4 hours ago
Today is Thanksgiving. A day when people all over the country take time to reflect on the things that they are thankful for. I love making lists of things we are thankful for on Thanksgiving, but I think it can be easy to focus so much on the things, especially material blessings, that we forget about Who gave us these things.
This day isn't about the turkey, or football games, or even spending time with family. This is a day to give thanks to God, not only for the blessings He has given us, but for who He is and what He has done. It should be a day not only of thanks, but also of praise - not just for listing blessings, but for reflecting and remembering what a great God we serve and thanking Him for everything that He is.
One of my favorite passages of Scripture around Thanksgiving and Christmas is Mary's song in Luke 1:47-55:
“My soul magnifies the Lord,
And my spirit has rejoiced in God my Savior.
For He has regarded the lowly state of His maidservant;
For behold, henceforth all generations will call me blessed.
For He who is mighty has done great things for me,
And holy is His name.
And His mercy is on those who fear Him
From generation to generation.
He has shown strength with His arm;
He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.
He has put down the mighty from their thrones,
And exalted the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things,
And the rich He has sent away empty.
He has helped His servant Israel,
In remembrance of His mercy,
As He spoke to our fathers,
To Abraham and to his seed forever.”
And my spirit has rejoiced in God my Savior.
For He has regarded the lowly state of His maidservant;
For behold, henceforth all generations will call me blessed.
For He who is mighty has done great things for me,
And holy is His name.
And His mercy is on those who fear Him
From generation to generation.
He has shown strength with His arm;
He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.
He has put down the mighty from their thrones,
And exalted the lowly.
He has filled the hungry with good things,
And the rich He has sent away empty.
He has helped His servant Israel,
In remembrance of His mercy,
As He spoke to our fathers,
To Abraham and to his seed forever.”
The lyrics of one of my favorite Christmas songs, Magnificat on Todd Agnew's Christmas CD, is based on this passage. You can listen to it here. I feel like it presents Mary's song so beautifully, but it resonates with me so much because of how it focuses on God and His work.
He has done great things for me, and for you. Even if you have nothing but the clothes on your back, this is true. We are entering into the Christmas season, when we celebrate the fact that He became a man, so he could die for us. So He could rise from the dead and save us. That is a great thing. It is the greatest thing.
God and who He is right at the top of my list, right along with this mighty thing that He has done for us. I'm so glad to serve such a strong, holy, and merciful God as this.
In case you missed it yesterday, I did end up changing my blog design! With this lovely rollover header/navbar. Cool, huh?
In the process of blog designing this time, I discovered a resource that I overlooked before - free photoshop brushes, patterns, and shapes! So for all of you who like to play with Photoshop Elements or do your own blog design, I thought I'd share where I got some of the tools for my current blog design, as well as some websites I've found with fun free resources.
One of the issues with getting "free" things on the internet (like photoshop stuff or fonts), is that it may only be free for personal use. If you advertise on your blog at all (which I do), you have to use items that are free for commercial use. It makes it more challenging to find what you are looking for, but not impossible!
As of this writing, the following resources are free for commercial use! But read the license before you download to make sure, in case something changes.
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Free (for commercial use) Photoshop animal shapes - I used this set of free animal shapes for the deer, bird, and moose in my rollover header images (I just used some of the shapes I already had for the other rollover shapes). It only comes as a jpg, but you can use the magic selector tool to select the shape, drag it into your new image, and then use the paint bucket tool to change it to whatever color you want!
Free (for commercial use) deer brushes - I downloaded these too and didn't end up using them this time around, but they are nice and free for commercial use! You can use brushes as shapes as well - just create a new layer (SHIFT-CTRL-N), put the brush on the new layer, and then you can use the paint bucket tool to change it's color, make it a gradient shape, and resize it using the free transform tool (CTRL-T).
Free (for commercial use) tree brushes - I was thinking about using these for the trees in the main part of my header, but I ended up making my own tree brush instead. But once again, more free brushes! Yay!
Free (for commercial use) snowflake brushes - I'm thinking about using these to spiff things up around here for Christmas, if I have time.
