Thursday, January 30, 2014

"I got sunshine on a cloudy day"

Remember this post, where I told yall I had made a list of twenty goals to work towards over this year that I'm twenty? The only one I've shared with yall was #7. I was looking at the list the other day and realized I've been excelling at #9... GET OUTSIDE MORE!

But for real guys, even with the Icepocalypse a few weeks ago, I feel like I spend so much time outside lately. There is something I love about the outdoors- fresh air, sunshine, God's creation surrounding me. On the warmer days of Texas wintertime, I open my windows and air the house out, or drive with my sunroof open. I journal on my stairs or eat lunch outside. Occasionally the kids and I walk to the park. I've been hiking more lately- well, hiking as much as you can in Denton- more like jogging on nature trails. 

So here's to continuing my 'get outdoors more' goal. I'm sure yall need sunshine in your lives too, so see if you can't infuse your day with something outdoorsy! 

Tuesday, January 28, 2014

"just getting water ...in the heat of the day"

If you haven't heard of/read the story of the woman at the well, you ought to. If you have heard/read it before you ought to again. It's found in John chapter 4, verses 1-32. 

Honestly, I could go on and on about about this woman, about Jesus' tender behavior towards her, about the backstory; I could go on and on about this passage, period. But today I'm choosing to focus on just a few verses, towards the end. 

Something in verses 28-30 and verse 39 spoke to me recently. Verse 28-30 says, "Then, leaving her water jar, the woman went back to the town and said to the people, “Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Messiah?” They came out of the town and made their way toward him." Verse 39 says, "Many of the Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony."

image via Liz Lemon Swindle (stumbled upon on pinterest quite on accident- story soon)

The woman at the well was okay with admitting her sin to her fellow townspeople because she knew Jesus was worth it ALL. She recognized Jesus as the Messiah. She accepted the grace He extended her when she asked for forgiveness. She longed for her townspeople to do the same. 

We must not be afraid to admit our sins to others. Jesus can very well use your mistakes. He wants to take your heart and story and show those you surround yourself with what it is like to truly KNOW Him. Will you let him do so?

~bethany

Monday, January 27, 2014

Sharing My Library- Volume 8- Name Problems

Yall I've been watching waaaay too much Sofia the First with my little friend when I daydream of Enchancia. For those not regularly tuned into SoF, Enchancia is the magical kingdom she lives in. Oh and then, I wrote my name the way the kids pronounce it- on a check. Hi, I'm Beffney Vaughan. AND THEN, a resturant spelled my name B-E-T-H-N-I-E. 

WHAT IS MY LIFE ANYMORE.



I'm contemplating a blog makeover, so be praying that I would do the Lord's will in that. I never want this blog to give me fame; rather, I want it to glorify Him and draw people closer to Him. You may have noticed I went ahead and added a page to the drop down tab, so yall can find all the Sharing My Library posts in one place. Sharing My Library is actually going to look a little different from here on out.  Yes, I'll still be sharing my movie/tv recommendation, a music selection, and my current book of choice, but I'm also going to add a blog post I enjoyed and something else- the what I haven't decided yet...



Reading Radiant by Marian Jordan

 read more & purchase here!

Watched 1955's Hit the Deck! w/ Jane Powell, Debbie Reynolds, & Russ Tamblyn, as well as Vic Damone and Ann Miller. Somehow I'm just now seeing this often overlooked musical, made in the midst of Hollywood's Golden Age. Three sailors get into a brawl when Russ Tamblyn hears from Debbie Reynolds that his sister, Jane Powell, is about to be played by a conniving play director. A runaround with the police ensues, involving Ann Miller and Debbie Reynolds, as the sailors try to hold on to their friendship and their girls. Cute, funny, dancey, and I'm still singing the songs three days later.  

 My DVR has this week's Chicago PD on it. If you're a fan of cop shows or you've heard of Chicago Fire, then this is right up your alley. Suspenseful, intriguing. And hello, it is in CHI.



