Girls To Grow

Nurturing moms in their walk with God

Saturday Salutes ~ Advice for Tired Moms of Teens and Fun Snow Activities (With or Without the Snow)

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Last Saturday, I mentioned that this was Spirit Week at the girls’ school. Here’s my older daughter (on the left) with her friend dressed as Dora and Diego for “Dynamic Duo” day.

Rachel writes hey, tired mom of teens, this is for you. And from where I sit as a mom of teens, let me just say that six weeks into parenting an 18-year-old, 18 is my favorite year of all the teenage ones so far!!

Mary shares advice for When You Want This to Be Your Best Year Yet.

Ashley lists 5 Tips for Better Marriage Communication.

Shannon has Snow Activities for Families Living in Warm Climates (although I think these sound fun even if you have actual snow outside!)

I loved this list of 24 Unforgettable Birthday Traditions.

And then there’s this t-shirt that might be appropriate for me to wear some days!

Hope you have a wonderful weekend!!

The Spiritual Truth I Realized While Riding with a New Driver

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Our 16-year-old daughter is learning to drive. She has her beginner’s permit, has taken the classroom part of Driver’s Ed, and will have her first in-car driving lesson with an instructor next month.

In the meantime, she drives me around in our car whenever she has a chance. And let me say up front that she’s going to be a fine driver.

But just like with any new skill, learning to drive takes practice.

One morning last week, she was driving to school. I was in the passenger’s seat, giving occasional instructions. And I will say that I truly make an effort to speak calmly as I offer advice from my side of the car.

We were riding in the right lane, with two lanes of cars to our left. I’d already mentioned to her the possibility that cars in front of us might be turning into a row of businesses we were passing. I wanted her to be ready to brake and slow down. Sure enough, I noticed someone turning several cars ahead of us. The SUV in front of us hit its brakes.

I just didn’t feel like we were slowing down at quite the rate we needed to. In my mind, we were approaching that SUV’s bumper very quickly. I said, “Brake,” but it didn’t seem to have much effect. I repeated “Brake” a little louder, and then said it a third time, even louder.

She did brake at that point, and then calmly assured me she’d had it under control the whole time. (She also asked me why I’d gotten louder each time, and what I expected the increase in volume to accomplish!)

While she’s doing well overall, she’s still learning. And if she wants to avoid an accident, she’ll listen to what I’m saying. (And hopefully I’m saying it in a normal tone!)

As I was thinking about that experience later in the day, I realized that there’s a spiritual application for us.

As we navigate our lives, God wants to teach us and guide us. He wants to help us avoid “accidents,” and learn to stay focused on where we need to go.

Yet we have to be willing to listen. We can try getting by on our own, but there’s a good chance we’ll take a wrong turn or get involved in something we should have avoided.

Things will go much more smoothly for us if we’re listening to that first quiet instruction He gives us. And while we may think we know what’s best, we have to learn to trust that He will lead us in the way He wants us to go.

“I will instruct thee and teach thee in the way which thou shalt go: I will guide thee with mine eye.” ~Psalm 32:8

If my daughter would have had the radio cranked up, she likely wouldn’t have even heard me tell her what to do. In the same way, we won’t be able to hear God if we’re tuned in to what the world is saying rather than listening for His guidance.

“And thine ears shall hear a word behind thee, saying, This is the way, walk ye in it, when ye turn to the right hand, and when ye turn to the left.” ~Isaiah 30:21

We’re going to hear God speak to us through His Word and His Holy Spirit. We can choose to ignore His instruction, but it might not end well. We can also hurry ahead of Him, but it’s best if we wait on His leading.

“Shew me thy ways, O Lord; teach me thy paths. Lead me in thy truth, and teach me: for thou art the God of my salvation; on thee do I wait all the day.” ~Psalm 25:4,5

The more our daughter drives, the more experienced she’ll become, and the better decisions she will make when she gets behind the wheel of the car. In the same way, the more we make choices that are pleasing to God, the more we learn to respond to situations properly and grow in our faith and in trusting God.

