Journey to Love and Letter of Love Giveaway

Hello, again! 
Are there anymore avid readers out there? Personally, I go through phases of feeling like there are not enough good, Christian books to read, and other times feeling like there are tooo many good books to read and not enough time to read them all! 
If you are currently in the latter stage just described, you're in luck! Continue reading! 
If you are currently in the stage formerly described, welll, sorry, but you'll just have to add another book to your list. But, still, continue reading! 

Maybe you remember this post that I did on a Piano Book and CD giveaway from Amanda Tero, who blogs at With a Joyful Noise.  Well, Amanda is hosting another giveaway, this time for a book and short story that she has written and published!  As you can see, the book is called Journey to Love, and the short story sequel is called Letter of Love. Also, if you have a Kindle, take advantage of the other giveaway Amanda is offering--Journey to Love and Letter of Love are both going to be free on the 1st and 2nd of August!  

About Journey to Love:

Now orphaned, Marie is swept miles away from the only life she knew to be sheltered by unknown guardians. Caught in the challenges of a new life, she cannot prevent changes from happening, but she can keep the Bowles and their friends at arm's length. Or can she? 

While things appear to transition smoothly on the outside, Marie struggles against the turmoil she faces on the inside. She sees something in the Bowles and her new friends that she had never experienced before...but should she trust what the preacher is teaching when it goes against everything she had accepted as truth? Is God really a God of love? If He is, then is Marie willing to accept it? 

Follow Marie as she begins the journey to love.

About Letter of Love:

Edward Dixon is convinced that life is cruel, and he is not willing for anything to change his mind from that. A letter from his sister, Marie, reveals that she views life otherwise.

Will her letter, filled with love and forgiveness, Make a difference in Edward's life? Or will he stubbornly refuse to change before it's too late?


And now, for the giveaway!

If you live in the US, enter here.
If you live out of the US, enter here.

The fun doesn't end here though! Mark your calendars, because both Journey to Love and Letter of Love will be FREE on Amazon, August 1-2!! You'll only have two days to snatch them both. Share, share, share about this free deal!

Are you excited yet? Well go ahead and enter the giveaway or mark your calendar for the first of August or, just buy the book! 

Be sure to check out Amanda's blog, too, folks. Also, stay tuned for some more posts with topics including being a Light, and honesty, in the hopefully near future! 

"God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him." ~1 John 4:16b

Have a wonderful day :)
 Julia <3

Cloud Nine

Hello People! 
Britt from Ranch Life has started to host a monthly challenge on her blog. I have been getting into taking pictures of the sky recently, so I was 'on Cloud 9' when I saw that her July monthly challenge was on Summer Skies! ;)
Guys, as I've mentioned before, I am a picture maniac (actually, I only recently became that way), and I  took over 700 pictures of the sky. No joke. So it was slightly hard to narrow it down to just 42 pictures, (with two extra being my brother's picture, and three extra being non-July photos) which is still quite a bit of a ridiculous number, but I did my best :) [Britt, if you choose this one to share, I'm sorry for it's length :) ] The majority of these pictures are raw, untouched by editing, except for two, and then one or so cropped. So, you're getting the harsh originals, folks :) I tried to be creative with these, so I hope you like them!

I am organizing these according to how they might appear in a day--Of course, a day always starts with a sunrise. After that, who knows but maybe it'd be a pure blue, clear sky? Then the wind starts to blow and in come sailing a few clouds. Pretty soon the whole sky might be clouded over. And then the day begins to come to a close and the glorious display of a sunset is splattered across the sky. Of course, after that, God hangs up the moon to rule the night. And then, after the moon comes out, you have just a cool picture in general, that doesn't exactly fit in with the whole scheme, except maybe the clouds came back and a storm breaks out.
Okay. Here goes.

Sunrise:
I rarely get up in time to see a sunrise, so I was elated when I had somewhere to be that required me to be up by 5:45am! It was my chance to kill two frogs with one stone! (Er, is it birds? :) Yes, I know it's birds, I'm just being silly)  The pictures were taken while I was sitting in the passenger seat of a moving car, so they aren't that great. But, hey, I got them! The first three are kinda the same, so sorry about that :)

You can just see the sun barely trying to peak it's head above the surface of the earth.