Listening to Phil Wickham's This Is Amazing Grace & Bethel's You Are Good. Listen to my church's version here



Took away a lot from this blog post >>> my letter to my kids about anxiety



Our bakery owner asked us to come up with fun new flavors and treats. We've been experimenting. I've been ransacking recipe books and pinterest for something unique but not weird. I'm going to compile all the recipes I want to try into a scrapbook/recipe book, and make my friend Abby help. 


This weeks looks light. I'm super grateful for that, after some hectic weeks. Praying for light weeks for you too, sweet readers. Yall be blessed! 
~Bethany

Friday, January 24, 2014

i don't need a parachute

Hello friends. 

I got to spend the weekend serving at church with our youth. My best friend came down to serve as well, so she stayed with me Sunday night. By then we were dead exhausted. The kind of exhausted where she's emotionally drained and I'm getting snippy, and we both know the other well enough to not push. 

Even when we are too tired to do anything but sleep, I am so grateful for my best friend because she is a forever friend. If my memory is correct, the Lord gave her that realization first. (Not that when you first meet someone, you actually define them as a “friend for now” or a “friend forever,” but you often know pretty quickly if this is someone who will fade away when the circumstance that brought you together is history.)



A forever friend- Someone who has and will be there for you no matter what; someone who knows anything and everything about you and still likes you; someone who has and will continue to love you through the good times and the bad.

Forever friends don't come around very often. The Lord only blesses us with a few bestest friends who become and remain forever friends. Any friendship requires mutual intentionality. Friendship is a commitment that ebbs and flows depending on the season of life we are in (source). 



Friendship is a necessity in my life, and I'm betting it is in your life, too. Friendship isn't optional or occasional or when it's convenient. No, friendship is necessary and continual and unconditional and mutual. 

Notice I said "mutual". Friendship is a two-way street. One person cannot be continually giving without receiving, and one person can't continually receive without giving. It just doesn't work. That isn't a good, healthy foundation for a friendship; so it is no place upon which to build a forever friendship. 

We need friends to keep us accountable. 
Friends who will tell us when we're wrong. 
Friends we can call and/or text in uncertainty. 
Friends that will pray at a moment's notice, with or without being asked. 
Friends who share what God is doing in their lives and ask us what He's doing in ours. 
Friends who point you to God before voicing their own opinions. 
Friends who refuse to let you stay the same- instead, they challenge you and encourage you.
 Friends to be honest and frank with.
 Friends to wrap you up when you're hurting. 
And even friends to smack you when you're being silly.  


We need to BE friends. 
We need to be honest and gentle if the other is wrong, and hear them out when they tell us we are the one who is wrong.  
We need to answer their calls and/or texts with love and concern.
We need to pray at a moment's notice, with or without being asked. 
We need to share what God's doing in our lives and ask what He is doing in theirs. 
We need to point them to God. 
We need to let them make their own choices and mistakes- like they let us. 
We need to challenge and encourage. 
We need to offer love and comfort when they're hurting.
And occasionally a good headsmack. 

Forever friends mean you get to continue through life's messiness and shakiness with someone by your side. Forever friends mean adjusting schedules and making time for one another. Forever friends mean flexibility and enjoying the moment. Forever friends mean getting through a rough patch in the friendship because you are both willing to fight for the friendship. Forever friends mean being intentional about catching up, asking what to pray for/how has God answered a specific prayer, how a certain situation is going, and so on. 

Fight for those forever friends. Jesus gave you each other for multiple reasons. After all, "Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their work:  If one falls down, his friend can help him up. But pity the man who falls and has no one to help him up!" Ecclesiastes 4:9-10
_____________________

"A friend is always loyal, and a brother is born to help in time of need." Proverbs 17:17 
_____________________

"The heartfelt counsel of a friend is as sweet as perfume and incense." 
Proverbs 27:9 
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"As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another." Proverbs 27:17
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"Love one another with brotherly affection." Romans 12:10
_____________________


"When life comes rushing at you out of the darkness who will you choose to face it with? 
Will it be someone you trust? 
Will they be wise? 
And will their love for you help them to guide you to the light, or will they lose their way in the darkness? 
Will they make noble choices? 
Or will that person be untested, someone new? 
Life comes rushing at you from out of the darkness. When it does, is there someone in your life you can count on – someone who will watch over you when you stumble and fall, and in that moment, give you the strength to face your fears alone?"
 -Lucas, One Tree Hill

xo, bethany

Wednesday, January 22, 2014

All Eyes On Him.