My goal with our daughter is to make her a good driver. God wants to make us successful Christ followers. Let’s listen to and follow His instructions in the same way that I want my daughter to do that for me when she’s in the driver’s seat.

Related posts:

Saturday Salutes ~ Family Night Ideas and Weekly Traditions

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Brenda says Ride with Your Hands Up.

Dave writes about The Best Day Evaa.

Jessica tells us How to Help Your Kids Focus on Faith During the School Year.

Raluca lists 40 Family Night Ideas to Try with Your Kids.

I’m such a fan of family traditions, which led me to share Jessica’s post 10 Awesome Weekly Traditions for Your Family.

Taking my younger daughter shopping today, then meeting up with one of her friends so they can prepare for Spirit Week at school next week. From past experience, I know that Spirit Week requires at least one trip to Goodwill for random clothing in weird colors that we wouldn’t normally purchase!

My younger daughter and some of her classmates dressed up as characters from the Wizard of Oz last year. She was Glinda the Good Witch.

Hope you have a wonderful weekend!!

10 Things God Might Use To Change Us This Year

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We’re just over a week into the new year. How are you doing so far? Working toward some goals or getting on track with your word for the year?

On a very superficial note, I’ll say that we’ve had several days of beautiful weather here (after lots of cloudy, rainy days), so I feel like 2019 is going well!

While I didn’t choose change as my word for the year, I definitely want to experience some change in my life this year, especially spiritually speaking. I don’t want to be the same person on December 31, 2019 as I am today.

For example, one way I need to change is in not being critical in my thoughts and words. We had some of that beautiful weather on Sunday afternoon, and my husband and I were out walking in the neighborhood. I caught myself starting to say something critical about someone, but thankfully I backed off and didn’t take the conversation any further. I’m not always that quick to control my tongue, but I’m thankful that I listened to the prompting of the Holy Spirit that time!

I’m guessing we all want to change in some way. It’s not just change for the sake of change, but rather so that we can become more like Christ. That’s our ultimate goal.

So how might God change us this year? Here are ten things He might use to make us different as we walk with Him in 2019.

1. His Word

As we read and study the Bible, the Holy Spirit uses it to convict us about sin. Or, He may encourage us to step up to the plate and do something for Him that we’re not currently doing.

2. Meditation.

I’m not so good at this one. I’ve done the method of write a verse on a 3×5 card and put it in a prominent place in the kitchen or put a sticky note on the bathroom mirror, but after a couple of days, it’s like I don’t even see it anymore.

But I know meditation will help me – for example, with my critical spirit, like I mentioned above. Something as simple as “Let your speech be always seasoned with grace…” [Colossians 4:6] could go a long way toward helping me fight that spiritual battle.

3. Prayer

We might think more of prayer as a way God might change others, but the act of praying can change us, too. God can increase our faith as we see prayers answered. Including praise and thanksgiving in our prayer time focuses our thoughts on the greatness and goodness of our God.

4. Preaching

Being under the teaching of God’s Word, whether in a church service on Sunday or watching an online Bible study video during the week, can cause us to grow spiritually. The Holy Spirit can use a sound Bible teacher to show us truths and principles from God’s Word.

5. Music

Every time I’ve had a major trial in my life, God has given me a song to encourage my heart and draw me to Him. Sometimes I’ve heard it randomly on the radio or in church. At other times, a family member or friend has shared it with me.

6. Trials

So this one scares me. Yet I know if I’m going to change, I will likely face some hard moments in 2019. How you and I respond to these trials will determine whether or not growth and change happen.

7. Service

God can use our service for others to change us. I would guess we can all relate to a time when we went to be a blessing to someone else, and ended up getting a huge blessing ourselves!

8. People

I feel like this could go one of two ways. We may develop a new friendship with someone who edifies and encourages us in our Christian life. Or, God may place a difficult person in our lives who makes us see how unloving we really are. Learning to deal with him/her could bring about some very positive changes in ourselves, whether it effects that person or not.

