Tag Archives: Faith

Couch Arrest

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This is not what I do. There are animals to feed, gardens to weed, eggs to collect, a house to look after, children to chase. I do not have time to sit on this couch while my leg heals. BUT apparently, that’s what I am doing anyway.

At first, I was kind of ok with the forced rest I’m on. Then an hour passed and I realized just how long a sitting hour is. It is LONG, and boring, and frustrating.

Having to sit and ask for people to do the things around the house that I normally do is a hard pill for me to swallow. One because I do struggle with control. Two because I should be able to do it, but I can’t. And it drives me insane. However, this time really opens my eyes to the village mentality!

This is one of the busy seasons. We were hoping to get more meat chicks and purchase some meat rabbits. Alot of our ideas are now on hold.

But, I am choosing to try and see what God is working on in me. There is always a reason for the seasons of life that we go through. Instead of sitting here stewing over the things I cannot do, I am choosing today to start celebrating the things I can still do.

I can show more love and attention to my children. I can spend more time in the Word. I can dig deeper in my studies of Jewish culture. I can devote more time for praying for my tribe of people and the chaos in the world. I have the time to sit and let God work on me. Change me. Remove the nasty world from me and replace it with Him.

This couch is a hard spot for me to sit all day long, but I’m determined to turn this around for the glory of God. I mean, He does work all things out for His glory anyway. Might as well bend to His will so its not really painful for me!

So, there is a small update on our life. Everything is running as ‘smoothly’ as possible at the moment. This down time does give me more time to write, so that will be nice for the blog! And probably humorous to all of you. Until next time!

God Bless

Grace Revival Homestead

AND It Broke….

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My ankle. Not all the way, just a fracture. But painful none the less. And I injured it in the most silliest way possible. Trying to chase my daughter to wipe my dirty hands on her shirt. Let me explain!

Yesterday, I was sitting outside, writing a blog post to update everyone on our homestead, just enjoying the peaceful day God blessed us with. I spot my horse and decide to bring her an apple to enjoy.

After she messily finishes her apple, my hand is covered in horse slobber and mashed up apple bits. So I turn to my daughter and proceed to taunt and chase her with my nasty hand. Trying to wipe it on her shirt.

Which led to me stepping into a hole, mid sprint/pivot, and hearing a pop then falling to the ground. It was terrible! Of course, my son and daughter run to my rescue. My son drops to his knees and begins praying for my ankle, while my daughter panics and runs around the yard. Poor child did not know how to handle momma in pain.

So I send her to get my mother in law, who lives next door, and we hobble me into the house. A few hours later, I’m splinted up and leaving the hospital wondering how to handle a homestead on crutches?….Thank God for both my momma and my mother in law for tending to me and the kids. It takes a village guys!

Now here I am this morning, watching a storm blow through with my leg propped up. Thank God because now I dont have to water the garden (God had my back there!)

So to everyone out there, life took a crazy turn, but I am not to worried. God has a reason for every thing. This is just another episode of Grace Revival Homestead!

God Bless

Grace Revival Homestead

Day 5

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MY HOUSE TURNED INTO A HOME

Dear Heavenly Daddy,

Today I want to thank you for the rain. It’s cleansing and purifying and it is bringing in the colder weather with it. As the seasons transition, I think back to how my own house has transitioned with my marriage over the years. This place was once a hostile battle ground with children held hostage between their selfish parents wants. Now God has purified this place into a holy temple that welcomes in the Holy Spirit every minute of every day. You pour out peace and tranquility on my home every morning before my children wake from their restful sleep. My cup overflows with your love. This house has seen many battles, both spiritual and mental, inside these walls. With Your constant guidance and strength, we have taken back territory from the enemy’s hands. You reached right into enemy territory and snatched my family and I right out; and for that I am eternally grateful. Place a hedge of protection around my house and place your angels on guard around it. Touch my children’s hearts with your loving hand so they feel safe and secure always. Protect their minds from any attacks of the enemy. Fill them with Your Word so they do not sin against you.

Lord, I pray that you do this exact same thing for the families of the world. Pour out your peace on their households. Protect little children from selfish acts of parents who haven’t yet witnessed your love. Help us to be examples to our neighbors of how a godly household should look and feel. Give us discernment to what the spiritual and physical needs of our friends and families are. Teach us to be a shining lighthouse to draw more of the world to the cross.

