Today’s 9:24 reminder
Remember the Provider when you reach what you prayed for.
Make knowing God more valuable than wisdom, strength or possessions.
Don’t assume what you can currently see is all Jesus can do.
And don’t spend your life trying to preserve a version of yourself that obedience is asking you to release.
Sometimes the best recipes are the ones that make life a little easier. Instead of squeezing what feels like a hundred lemons every time I want homemade lemonade, I’ve been using Santa Cruz Organic Pure Lemon Juice—and it has become such a simple way to keep a pitcher ready. My recipe is easy to remember: ½ gallon (8 cups) of water, 1 cup of lemon juice, and 1½ cups of sugar. Fill the pitcher with cold water, add the lemon juice and sugar, stir until everything is dissolved, and that’s it. Of course, you can always adjust the sweetness to your taste. Simple doesn’t mean it can’t be good. Sometimes simple is exactly what we need.
What I especially love is that one basic recipe can become the starting point for so many other drinks. Mix equal parts lemonade and freshly brewed iced tea for an Arnold Palmer, add lavender syrup for a floral lavender lemonade, muddle fresh blueberries into the pitcher for blueberry lemonade, or combine pineapple and dragonfruit with the lemonade for something tropical. One recipe, several possibilities—and maybe that’s the insight beyond the pitcher: once you have a good foundation, you don’t always have to start over to create something new. Sometimes you simply build on what you already have. 🍋💜
Receive what God has prepared.
Gratitude doesn’t always have to be grand. Sometimes it’s simply noticing the good, saying thank you, offering a kind word, or blessing someone just because.
Ways to practice gratitude.
✨ Write out 3 things that you’re grateful for.
✨ Send someone a thank you text or email.
✨ Be kind.
✨ Compliment someone.
✨ Purchase someone a cup of coffee or tea.
✨ Purchase a meal on send a gift card for lunch.
Gratitude helps us see that goodness surrounds us and a random act of kindness makes people feel special. 🌼
Let Him sustain you.
Yesterday, I cleared my bed.
That probably doesn’t sound significant. People clear their beds every day. But for me, it felt different. Because I like to write and create, I usually keep things close to me. My laptop may be at the foot of my bed, along with a notebook, journal or pen. Those things are there intentionally. I may get an idea and want to write it down, open my computer or work on something without having to go very far.
But over the past few months, other things have started collecting there too. The case with my prescriptions. The packaging from the pharmacy. Mail. Socks. Clothes I’d worn earlier. Nothing outrageous and nothing that prevented me from sleeping comfortably. I sleep on one side of the bed, and everything had its own little spot on the other side or toward the bottom. Sometimes I’d even make a cute little pile. 😂 It was organized enough—or at least that’s what I told myself.
Yesterday, September 20, for some reason, I wanted it gone. I don’t know where the energy came from. I didn’t make some grand declaration that I was getting my life together. I didn’t start a cleaning challenge or decide that September 20 would become some symbolic day of transformation. I just felt the need to clear my bed.
So I did. I hung up the clothes and put things where they actually belonged. I moved my medicine to the table where I want to keep it, which also means that when it’s time to take it in the morning, I actually have to get up to get it. The laptop moved. The journals moved. The mail moved. My phone stayed because that’s my alarm, and I like sleeping with Gospel music playing. But everything else was put away.
And this morning, when I woke up, I noticed something.
My sightline was clear.
I’ve had this thing about sightlines for several years now. Depending on where I’m sitting in a room, I want to be able to look out and see clear space. When something starts cluttering that view, eventually something in me says, Wait a minute. I need to clear this. Maybe that’s what happened yesterday.
When I opened my eyes this morning, I didn’t see the little pile at the foot of my bed. I saw my comforter. That’s it. And it felt good. What makes this interesting to me is that none of those things had actually been in my way. They weren’t preventing me from getting into bed. They weren’t taking up the space where I sleep. They weren’t keeping me from writing, resting or listening to music.
But maybe something doesn’t have to be in your way to affect what you see.
I’ve been thinking about that. There are things we become accustomed to seeing simply because they’ve been there for a while. We stop questioning their presence. We work around them. We make a pile. We straighten the pile. We might even make the pile cute. 😂 Eventually, we don’t really notice it anymore because we’ve learned how to live with it.
Until we see the space without it.
And maybe that’s what felt different this morning. It wasn’t that I suddenly had more room in my bed. Technically, I didn’t need more room. It was that when I opened my eyes, there was nothing competing for my attention. There wasn’t anything waiting for me to put it away, deal with it, organize it or decide what to do with it. There was simply clear space.
I don’t know that I need to make clearing my bed mean anything more than what it meant yesterday. I don’t know if this was some profound moment about clearing my life, preparing for something new or making room for what’s next. Maybe I’ll understand it differently later. For now, I simply know that something in me wanted a clear bed, so I listened.
And I’m glad I did.
Maybe sometimes clarity isn’t about having all the answers. Maybe it isn’t even about making some huge change. Sometimes it may be as simple as noticing what has been sitting in your sightline for so long that you’ve stopped seeing it—and deciding that it doesn’t need to be there anymore.
This morning, for the first time in a while, I woke up and saw nothing at the foot of my bed except my comforter.
I liked what I could see.
It felt good to be clear.
Same God. Bigger purpose. Brighter days. 💜📖✨
Receive the mercy. Surrender what you have. Steward what He gives you.
You don’t have to see how He’s going to do it before you obey what He told you to do.
You don’t have to work constantly to prove that God is working.
God Included Rest in His Instructions.
Don’t Just Remember the Rescue—Rejoice in It.
Grace Received Can Become Grace Expressed.
God Can Show Up in the Storm.
God isn’t only concerned with where you’re going. He’s shaping who you’re becoming on the way there.
You don’t have to have everything figured out to take the next step.
Your obedience may become somebody else’s evidence.
He kept His promise.
Keep growing.
Use what He gives you.
And when people see what He does through your life, let the glory go back to Him.
💜📖✨
This past Friday, I had a procedure. When I came home, I received calls and text messages from family and friends checking to see how I was doing. I was grateful for every one of them.
But somewhere through the grogginess, I had a thought that caught me off guard.
I wondered why my father hadn’t called to check on me.
For a moment, I forgot.
Maybe that’s one of the strange things about grief. There are relationships and routines so deeply woven into us that even after someone is gone, some part of us still expects them to be there.
My father checked on me. He cared about how I was doing. Throughout my life, I knew what it felt like to be cared for by my dad. So perhaps it shouldn’t surprise me that in a vulnerable moment, my mind still expected his call.
Then reality returned.
He’s not here to make that call anymore.
And yes, that hurts.
But instead of allowing that moment to only remind me of what I’ve lost, I can also allow it to remind me of what I had.
I had a father who checked on me.
I had a father whose care was so consistent that even after his death, something within me still expects it.
Grief continues to show up in ways I don’t anticipate. Sometimes it’s an anniversary. Sometimes it’s seeing something I know Daddy would have loved. And sometimes it’s simply looking at my phone and realizing the call I’m waiting for isn’t coming.
I’m learning not to fight those moments.
I let myself miss him.
I let myself remember him.
And I thank God that I had a father whose love left such a deep imprint on my life.
Grief is hard, but God is still good.
Both can be true.
I can miss my father deeply and still be grateful.
I can feel the absence and still recognize God’s presence.
And on the days when grief catches me somewhere between what used to be and what is now, I can rest in knowing that the love is still here.
It’s just different now. 💚
Today’s 9:24 reminder Remember the Provider when you reach what you prayed for. Make knowing God more valuable than wisdom, strength or po...
