Blog Awards

  

While I was AWOL from blogging, Anabelle at Written By the Finger of God sent me two wonderful blog awards:
                                                   The 2012 Blog of the Year Award
                                                                          AND
                                                      The Food For Thought Award

THANK YOU, Anabelle! Now, I'll have you all know that my dear friend, Anabelle, sweetly blackmailed coaxed me into returning to my blog by threatening to take my awards back offering me a gorgeous pair of designer earrings made by her very talented daughter. (You can get a sneak peek at the earrings here - just scroll down the page a bit.)

I'd also like to send a big THANK YOU to Nancy at The Breadbox Letters (and  
The Cloistered Heart) and Karinann at Daughter of the King for sending me The 2012 Blog of the Year Award too! Right back at you, Ladies!

Here are the rules for passing the award along: (Man, I love cut and paste. Whoever invented it deserves an
award of their own.)

"The ‘rules’ for this award are simple:
1 Select the blog(s) you think deserve the ‘Blog of the Year 2012′ Award
2 Write a blog post and tell us about the blog(s) you have chosen — there’s no minimum or maximum number of blogs required — and ‘present’ them with their award.
3 Please include a link back to this page:   — http://thethoughtpalette.co.uk/our-awards/blog-of-the-year-2012-award/ and include these ‘rules’ in your post (please don’t alter the rules or the badges!)
4 Let the blog(s) you have chosen know that you have given them this award and share the ‘rules’ with them.
5 You can now also join our Facebook group — click ‘like’ on this page ‘Blog of the Year 2012′ Award Facebook group and then you can share your blog with an even wider audience.
6 As a winner of the award — please add a link back to the blog that presented you with the award — and then proudly display the award on your blog and sidebar … and start collecting stars…
Yes — that’s right — there are stars to collect!
Unlike other awards which you can only add to your blog once — this award is different!
When you begin you will receive the ’1 star’ award — and every time you are given the award by another blog — you can add another star!
There are a total of 6 stars to collect.

Which means that you can check out your favorite blogs — and even if they have already been given the award by someone else — you can still bestow it on them again and help them to reach the maximum 6 stars!"

I'd like to pass the awards along to these incredible bloggers:
~ Theresa at My Desert Heart  phew, I almost wrote dessert heart  can't let these folks know how much I pigged out on sweets this week  that was a close call
~ Victor at Time for Confections Reflections
~ Colleen  at Thoughts on those chocolate chip cookies her husband bakes Grace
~ Anne at Imprisoned by my jeans lately in my Bones
~ Kathryn at Heart for God 's good food
~ Monica at Little Jesus and Me love cupcakes
~ Barb at Suffering from sugar overload with Joy
~ Sue at Sue Elvis Writes and I bet she bakes too
~ Jennifer at Catholic Inspired cuisine
 
if anyone notices my slips i'll just blame anabelle for sending me that food for thought award in the first place
besides, I bet anabelle likes a good seven layer bar oh right I forgot that anabelle burns things like i do hopefully she won't notice that i cheated on the rules for the awards  then again she did too 

Capital Sin, Apocalypse Wow

Okay, I realize I've been away from Blogger for a while but:

Since when do we have to answer trivia questions to access our dashboards?

And does Blogger really care whether I know the capital of Texas?

(Now, I'm not sayin' I got it wrong, mind you. Nope, not sayin' that at all. I mean: I got on here, right?)

I admit that "Do you know the 37 things you should hoard before the coming disaster?" has me a bit stumped though.

(Hmm, after looking at some of my post titles I'm thinking that I should know the answer to that one....)

They Did Not Know I was Their Healer

One of my favorite passages in the Bible is from Hosea and it reads like this:

I drew them with human cords,
   with bands of love;
I fostered them like one
   who raises an infant to his cheeks;
Yet, though I stooped to feed my child,
   they did not know I was their healer.
                                    Hosea 11:4

Do you know that God is your healer? As I look around the world we live in today I see so much suffering in people's eyes. Many don't seem to realize that God is their healer in a very real and personal way. I believe that this is an aspect of God's nature that people don't think about often in this day and age where being self-sufficient is praised and looked upon as a great virtue. I think we forget that we are not a world unto ourselves and that the very self-sufficiency we so praise can at times be our greatest downfall. When we forget that we need others we tend to grow very selfish and overly focused on our own lives and well-being. We lose the greater picture that is reality and sit on our little thrones in the little false worlds we create for ourselves.

Pretenders, the whole lot of us. Imagine if God were to show each and every one of us the truth about ourselves all at once?

Ouch.

Like a universal "divine adjustment". (Hey, never say never.)

Thankfully, we usually get this "divine adjustment" over a period of time.

The truth is that we need others and we need God. Those who believe they can "do it all myself" can, if it goes too far, shut themselves off from God and others. When we close ourselves off in this way we also close ourselves off from the deep interior healing each of us needs. Healing that we need so very much in order to grow spiritually.

Many people aren't even aware that they do need healing. They walk around joylessly, believing that this is a normal state of existence.

It's not.

There's a strange ideology in this age (and an odd one it is if you really think about it): that God doesn't  step into our lives in an extraordinary fashion anymore. I think this manner of thinking is more a byproduct of the age we live in rather than a "truth" we should hold onto. As a matter of fact, if you ask me:

It's ALL extraordinary.

Every darn bit of it.

Every single moment of it.

Every last particle of it.

                                                             God with us

At least...it should be.