What do you think?

Okay, today my sweet hubby played around with my banner that you see at the top of the blog. So, what do you think? I love the colors, but what do you think about the style of the title? He would call me every once in a while and ask me what I thought and after a gazillion changes, we ended up with this. I think he still wants to tweak it a little.

At one point I asked him to change the position of one of the butterflies, but he misunderstood me and ended up hanging it upside down. It looked like a bat. Hmm, not the look I'm looking for. So, what do you think? What other colors do you think would look good in this palette? Is that the word I want? Palette?

Oh, one more thing...Lisa posted on her blog another section out of TrueFaced that I love. It's a "letter" from God's Heart. Go read it now!

added May 1, 2008...Please be patient...if it looks funny, we're still working on it...of course, you may think it looks funny and it's the final product...just don't tell me ANY of it looks funny and you'll be safe! : )

My Fav-o-rite Shoes

I usually don't just go crazy over shoes. You can look in my closet and see the pitiable state of my foot attire. It consists mostly of flip-flops, sloppy mules, a couple pair of sandals and a couple pair of dress shoes that I wear only when I have to. Very rarely do I find shoes that I just have to tell people about. Well, a couple of weeks before Easter, I found those shoes. It doesn't matter that half the female population of my church already had these shoes, or that I had just been shopping with Lady Wiggy when she bought a pair, or that JB had been wearing hers for months. When I tried these shoes on at Target I could have sworn I heard a chorus of The Doxology.

Now, you may not think these shoes move the earth or anything, and they are certainly not Jimmy Choos (like I would EVER wear something that expensive on my feet!), but I love them. I can wear them all day and my feet won't hurt. Plus, they're ding dang cute.

And, okay, here's a silly reason I love them...I think they make me feel grown up. At 37 1/2, it's about time. Here's a look at my grown up feet in my grown up shoes. And no, I'm not wearing white socks...that is my flesh you see peeping out from under my jeans. Shut up.

You wouldn't believe the angle I was having to bend myself into to get this shot. I almost fell down several times. That happens to me a lot. Read my profile random question. I will most definitely post about that at a later date.

The really funny thing is the fact that seriously, a ton of my friends have these shoes. We have decided to form a club. Anyone can be in our club, as long as you have these shoes. They don't even have to be from Target. They also have them at Kohl's and Rack Room Shoes.
Ah, my beautiful shoes...I'll probably wear them tomorrow. They like to go to church with me and hang out with their friends.

Bird Nerd

I am a self-proclaimed bird nerd. So is my sweet hubby. He regularly fills my feeders when I'm too laz...uh, busy to fill them. Not much makes me more content than to see lots of different kinds of birds at my feeders, and we have eight feeders for them to eat from. My favorite kinds are Tufted Titmice (yes, I know...just be glad it's not a bushtit), Rose-breasted Grosbeaks, Carolina Chickadees, and of course Northern Cardinals. I'm sure there are some I've missed, but these are the first that come to mind, and they are the ones that come to my feeders.

Notice I didn't say Robins. Like House Sparrows, Robins are just birds to me. Now, don't get me wrong, I don't dislike Robins like I do Grackles and Starlings, but I don't wish them into my yard like I do the Titmice and Chickadees. So when that Momma Robin built her nest on our meter box, I sort of didn't pay attention to it. That is, until my sweet hubby came in and showed me the picture of the lone egg in the nest. It was such a blue, perfect, sweet egg that I instantly fell in love with it. And the three subsequent siblings laid a few days later.

So, when my sweet hubby came in one day and showed me a picture of two freshly hatched babies, I had to "see" them for myself. This is what greeted me. You have to wait till 10 seconds or so before you really can see it in the frame...



You can hear Momma Robin scolding me in the background. Which is why I don't have more than 17 seconds of this...I didn't want to get dive bombed. Remember, I'm doing this blind and don't even know what's up there. For all I know, it's just the two that he showed me earlier. I had no idea this was happening. Isn't it amazing? I know, I know, you're probably saying..."Uh, what are you so excited about? This happens millions of times every year...what's the big deal?" Well, I guess I love it so much because I caught it hatching on my house. Me being the bird nerd and all, it was just really cool beans. And yes, I just said "cool beans."

