Aloha

No, we're not going to Hawaii (i could never survive the plane ride) but yesterday at church, we had a wonderful guest speaker who is a pastor of a GROWING church in hawaii called New Hope. He is one of our pastors mentors and it was such a blessing to hear from him. He talked about how for some reason WE were chosen to be here on this earth during the last days and how valuable we each are for different reasons. He had so many good points but a couple things stuck out so I wanted to share the best i could. One was about titheing. I have always and will always tithe...it's such a huge deal for me and it's soo frustrating when people dont but I never looked at titheing aside from the finanial aspect. We are a "titheing people" as Christians which means we give the first tenth to God in every area we want him to bless. Um, wow, I didnt know thats what it meant, I serisously just though that it was my duty b/c the money belongs to God. It makes sooooo much sense though...we want God to bless us financially so we give hin the FIRST tenth, we want him to bless our marriages so we give him the FIRST tenth, we want him to bless us personally so we give him the first tenth of our day. He says that people ask him all the time how he find time to give to God in the morning and he explained that he doesn't plan his day in time. He says we all have a certain amount of energy in one day, on average about 5-6 "pockets". The first pocket belongs to God, before you give your energy to anything else. The next 3 pockets are for work...so many of us (Jay and I included) give so much energy at work that when we come home we just want to chill out). The 5th pocket is for your spouse/family and the last pocket is for your self. In America we are praised for living to work and for spending countless hours there to provide for our familes. But he also talked about how some things bounce back and others don't. For example, (he used this for husbands) your buddies are all going to play golf on Saturday but your son has a baseball game. Your friends are going to bounce back if you're not there but your son will always wish his dad was at his game. You get what I mean. Jay and I both have newish jobs and we are giving SO much to them. Jay is out of town Mon-Fri and even when he is home, I am so tired from my work that we don't save enough energy for eachother. It's exciting though b/c we are SO happy now that we can't imagine how happy we're going to be when we start saving energy for eachother...AND ourselves!! This message was so good and I know I'm not getting close to explaining it right so if you have time go to pinelake.org and listen to the service, you will love it! Hope your week is great!