Nurture My Heart

Its way past time for me to follow up on my post entitled "Shortcomings" that I made almost two months ago (I can't believe its been that long), to share the answer that God gave to me. I was looking for compassion for the kids because I didn't seem to have enough of it and to my amazement, I did get an answer, loud and clear. "For out of the overflow of the heart..." The overflow of the heart... Hmmm.... my heart. What overflow? I don't even have enough for myself. I'm running on empty. Mom said something about it (overflow, needing a surplus) on the phone the next day and BAM I knew it was meant for me, even though she wasn't talking about it in that context (not like "I was thinking about you and..."). Then someone said something about it in care group that Wednesday, too. It wasn't until Thursday, when I was sitting at lunch with Nathan talking to him about care group and how excited I've been to be getting involved with people from the church that I made the connection with my blog post, about waiting for an answer, and that that was the answer. Women's bible study, here I come, and I need to be spending time with God myself every day. I have sat down with a book a few times but unfortunately I have not gone to the women's bible study yet, and I have used the excuse that I'll wait until they start a new study rather than go for the first time in the middle of one. My excuse for that has run out and I will be attending when they start the new one, I think next week, but I need to confirm, and I have no idea what study they'll be doing.

Tonight I went to Holly Sanders' house, even though it wasn't care group night, because she had a girls night. It was Holly, Maria Stout (who has a son Callia's age), and me. I had an excellent time. We basically did nothing but sit and talk and eat strawberries and blackberries with chocolate dip and soy based cream cheese dip (since Maria is allergic to milk, and it was actually very good). We talked about gardening, house cleaning, children, and health problems, among other things. Maria said something about "out of the heart the mouth speaks", saying Peter (her son) has really latched on to that because a woman at the church taught it to the kids with hand motions, and he seems to really understand that when he is talking bad his heart needs some working on. That really amazed me and I'm going to have to use that when talking to Callia, too, because lately that is something I am seeing as a big issue with her. I am so bothered by the little "insignificant" things I'm hearing her say because I'm worried about her heart. I have had a very difficult time communicating it to her, and all I can seem to do is stumble around talking about decisions and attitudes. She does her best to ignore me and avoid eye contact, which is another symptom of the same problem. But scripture is good for teaching so tomorrow I'm 99.99% certain that something will come up to provide the perfect opportunity to talk about it with her.