OBB - "All Eyes On You"
Everything else fades away

When you step on the scene
In my heart take center stage
And I'll follow your lead

So let me step aside
And put your name in lights
Headline this life

All eyes on you
In everything I do
Everywhere I move
Let your light shine through
So all the world can see
You've taken over me
Let me be a reflection of your truth
All eyes on you

You burn brighter than a million stars
And nothing can compare
So let me shadow who you are
Every second and everywhere

So let me step aside
And put your name in lights
Headline this life

All eyes on you
In everything I do
Everywhere I move
Let your light shine through
So all the world can see
You've taken over me
Let me be a reflection of your truth
All eyes on you

Yeah I was blind but now I see
You have it all to set me free
So everyday till my time is gone
I'll live my life turning eyes on

No matter where I am
No matter who I'm with
With everything I do let it point to you

All eyes on you
In everything I do
Everywhere I move
Let your light shine through
So all the world can see
You've taken over me
Let me be a reflection of your truth
All eyes on you

___________________________

make this your prayer today, friends. 
~bethany

Thursday, January 16, 2014

The Single Woman Dare


Women this is for you. Single women I am speaking to you. I want to dare you.

I dare you to stare insecurity in the face. I dare you to allow God to face you with your weakness, with your inability to control every circumstance and situation that comes your way. I dare you to acknowledge the fears you’ve associated with being single and with being married. 

I once heard Corey Russell say ducktape your foot to the gas pedal and go straight into that wall, because you’re going to hit it at some point. So just go after it. [The wall being whatever is hindering you from God's love.] That is exactly what I am daring you single women. I dare you to face your fears in the eye. Those fears of being alone the rest of your life, the insecurities of not being enough. 

You are beautiful, you are worth the pursuit. Just because that guy that you are crushing on doesn’t see that does not alter your identity. You are who God says you are. Lovely, Pure, Holy, Beautiful. You ravish His heart with just one glance. What you do for God, you cannot do for any man. What God can do for your heart, no man can do for you. 

So before racing into a relationship, or attempting to get your crush to like you. I want to dare you to take a moment, a week, a season, and face whatever you’ve been running from. 

I dare you to allow the Lord to purify your heart, you mind, your soul. So that when the day comes that you are in a relationship there are less walls, less restrictions for the Lord to be able to love that person through you. 

Love is patient. Love is kind. Love is long-suffering. Love does not boast. Love is not self-seeking. 

Allow God to write love on your heart. To erase the fears, the doubts, the insecurities. Allow God to be your everything. 

I dare you to let God be your all in all. 

Why do I make you this dare? Because I took this dare, I take it every day. I make the choice every day to allow myself to sit in the gaze of the Lord and allow His burning eyes to purify me. It is choosing to everyday let go of what hinders love in my life. It is knowing that Id be worse off if I held onto my baggage and fears than to encounter the love of God. I dare you because some of you need that prompting, some of you have been waiting for that reminder that it is worth it to let go. 

I am writing you as a single woman. I am not writing you this dare while being in a relationship or married. I understand what it means to take this dare. I believe its worth it. 
So, again. I dare you. Take some time tonight to release to the Lord what has hindered you. I promise it will be worth it. Let love in. 

And remember… Perfect love casts out fear.


Tuesday, January 14, 2014

To Hope Completely.




Hope in things: distracted
Hope in people: disappointed
Hope in myself: devastated
Hope in Christ: delivered 
"In ME, you have been made complete" -Jesus (see Colossians 2:9-10)
Go listen to >> All My Hope - Hillsong

Monday, January 6, 2014

Sharing My Library- Volume 7- Do you want to build a snowman?

Hello, Monday; so we meet again. 
I can't say it enough: GO SEE FROZEN. Olaf is my homie. 



As for reading? 