More about Grace

I know I promised more fun posts, and I'll get to those tomorrow, but I wanted to explain some more about the grace thing. I hope no one who reads these posts will think that I don't think we need to "work" on our sin. Well, "work" is not a good word, because I don't think we need to work on it. I think we need to let God work on it. However, it almosts sounds too easy like that. That we don't have to do anything except sit back and do whatever we want to because, well, you know, that grace sure is a powerful thing and I'm covered, so why bother worrying about becoming more Christ-like? The passage in Romans 6 comes to mind:

"Well then, should we keep on sinning so that God can show us more and more of his wonderful grace? Of course not! Since we have died to sin, how can we continue to live in it? Or have you forgotten that when we were joined with Christ Jesus in baptism, we joined him in his death?"
Romans 6: 1-3 New Living Translation

We still have a job to do, even covered by all that wonderful grace...we have to repent of (turn away from, change our minds about) our sin, asking our faithful Father to once again cover us with His grace and forgive us. This is not something you do once a year. This is an ongoing process to keep our hearts clean before Him. Do I do this? Sometimes. Sometimes I'm so good at repenting I'm doing it a hundred times a day! (In case you didn't catch it, that was a joke.)

Here's another thing: a lot of Christians beat themselves up because they aren't as mature as they think they should be, or they measure themselves to other believers, or they can't get rid of a stronghold. Well, in case you fall into one (or all!) of those categories, here's some verses you need to look up, keep in your Bible, and refer to every once in a while...

Ephesians 1:3-5, 7-8
Ephesians 2:13
Ephesians 3:6
Ephesians 5:29
Isaiah 43:4

These verses tell us who we are in Christ. Will we still struggle? Yes, until Jesus takes us home. But we don't have to live defeated.

I know this is a lot to take in, and I don't convey my thoughts as eloquently as they do in TrueFaced, so you need to read that book! Just my personal opinion, though. :)

Robin's egg blue

I've always known that robin's eggs were blue, but until now I never realized what a perfect shade of blue they were. They're perfect! And it's the perfect shade of blue to go with brown, which is, in my opinion, the perfect color combination popular right perfect now. I perfect lurve it. (I just thought I'd add a few more "perfect's" in there for good measure since I didn't use enough in the first part of the paragraph).

As amazing to myself as it is, I took this picture. It's perfect (HA! I totally amuse myself). It is now my desktop wallpaper. The amazing thing to me is that it was completely blind. The robin that built her nest on our electric meter or whatever you call it figured that she was out of sight of picture takin' bird nerds, but she was mistaken. I took the camera and stretched it above the nest and snapped away. It looks like I really tried to get this shot. Well, I did, but only because I was trying not to lose my balance and crash into the brick wall. My sweet hubby took some, too, and between the two of us we've got a gazillion pictures of this nest with anywhere between one to four eggs in it. Poor Momma Robin. She's a good momma, too. I've never been too excited about Robins...they're kind of like sparrows...they are always around and I get used to them. Then this little momma bird built a nest on my house and I just fell in love with her and her babies. I'm such a bird nerd!

I'll post the video of one of the chicks hatching later. That was totally amazing (perfect). Again, totally blind as to what I was getting.

Glory in the Highest

We haven't sung this at church since Christie's funeral, so when, during second service yesterday, I looked up as we were singing the chorus and saw Stacin, I about lost it...

Here's a You Tube vid that explains how the song was written, and how Chris and his team mean for it to sound. It gets a bit technical toward the end, but stay for the whole thing. He shares his heart about how the end chorus is supposed to sound. Notice what he says about us singing what the angels are singing all the time. I just lurve CT!

Grace

How many times have you had something less than desirable in your life, like a bad habit, or a character flaw, or something like that that you've told yourself "If I just try harder, I can beat this!" Or, "I'll get it right tomorrow, I promise!" Or, and this one is sooooo easy to do..."It's not my fault! It's because I didn't have June and Ward as my parents!" (or some such version of a less than perfect family...you fill in the blanks)?

We can wear oursleves out pretty quickly "trying harder" to fix what's wrong with us. And when we don't see results, or those results we do see are derailed by the next bad day, harsh comment, or hormone flare up we're back where we started: exhausted, and added to that, discouraged by our lack of willpower. It's a pretty sad state to be in. We feel like failures because we can't fix it.

That's because we can't fix it. We just don't have it in us. Pretty depressing, isn't it? Well, that is until you find out that the Solution is just waiting for us to ask. It's called Grace. The grace of God. Grace is what we receive when we trust Christ as our Savior, but it doesn't end at the moment of salvation. God keeps extending His grace to us so that we can trust Him with our lives, bad days, bad habits, bad whatever, and all.

Trusting God (in TrueFaced, it's called Living in the Room of Grace) with who He says we are in Him is the only way we can live victoriously in this life.

Because I don't want to make this post any longer or I'm afraid you'll stop reading, I'll close and continue tomorrow. And after that, no more heavy stuff for a while...if you know me you know I'm all about the fun!

A Question...

Now that you know the reason behind the title, should I keep it "genes" or should I change to "jeans" which would sort of be a play on words of "buttonfly jeans" ???

Something to ponder...

BTW (that's "by the way" for you non-initiated ones), haven't forgotten about grace, but today I had to sing at a funeral 2 hours away, plus my kiddo had a ball game tonight and I just ran out of brain. Hope to get to it tomorrow.