Free overlays and free "paint" brushes - I used one of the overlays in this set to create a pattern in Photoshop Elements to use behind the trees in my header (see this tutorial on re-coloring overlays). Then I used some of her other brushes to create another pattern, which I added behind the first pattern for more interest. I love this site because she has so many great Photoshop freebies! The ones that are free for commercial use are marked with a "CU". I also got the little arrow brushes that I used in the above image from here.
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And those are all the resources I used!
I found several more sites with photoshop resources that are free for commercial use in the midst of my search, which I might share at a later date. Or if you just can't wait, you can check out my bloggy Pinterest board, in which I pin all things blog, and you can find them there!
For installing shapes check out this tutorial, for installing brushes look here, for installing patterns see this.
(Click on image for more posts in this series.)
(These grasses are gone now, but they were really pretty while they were here last summer.)
I'm tempted to break out in a verse of "Breaking Up Is Hard To Do", but I haven't had a friendship "break up" since elementary school. Friendships don't usually end that way. In my experience, it's always been more of a slow fade.
I used to be the type to try to stop this as soon as I saw it start. I hate the thought of losing friends, drifting away from people, and I never wanted the fault to fall on me. If I saw it fading, I'd make sure I did everything I could to let the person know I still wanted to be friends. Sometimes the friendship died anyway, but it was never on my conscience. I never wanted to look back and wonder if I should have tried harder.
In recent years I've changed my mind about this a little bit though. Certainly there are a lot of friendships that are worth saving, or sometimes friendships just fade during certain life seasons only to come back later. But over the years I've started to learn that there are some friendships that I'm better off letting go.
This is really hard for me to do. It goes against my nature. I try really hard to be a good friend, and just letting someone go doesn't seem like it fits in with good friendship skills, but I've realized more and more that not everyone is like me. Some people don't care about being a good friend. Some people don't know how to be a good friend. Maybe they are busy with their own lives, maybe they never had good friendship skills modeled for them. Either way I've realized I can't be the only one who cares.
Recently I was struggling with this, wondering why certain friendships of mine over the years have ended or gone stale. I would go over everything that happened toward the end, trying to figure out if I said something or did something that might have offended the person. Wondering if I should have handled this or that better. Wondering if it was me who had dropped the ball.
Then a couple weeks ago a dear friend wrote me a note, out of the blue, just thanking me for always being there for her, for loving her through the tough spots and not judging her (which is ironic, because I've thought the same thing about her actions toward me over the years). It made me want to cry, because she couldn't even have known how much I needed to hear those words right then.
Shortly after I randomly turned the radio to a Christian station, and a speaker was talking about letting go of toxic friendships. The timing was interesting, and I somehow knew the Lord was trying to tell me something.
As I listened my eyes opened up, and I realized what kind of friends I really want. I want friends like the one I have who wrote me that note. I want friends who make me feel loved and accepted even with all my flaws. Friends who I know will be there for me through the tough times, friends who will forgive me when I make stupid mistakes, friends who will overlook the little things. Friends who not only love when I call or write to them, but who reciprocate and reach out to me too. You may not have talked to them for months, but you can get together again and feel like nothing has changed.
Those are the friends who stay. Those are the friends who are worth keeping. I have several friends like that - and what a blessing they are in my life! To have multiple women in my life that are these kind of friends to me - how can I ask for anything more than that? I am blessed.
On the other hand, friends that always make me wonder if I did something wrong, friends who don't call me back, friends who always seem to have an agenda, friends who are too busy (or just don't care enough) to make the effort to keep in touch - those friendships are exhausting. They aren't edifying, they suck the energy right out of me. They don't make me focus on God, they don't make me focus on things that are really important. If anything the constant effort and drama that they require distracts me from my walk with the Lord and from the good relationships in my life. I think this second type of friendship qualifies as toxic, and these are not the kind of friendships I want. They are the kind that need letting go.
The Lord showed me that sometimes it can be the right thing to do. When I accepted that, it turned out that letting go wasn't as hard as I thought.
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