I had taken about a gazillion pictures before I decided I had taken enough and should put the camera away,  and then, BOOM, out pops the sun! 

Normal, blue sky:
Blue sky can be pretty, but it's also pretty boring to take a picture of. So, I tried to make it interesting by 1) bordering it with trees, and 2) taking the picture with branches against it. Of these two pics, the first is my favorite. I love how it shows, along with the blue sky, the three different shades of green and a bug in mid-air :) What do you think? 

Clouds: 
Okay, folks, this is a pretty big category! Clouds can come in many different shapes and sizes and sometimes they are so interesting. I was a little bored to find for the first while, that the clouds in the sky were pretty average, big, puffy cloud formations, that look like whipped cream wigs or marshmallows, sometimes with flat and light grey tableau looking bottoms, sometimes with lumpy stomachs. But then there struck a day where the sky was crazy beautiful with lacy cloud patches and average cloud formations! It was a really pretty day, just saying. 

 I added this picture because I thought it looked sort of like an elephant playing with a ball. Can you see it?

I know the lighting in this picture isn't very good, but I thought it was cool how it looked like a cyclone.

And these clouds look like you could just jump into a world of lacy fluffiness :)

I experimented with taking pictures in the reflections of a car. Some of the pictures came out really nice and clear. Some of them looked like a picture posted in the windows of the car. But in looking through them, I realized that a good amount of them were picturing more of the landscape than the sky so I only shared this one. What do you think? 

This looks kind of like a sheet of ice, doesn't it? (At least when you enlarge it)

Fully clouded sky:

Sunset:
Of course you have to have pictures of sunsets and sunrises. Some of mine aren't the greatest, but I hope you still enjoy them.

Just slightly tipped with the display of the sunset

 This looks a bit like a fish, to me (Maybe a swordfish?). Swimming in the glory of God's painting :)

This, along with the following three pictures, were taken on the same night. The sky actually didn't look like this, nor did I adjust the picture at all. It was just the light balance that changed the sky to look way more orange than in reality.

This is more what the sky looked like in reality

My camera ran out of batteries right at the peak of the sunset, so I rushed to replace the batteries and then captured the almost-ending proclamation. Again, the picture isn't that great, but this is what it looked like. It sort of just descended into a pocket of clouds that I didn't know were there.

Night sky:
I was bummed that I didn't bring my camera to take pictures of fireworks on the 4th of July--I thought that would be some great July sky pictures to share, but either I didn't see the contest in time, or I just didn't have the presence of mind to think of bringing it or both. Nonetheless, I didn't bring it. But I did take pictures of the moon later. 

This was as the sun was going down, so it was still mostly light out. If you click on these two pictures to enlarge them, you can see craters around the edges a little bit. Interesting, eh? 

Lightning:
On the fourth of July, there was an awesome lightning storm. I SOOO wished that I had my camera with me, but, again, I didn't. My brother, however, decided to take a video of it on his phone. What did we do? Played the video until it showed a flash of lightning, paused the video, took a screen shot, and edited out the play button! Genius, huh? :)
Here it is:

Since it was taken off my brother's phone, it was a little grainy, etc. So I edited it a little bit. It didn't exactly help the graininess, but, it sharpened it a little bit. These are both the same picture, but one is edited, one is not. Can you tell which is which? Which one do you like better? 

And last but not least,
Sky from June:
As maybe you noted from the title of Britt's challenge, JULY summer skies, these pictures are supposed to be from July. They all are. But as I also mentioned in the beginning of this post, I was starting to be interested in sky photos before the challenge, and in the end of June, I did take some. I liked these a lot, so I decided, since this is a sky post, even though these last three pictures are not from July, I would share them with you.

I love in this one how there's about three different kinds of clouds in it! 

This is a small rainbow we saw.

And I just liked this one.