9. Circumstances

This wouldn’t necessarily be a trial, but just something that comes along, perhaps that’s unexpected. In God’s providence, He may start us moving in a different direction than we had planned.

10. Books

How important is it to read good books! A couple of books that I think are worth reading every year are Stepping Heavenward by Elizabeth Prentiss and Keep a Quiet Heart by Elisabeth Elliot. I’m currently reading Abide in Christ by Andrew Murray. While it’s written in an Old English style, I’m pulling some great truths from it.

As we continue through January, I hope we’ll keep our hearts open to areas in which God wants to change us. We can trust our loving heavenly Father to do what’s best in each of lives as we go through this year.

Related posts:

Saturday Salutes ~ Happy Kids and Chocolate Banana Bread

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Welcome to the first Saturday Salutes post of the year! We started 2019 with my older daughter getting all four of her wisdom teeth taken out on Wednesday. Very thankful that the procedure went smoothly, and she’s recovering well.

Here are several helpful posts I read this week.

Michelle shares Sacred Stories on Mundane Tables.

Lauren lists 7 Ways to Keep Your Kids Happy and Beat the Winter Blues.

Sarah Joy is one of my favorite Instagrammers to follow, but she also has a blog where she recently shared My Best Farmhouse Style DIY Projects of 2018.

Lara gives us 16 Things Your Teenage Daughter Needs to Hear from You.

I think I need to buy some extra bananas so I can try this Chocolate Banana Bread recipe!

This graphic from Ginger Harrington has tips to help us in the battle against selfishness.

We’re gearing up for our girls to go back to school on Monday. It never feels quite like the new year until we’re back into our regular routine – not that I haven’t enjoyed the break! Hope you have a wonderful weekend!!

Turning Change Into Opportunity

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Happy 2019!! I hope each one of you is enjoying a good start to the new year.

It’s a time of fresh beginnings and renewed purpose. Everywhere I look people are posting their goals, resolutions, and words for the year.

I’m honestly not feeling a lot of motivation for setting goals. And while I’ve occasionally chosen a word for the year, it’s not something I’ve done recently.

But this year, I’m going back to the word idea. I want a focus for this year, a way to make sure I’m accomplishing something worthwhile.

At first I thought choosing a word would be easy. With a daughter graduating high school and heading off to college in 2019, my word would be change.

Her life will change, but our lives here at home will change just as much. Beyond the bittersweet nature of her leaving, and knowing we will miss her, is how the change will effect our everyday lives.

As I thought about it, though, I realized that change is kind of a word that’s been chosen for me for 2019. I decided to actually choose a word on my own.

And that word is opportunity.

It's not the word that was chosen FOR me, but one I chose for myself.

I wanted to twist the change that’s coming into an opportunity. Hopefully I’ll be encouraged to approach it in as positive a light as possible!

There are six areas in which I’d like to apply this word. In 2019, I’ll look for opportunities to…

~ grow in my walk with God. I’m recommitting to memorizing Bible verses, which I’d slacked off of in the last couple of years. I expect my trust and faith to be stretched with a daughter hundreds of miles away, so I need to always have God’s Word fresh in my mind!

~ serve others. This doesn’t come naturally for me, so I want to keep this idea in the forefront of my mind. It doesn’t have to be big or noteworthy; in fact, the little ways in which I can serve others can be the most meaningful.

~ share my faith. Another spiritual area where I desperately need to grow, especially in my boldness. I need to remember to pray for opportunities to tell others about Christ. He wants the gospel shared, so I believe He will open doors for me to do just that.

~ strengthen relationships. This starts with my immediate family. I want to intentionally do things with and for my husband. In the second half of the year, I’ll get to develop a new “long-distance” relationship when my older daughter goes off to college. Then I’ll also have lots of one-on-one time with our younger daughter!

Over the last few years, I’ve realized the value of friendships. Near the end of 2017, a lady invited me over to her house for coffee. We’d known each other for a long time, and saw each other occasionally, but weren’t close. We had such a good time that day just talking and catching up, that we decided to schedule another coffee date. Ever since then, we’ve gotten together once a month. It’s been such a blessing, and all because she took the time to reach out to me. I want to be that friend for someone else.

