elements in this experience. If you hunger for a deeper walk with Jesus, this school is for you!

Doesn't that sound great?! Everyone should do this! Today I was finishing my application to Elevate, and had to write an essay on why I want to attend the training school. Here's what I wrote:

The reason I want to attend Elevate is because I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is what the Lord has called our family to do. It is so important to say "yes" to the Lord, demonstrating trust and faith through obedience. This is the only way to experience the abundant life God purposes for His children.
When our close friends were called to be missionaries to the Middle East, Ryan and I began dreaming of ways to come alongside missionaries with support, encouragement, rest, and life. We had a "holy discontent" for God's harvesters returning from the field beaten down and broken. The tugging on our hearts began.
Then in the fall of 2009, God placed a brochure for The Haven in Portugal in our mailbox. My heart lept. This was better than the small, local ideas we had bounced around! Under the recommendation of Pat Murphy, Ryan and I spent thirty days praying, journaling, and listening to God for His will in our lives. By day thirteen, we both had a firm, "Yes! Go!"
So here we are, trying to obey the Lord as He guides each little step. We are excited to grow and learn during Elevate. Twelve months of intense discipleship sounds so exciting, a little scary, but definitely God's plan for us!

Fix-It Friday #44

There is an adorable "fix-it" over on iHeartFaces today!
Check out this sweet before:

And here's what I did with it:
After cropping, I adjusted brightness/contrast until I liked the effect, then used the dodge tool to brighten up her face. I then ran Pioneer Woman's "Funky" action and adjusted the opacity of some of the layers. Finally, my edge burn action wasn't working well, so I manually burned the edges myself. And Voila!

Photoshop Tutorial - Lens Flare

One of the very best things about iheartfaces is all the tutorials they provide!! Today they have one by Rita from CoffeeShop photo-editing blog about how to create a lens flare during editing if you can't quite capture it SOOC. As an added bonus, they included a FREE action to download! Honestly, whenever I see the free action, I normally take the easy way out, download the action, and just skim over the tutorial. But this time I gave th manual editing a try! Here are my results:

The original picture I used:

My manual fix:


And the lens flare action (with adjusting the opacity on just a couple layers):

Banana Ginger Ale Pancakes

So this morning I made up a new recipe for banana pancakes. I used whole wheat flour, and have been searching for a way to make whole wheat pancakes and waffles not so heavy and "wheaty," for a lack of a better word. My friend Anita, an amazing cook who makes the healthiest, yet delicious treats, had heard that you can use club soda in the batter to counteract the heaviness. Well I didn't have any club soda at the house, but I mean, ginger ale is just as fizzy, right?! Well it worked! I made a test round without the ginger ale, and then the rest with it, and it really did make them lighter! Here's the recipe:

Ingredients:
3/4 cup whole wheat flour
1/2 cup all purpose flour
2 Tbs granulated sugar
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1 ripe banana
1 beaten egg
1 cup skim milk
1/8 cup ginger ale
1 Tbs canola oil
1 tsp vanilla

Sift together all dry ingredients (flour through cinnamon). In a separate bowl, mash banana with fork until pretty smooth. Add to the banana all the wet ingredients (egg through vanilla) and mix together. Add flour mixture in, and stir until blended, but still slightly lumpy. Pour batter onto hot griddle coated with cooking spray. Flip when bubbly and the edges are dry.

Enjoy with pure maple syrup or banana slices and chopped pecans!

Cop Out

So this is a total cop-out of a blog, because I am simply going to copy and paste from a friend. His name is Jimmy and he happens to have started the church we go to. (The original blog is here.) I love this story he told, and if anyone out there in bloggy-land happens upon this today, I pray it speaks to your heart the way it does to mine.


Him Thinks About Me

{ February 8, 2010 @ 8:09 am } · { Uncategorized }
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It was one of those rainy days several years ago when Melissa and the girls got home. Emily must have been about 4 or 5 and I could tell that her heart was broken. She had lost her umbrella while Melissa and Samantha both still had theirs. As her daddy, I could tell this was about more than an umbrella. She felt left out and less significant because of it.

So I made it my mission the next couple of weeks to find her an umbrella. I went to two Walmarts and two Targets but could not find any children’s umbrellas (lady bugs, frogs, flowers, etc.) Any time I had some free time, I went somewhere to look for a stinking umbrella.

After a couple of weeks of futility, we were all together and I told Emily that I had not forgotten and was still looking for her umbrella. I was a little surprised to see her reaction. Her shoulders shrugged up to her ears as her face flushed and she broke into a great big smile. She looked at Melissa and said something I will remember the rest of my life.

“Him thinks about me.”

As my heart melted, I remember thinking “of course, I think about you.” Was there ever a question? I think about you all of the time. My life is filled with thougths of you. They make me smile and they make me shake my head. They make me dream of the young lady you will become. They are about what makes you tick, what makes you feel strong and alive and what I can do to help you be the person God wants you to be. They make me laugh and cry. They make me feel protective and caring. They bring delight to my heart and they are sometimes an oasis when life is hard and dry. To me, there is no more obvious and certain truth than “him thinks about me.”

God is a better father than I am. Jesus said so.

If I, in my selfishness and limited capacity to love, am driven almost obsessively to show my girls how much I love them, how much I am for them, how much I care about them. What does that say about how God, the Father, thinks and feels toward us? Toward you? Could it be that Him thinks about you?

That would change eveything, wouldn’t it? You could face the day with confidence that your Father who knows you the best, loves you the most. His thougths are about you. His dreams are about you. His plans are about you.

Him thinks about you.

May we all abide in his love today. May we live in the freedom of knowing that his thoughts are on us. May we be so changed by his love that we become obsessed with sharing the message with everyone we know and in any way we can that “him thinks about you."

SOOC

I have just returned from a most excellent trip to Savannah to see my high school/college friends Holly and Katie. The girls live on Skidaway Island State Park, where Holly is the Park Ranger. And let me just say that this is a BEAUTIFUL park. I highly recommend it for tent or RV camping. Weaving through trails of forest lined with Spanish moss, seemingly untouched since the settlers laid the very road bed or the Native Americans piled huge mounds of oyster shells or Confederate soldiers built "earthworks," simply transported me somewhere else. (I would also like to add that rusty barrels which once housed moonshine and were slashed by U.S. Marshalls during Prohibition still lay on the ground next to the deep ditches where they hid!)
Oh, how I digress with a history lesson!
The point of this story is to tell you that I had so much fun getting to play with my new camera Tuesday morning on a little photography outing. My Dad is a painter who does beautiful landscapes, and he happens to be running low on subject matter. So Holly and I bundled up the boys under blankets and took the golf cart out on a little expedition this morning. I took over 100 pictures in around 20 minutes, and was just so pleased with the way a few of them came out. Here are a few SOOC shots (straight-out-of-the-camera) without any editing.

Textures

The theme this week at i heart faces is "Textures." I took this shot last week and was curious to experiment with mixing the obvious texture in the shot with a contrasting layer edited in.


What do you think? Too much?? Also, anyone have any suggestions of how I could further brighten my son's face??