And with that, I conclude this post! 

How did you like it? What do you think of the pictures? 

"The heavens declare the glory of God, the skies proclaim the work of His hands. Day to day pours forth speech and night to night reveals knowledge." ~Psalm 19:1-2

Blessings,

Julia <3

*Please do not use these photos without permission*

Coals of Fire

Greetings! 

Today I am going to post about a section of verses I was reading recently:

"Recompense to no man evil for evil. Provide things honest in the sight of all men. 18 If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men. 19 Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord. 20 Therefore if thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink: for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head. 21 Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good." ~Romans 12:17-21

The main part I am going to be writing about is verses 19-20, but the other verses are just to give a little context.

When I read verse 20, it sounded kind of evil to me. What about you? It almost sounds like it's saying this: serve your enemy because when you do that, you hurt him back.

Aren't we supposed to love others and forgive them and want the best for them? In the next verse, 21, it even says, 'Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good.'    (And I'll say that this is a tough topic right now because we are still learning how to love and forgive--it doesn't exactly come easy when you've been hurt bad).

So what does this mean? That we are supposed to serve those who have hurt us so that we can hurt them back?

No, not exactly. First of all, verse 19 says that God alone is the one who has the right to judge and bring punishment on someone. We don't have that right because we ourselves are guilty. Besides, we can't know the heart of man. Only God can see his true intent. 

So, since we have no right to judge a person and prescribe his punishment, and we ourselves are guilty, since we ourselves, as believers in Jesus Christ, have been forgiven so great a debt, we are commanded to forgive the debt that others are indebted to us. We are to have grace. We are to show love. This is what Christ did for us, right? Through His death on the cross, He forgave our enormous debt that we owe Him, He gave and still gives us grace, and He shows us the deep, deep, unconditional love He has for us--unconditional-despite the circumstances. Despite what we say or do.

One way of showing our enemies love and grace is by serving them, and when we do this, we heap coals of fire on their head. Now what does that mean? That is the part that sounds evil. But here's the difference: If we are serving our enemy just to heap coals of fire upon his head, that isn't right. We are doing it with evil intent, to bring hurt upon the person that hurt us. We are repaying evil for evil. We are just as guilty as he is. 

What I gather this verse to be saying, is that you heap coals of fire on his head because you are in the right, and he is in the wrong. You have made the right choice--and again, it doesn't come easy, naturally or right away, sometimes it can take a really long time--but you have made the right choice to forgive and love. By serving a person, you show that you love them. Godly love is unconditional, and when we love with Christ's love, we bring Him great honor and glory. Hurt is a great test of love. So when we serve a person that has hurt us, in a small or large way, we are telling them that even though they hurt us, we still love them because Christ has first loved us.

When we serve a person with this attitude--not an attitude of vengeance or evil intent--we are clean and pure. Whereas they are not. Unless they choose to repent, they are in the wrong. They have no reason or right to stay in the evil state that they are in and therefore, coals of fire are being heaped on their head because, despite the display of God's love that is shown them, they still choose to stay hard-hearted. And in the end, that will get them. Each person is accountable for his or her actions, and nothing goes unnoticed by God. When you think about it, it's kind of pride. They are choosing to not acknowledge that they are wrong. When you serve a person, and give a clear display of God's love, a person has no excuse to remain hard-hearted. Their sin is exposed and mercy and grace is being shown them, but they choose not to accept it. 

In summary: What I have understood Romans 12:19-20 to mean is that we are supposed to serve our enemies, in other words those who have brought harm to or have evil intent against us, but we are not to serve them with the intent of bringing judgement and harm upon them, rather to do what is right and pleasing in the eyes of God and in doing that, if the said enemy makes no move to repent or soften his heart, he will eventually be punished by the great and Righteous Judge. The hurt that was caused you will be avenged, but by God.

What do you think about this? When you read these verses, did it come across to you as serving with 'evil intent'? 

By the pictures, can you tell where we went recently? :) Take a guess in the comments!

"If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness." ~1 John 1:9

Have a wonderful day!

Julia <3