~ try new things. Okay, I really like staying in my comfort zone, but I want to get better at stepping outside of it. One of my husband’s Christmas gifts is helping me out here! He gave me a gift certificate so we could have a private lesson in ballroom dancing at a studio here in Charleston. This is something I’ve wanted to do for a long time. We’d talked about taking lessons once the kids were grown and gone, but now we’ve moved that schedule up! He may be sorry since coordination isn’t a natural gift of mine, but I’m really looking forward to it!

~ use this blog to encourage others. I want to be more consistent in writing and putting out helpful content. I know I need to set some goals in this area to motivate me to do better.

Finally, I want to claim these verses for 2019, to meditate on them as I go throughout the year.

“Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee; because he trusteth in thee. Trust ye in the Lord for ever: for in the Lord Jehovah is everlasting strength.” ~Isaiah 26:3,4

To live in peace as I trust in God, and to rely on His everlasting strength will make 2019 a great year!!

So that’s a lot about me in one post, but I hope you’ll find some encouragement here as you plan for the year ahead.

Let me know if you’ve chosen a word for 2019. Is there something specific you want to accomplish? I’d love to know what you’re planning for the upcoming year!

Saturday Salutes ~ Top Ten Posts from 2018 and the Books I Read in December

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We continued our Christmas Eve tradition of going out for dessert in downtown Charleston and touring the hotel lobby at Charleston Place.

I didn’t do much blog reading this past week, so I thought I’d share the books I finished in December, as well as recap the top posts from the blog this past year.

I only read one non-fiction book this month.

I recommend How to Break Up With Your Phone by Catherine Price if you’re serious about limiting the amount of time you spend on your phone.  In the first half of the book, she outlines the issues we often have with our phones.  Those include addiction, changes in your brain, the effects of social media, and how advertisers want to program us to be on our phones as much as possible. 

The second half lays out a plan for being more mindful users of our phones. She doesn’t suggest getting rid of your phone, but rather learning to use it mindfully.  Don’t let it be your default when you’re bored, or allow yourself to just mindlessly scroll.  There’s a 30-day program in the book, which includes plenty of helpful tips including taking a “phast” from your phone.  This was a relatively short book, but definitely helpful.

I finished four fiction books this month.

Celia Garth by Gwen Bristow is set in Charleston during the Revolutionary War.  Nikki recommended this book, and I’d say it was one of my favorite reads this year.  It’s an older book, and reminded me of the kind I read as a teenager.

Catching Christmas by Terri Blackstock was a quick read that I also really enjoyed.  It was a sweet story about an old lady, her granddaughter, and a cab driver.

Amy Snow by Tracy Rees was an entertaining book with a nice mix of mystery and romance.

The final one is Murder at the Brightwell by Ashley Weaver.  It was an Agatha Christie type novel.  That’s not a genre that I normally read, but this was another fun book as well.

I didn’t publish as many posts here as I have in previous years.  Life has felt a bit busier in general, and I’m definitely focusing on making the most of these last years of high school with my daughters.  That being said, I do hope to be a little more consistent with my writing in 2019. 

Here’s a countdown of the top ten posts (according to Google analytics) published here on Girls to Grow over the past year.

10. This Is What Our Souls Need

9.  3 Ways to Strengthen Your Marriage

8.  4 Bible Verses to Hold On To As We Parent Teenagers

7.  7 Ways to Prepare Your Heart for Christmas…(Especially if You’re Not Feeling It Yet)

6.  10 Things We Can Give Away Today

5.  5 Ways to Pray for Your Husband

4.  5 Bible Promises to Pray Over Your Life Today

3.  5 Prayers to Pray for Your Children Every Day

2.  Don’t Be a Fool: 5 Things to Avoid if You Want to Be Wise

1.  How I Want God to Answer My Prayers

If you have a favorite post that didn’t make the list, let me know what it was!  Hope you have a wonderful weekend as we prepare for 2019!!