Well, let me preface that by saying a few years ago, I vaguely remember my dad and my sister discussing a Dallas girl who had walked into a propeller prop. My mom, who's dad piloted small planes as a hobby, added her two cents. I remember saying a quick prayer for her and moving on. 

A year or so later, I went through a period of time where I wanted to read nothing but biographies or intense mysteries. Fiction ended too well, and I was not at a place in life to handle sappy ending fiction. I reasoned that with intense mysteries, justice was usually served. I reasoned that biographies were proof that people had made it through worse than me. So I stuck with intense mysteries & biographies. 

Even with my change of heart, I couldn't stay out of Lifeway any more than my art-loving sister can stay out of Hobby Lobby. There was a book on sale that grabbed my attention- 
Still Lolo by Lauren Scruggs. 


Here's a Jesus loving girl, who's family is still intact, and they made it through the chaos surrounding such an accident- that's a God thing. My heart kept insisting that I HAD to read this book. So I did. Now yall are aware that I don't cry easily. I don't break easily. Very few books have I walked away from sobbing. 

But the Scruggs family did me in. I could relate. To pacing hospital halls.. To waiting, always waiting on doctors... To having people cover you in prayer... To having God change the direction of your life, multiple times, usually in big ways... To learning a new normal. 

A constant in Lauren's life is the phrase "one day at a time", a phrase that at once resonated deep in my soul because that is how I got through my last few teenage years. 


Friends, it took me a long time to understand that sometimes God breaks us to strengthen us. That seems like such an easy phrase, right? But sometimes we are too stubborn to see that where He is leading us is GOOD. Catastrophe can be GOOD. Crazy can be GOOD. God is big enough to interrupt your life if He wants it heading somewhere else, ministering someway else.

Lauren Scruggs and her family have a beautiful story. Messy, as life tends to be, with God's grace woven throughout. I want that said about me, that my life had God's grace woven throughout. 

Read this book, friends. 
~bethany 

Wednesday, January 1, 2014

for auld lang syne.



Hello friends! Unless you live under a rock, you're well aware that we are in the first days of 2014. I'm the kind of person that is always thrown off when we start a new moth, so imagine what a new year does to me. 

When I was at my parent's house over Christmas, I got all my journals off the top shelf of my former closet. After all, that closet has turned into my mom's "I don't have a place for it so we'll stick it in there" room, and I'd like to save my journals before they get buried under stuff. I couldn't quite remember how many I had, but I had a big box just in case. 

Yall, I've been journaling since I was eleven... I counted twenty-one journals.Including last year's journals, the final count is twenty-five. In nine years. TWENTY-FIVE. Good night nurse. 

I don't even want to think about how many journals I'll have filled up by the end of my life. 

So why am I sharing about my journals? Well, this year, I'm taking the first few days of 2014 to reflect on all God did in me and for me in 2013. I'm going to reread this year's journals and review His faithfulness, His provision, His involvement in the big moments and the little moments. I plan on spending time with Jesus and figuring out what He wants of me this year, as well. Honestly, whatever He wants, let's do it. I'm all in, because a relationship with Christ is all in, is it not? You're either 110% with Him or you're not. It's when you're 110% with Him that you'll find fulfillment and contentment in Him. 

2013 was definitely a year of personal growth. Lots of letting go. Lots of re-learning things. Lots of breaking patterns and habits. Lots of time spent aiming to be different than what I've known. It was a year spent figuring out who God wants me to be. 

2013 was definitely a year of friendship. After spending a few years in which I made my family my #1 priority, I've been blessed with a core group of of young women to do life with, as well as several older sisters-in-Christ who exemplify Him and challenge me to do so as well.  

Now please forgive me for being a cliche blogger and blogging about the last year of my life. Yall know I'm not a fan of cliches. I would love to hear what Jesus showed you in 2013 and what you are looking forward to in 2014! 

I almost forgot! UNT won the Bowl game! That NEVER happens. They NEVER get this far in football. Denton is quite excited today. GO MEAN GREEN! My cheerleader friend Morley was even on the tv multiple times! #hometownPride

 love, beth