More 'splaining

I was inspired to title the Blog "Butterfly Genes" by the section of chapter two of TrueFaced that compares Christ followers with caterpillars/butterflies. The term "butterfly genes" doesn't actually appear in the book, that's just an interpretation. Anyway, did you know that a caterpillar’s DNA is the same as a butterfly's? Click here to see it explained by a scientist. Pretty cool, huh?

And no, I didn't ask the question. I wouldn't even begin to guess what prompted someone to ask this. Oh, wait, I wonder if it was the authors of TrueFaced? Anyway, the quote on the sidebar comes from that section. Here is the passage in full:

"Nature provides many examples of this incredible discrepancy between who we appear to be and who we truly are. Consider the caterpillar. If we brought a caterpillar to a biologist and asked him to analyze it and describe its DNA, he would tell us, 'I know this looks like a caterpillar to you, but scientifically, according to every test, including DNA, this is fully and completely a butterfly.' Wow! God has wired into a creature that looks nothing like a butterfly, a perfectly complete butterfly 'identity.' And because the caterpillar is a butterfly in essence, it will one day display the behavior and attributes of a butterfly. The caterpillar matures into what is already true about it. In the meantime, berating the caterpillar for not being more like a butterfly is not only futile, it will probably hurt his tiny ears!

"So it is with us. God has given us the DNA of godliness. We are saints. Righteous. Nothing we do will alter this reality. God knows our DNA. He knows that we are 'Christ in me." And now he is asking us to join him in what he knows is true!"(Used by permission of NavPress. TrueFaced by Bill Thrall and Bruce McNicol, pp. 47-47. Copyright 2004, all rights reserved. 1-800-366-7788 http://www.navpress.com/)

Now, we're not talking everybody here. When they say "us" or "we" they mean people who have trusted Christ as their Savior. The title of "saint" came at a very steep price...one that neither you nor I could ever, ever hope to pay, but that Jesus paid willingly with His life.

I will 'splain more later. I think this is about all I can write without it becoming just too much to comprehend. Tomorrow, it's all about grace, man.

A few explanations

Like Inigo Montoya says in The Princess Bride, "Let me splain...no, there is too much, let me sum up...." I really wanted to explain the name of the blog, but I think I'm supposed to get permission to quote from TrueFaced before I post a quote. Hopefully I'll hear back from NavPress quickly...I can't fathom that they would see too much copyright infringement on a silly blog, but you never know. I actually quote from it on the sidebar, and if they tell me I can't quote it I'll take it off, but for now...well, let's just say it's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission sometimes! ;)

So, while we wait on that, let me explain my name. It's actually my favorite nickname. I didn't come by it until I was 36, and why that is I can't begin to imagine, because I do love it. So ehneeways (to quote Ignacio in Nacho Libre), here's the story.

I was with several of the Praise Team singers as well as several pastors from my church at a conference in Atlanta a year and a half ago. We were standing around waiting for the next session to start and for some reason started talking about middle names. I piped up and said that whenever my Daddy was upset with me when I was little he'd say my first and middle name. Not unusual for parents to do (in fact, most people know my son by both first and middle names...sigh...another story). The fun part of my information was relaying the fact that Daddy, along with all of his siblings, (AND first cousins, second cousins once removed, third cousins once removed, twice replaced, etc, etc) has the Old South, genteel Southern dialect that not many of us in the South still use (though Hollywood still thinks we do...they also think we marry our cousins). Think Gone With The Wind or Clairee in Steel Magnolias. Like, saying "buttuh" for butter. Or "juniuh" for junior. My cousins Carolyn and Ruth made this phrase up when we were younger, saying that it summed up my Daddy's accent: "Heathah, throw the buttuh out the winduh with the Whoppah Juniuh." Why they made that up, I don't know. Why I just posted that, I don't know either, but there you go.

Sorry for the rabbit chasing. Back to the 'splaining. My middle name is Lee, so when Daddy said my name it came out "Heathah Lee!" Our worship pastor, Brent, said, "Oh, from now on you are SO "HeathahLee!" And now all my close friends at church call me that. Of course, I call them by their first and middle names, too.

I love it because it sums up a couple of things close to me. First, it was inspired by my Daddy, whom I, of course, love. Second, it's so...Southern. I have lived in the South my entire life, and wouldn't have it any other way, unless, of course, the Lord called us to live in a foreign land. Like Schenectady.

So there you go. The story. My, I take a long time to tell stories. But then, if you're reading this you probably know me, so you knew that already, didn't you? :) And if you don't know me, leave me a comment 'cause I'd like to meet you!

I can't believe I'm doing this...

Okay, Kat. You wanted it, you've got it. Oh, help us all...