Merry Christmas 2018

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From our family to yours, Merry Christmas!!

May the love, joy, and peace that only Jesus can give be yours today, and the whole year through!

Saturday Salutes ~ What NOT To Do This Holiday Season and a Video

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Alia writes about The Waiting and Hope of Advent.

Stacey shares help For the Days When You’re Tired of Living with a White-Knuckled Grip.

This is an older post, but a great reminder of 10 Things to NOT Do This Holiday Season.

Ann has 9 Cozy Winter Favorites for the Cold and Dreary Season.

It wasn’t until we were in New York City a couple of weeks ago that I realized everyone in the family likes bruschetta.  I’d ordered it in restaurants before, but this time my husband and daughters ate it, too.  Ater we got home, I made The Pioneer Woman’s Bruschetta and it was so tasty!!  I’ll definitely be making it again.

The video below is from our daughters’ school Christmas concert last week. This handbell song was my favorite of the four they performed. I was sitting pretty far back, so the video’s not as clear as I would have liked. Our daughters are the third and fourth ones in, if you start with the line of girls at the first table.

Just one Christmas party left, which is our Sunday School class breakfast tomorrow morning. All of the shopping and most of the wrapping is done, so I’m looking forward to a low-key Christmas Eve day. Hope you have a wonderful pre-Christmas weekend!

Don’t Let the Kids Be the Only Ones Anticipating Christmas

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Anticipation.

If you want a picture to go along with that word, I can’t think of one that’s more appropriate than that of kids waiting for Christmas to arrive.  

As a child, I remember my two younger brothers getting up VERY early on Christmas morning.  At some point they’d come into my room, so excited to go downstairs and wake up my parents so we could open gifts (and eat candy from our stockings for a little pre-breakfast sugar high!)

Take time to anticipate the wonder of Christ's birth this Christmas season.

As adults, I think we generally anticipate Christmas a little (or a lot?) less.  We face more responsibilities.  There are presents to buy, food to make, holiday events to attend, and Christmas parties to fit into an already busy schedule.

And while we’re never too old to get excited about gifts, Christmas becomes about a whole lot more.  We treasure the joy others get when they open presents we’ve chosen just for them.  Getting together and spending time with family becomes much more of a focus…though there’s still a lot of excitement about the candy and other good food!

All that to say that our anticipation level for Christmas can be fairly low at times.  But in these last few days before Christmas, I hope we can slow down and really anticipate what’s to come.  Let our whole focus not be the gifts or the food or the family celebrations as much as marking the significance of Christ’s birth.

I love the definition of anticipate from the Cambridge Dictionary.  It defines it as “to imagine or expect that something will happen, sometimes taking action in preparation for it.”

Thinking all the way back to the first Christmas, Joseph and Mary must have experienced incredible anticipation.  Many of us can identify with anticipating a child’s birth.  But what about a child that has been said to be the Messiah?  One whose birth was foretold to both Joseph and Mary by angels!  How exciting!!

Since long before then, though, God’s people had been waiting for a Savior.  God told Adam and Eve in Genesis 3:15 that the seed of the woman would bruise Satan’s heal.  From then on, the anticipation of God fulfilling His promise was a hope for all mankind.

And just as our God is always faithful, so He provided His Son as that seed.  The anticipation from the centuries before was brought to pass on a quiet night in Bethlehem.

In this last week before Christmas, let’s try to find a bit of the wonder and anticipation of the season.  This message is for me.  Me, with a few presents still to buy and wrap, a couple more parties to bake for, and a Christmas dinner to cook.  Let me not get so caught up in the last minute details and preparations that I forget to marvel in the glory of the greatest gift ever given.

“And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.  For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord….And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God, and saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.” ~Luke 2:10, 11, 13, 14

Thank you, Jesus, for coming to earth.  This was the initiation of God’s plan for my redemption, the redemption of the whole world.  Thank you, God, for the gift that was perfect and that only You could give.