In Jesus name I pray, amen

With All of God’s Blessings,

Stephanie Smith

Day 4

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Today is a special day of prayer for me personally. Maybe it’ll be special for you to! On day 4 of this prayer journey, we are going to be praying about marriage. Mainly about over coming struggles in marriage! My husband and I did not know the Lord when we got married, so the first four years of our relationship were incredibly unstable. Our life was littered with selfishness, infidelity, anger, lust, frustration, and the constant threat of divorce. Once Holy Spirit pulled us into the Lord’s embrace, I wish I could say things calmed down immediately; but we all know that wasn’t true. It took time, persistence, prayer, and lots of time spent gleaning from God’s Word. So, here we go, giving God all the glory for His never ending love of us!

What God Has Joined Together

Dear Heavenly Daddy,

Thank You for this day spent with many children. It has been enlightening to watch them as I learn to have faith as a child. Thank You for the help-mate you have gifted me. He is an amazing man and we are blessed to have him as the leader of our home. Thank You for the obstacles we had to overcome that shaped us and our marriage into a living testimony of Your love and grace. Lord, and thank you for sending us Holy Spirit to comfort us and guide us. His presence in my life has shaped many bad situations into spiritual transformations.

Lord, there has been many attacks from the enemy lately in our marriage. I pray that you would protect my husband and my children from any assaults. You are the greatest protector and I have full faith that You will use these attacks to shape our faith and bring us to a new level of intimacy with You. I pray for peace in the storm and I thank You for these unsteady times so I can prove my faith to You. Your Word says Your grace is sufficient for each day, so I will stand firm against all forms of negativity with full assurance that You have supplied my arsenal with plenty of ammunition. I can block all attacks with my shield of faith.

Lord, I do know sometimes negativity in my marriage isn’t an attack from the enemy, but just plain old sinful selfishness from either I or my partner. So I pray for us to be emptied of self and fully filled with Holy Spirit. Pour out the fruits of the Spirit on us and into our lives. Teach us to be more like you and less like the world. Let my marriage be a true and holy representation of Your relationship with me. I fully submit to You and Your Will for my life and for my family. You are holy and righteous Lord and You are worthy of all our praise and admiration!

In Jesus name I pray, Amen

With All of God’s Blessings,

Stephanie Smith

Day 3

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Welcome to day 3 of our 30 Day Prayer journey! This has truly already blessed my life in more ways than I can count. God sure is good to us! So since today is Sunday, and I just finished prepping for homeschool tomorrow, let say a prayer about school!

CO-PARENTING WITH GOD

Dear Heavenly Daddy,

Thank You for this day. Thank You for sending the shepherd to take care of your flocks. Thank You for leaving the ninety-nine to come and find me. Thank You for these children You have put under my care to train up for Your Kingdom. Without Your wisdom and guidance, I would be lost daily. Your presence in my house is what keeps me sane. Lord, I know that my children are truly Yours and that You have just entrusted their care to me. Thank you for co-parenting them with me. Your love and Your example is what teaches me how to love them. Thank You for showing me the way.

TRAIN UP A CHILD

Lord, tomorrow is a new day of me trying to put more of You into our children. Your word says to train up a child in the way that they should go, and when they are older they will not depart from it. Jesus, I am standing on that word and proclaiming it over my children. This world is a very scary place and schools are no longer safe for children. So we are entrusting them into your care. Protect and nurture them when they are away from us. Thank you for giving me the means to teach my children from the safety of my home. Your generosity is overwhelming! Give me the wisdom and patience to teach them in a language they are capable of understanding. Speak through me into their lives. Speak life into them. Fill in all the gaps I miss in their education. Fill them with Your Holy Spirit and the fruits of Your Spirit. Help me to equip them to be kind and gentle and loving while the world is cold, cruel and scary. Lets raise up a generation of believers that are not afraid to stand on Your Word!

In Jesus name I pray, Amen

With All of God’s Blessings,

Stephanie Smith

Day 2

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Yesterdays prayer was so refreshing that I absolutely cannot wait to put up todays! This time we are going to be praying about health, mainly because my son’s sugar has been super high all morning. I need this prayer at this moment and hopefully you’ll find something valuable from it as well.

By His Stripes We Are Healed

Dear Heavenly Daddy,

Thank you for this beautiful but slightly flooded day in Louisiana. We appreciate Your kindness and love so much! Your grace and mercy far exceeds our limited way of thinking. Lord, I pray for divine healing today. We have been struggling to be a makeshift pancreas for my son lately. His blood sugar continues to be untamable and its frustrating to say the least. I pray that you step in and take control. I proclaim healing in his body and for all of his organs. I proclaim healing over every family that comes across this post. I pray for peace during sickness and for comfort. Relieve pain in joints and nerves. I rebuke cancer and all diseases that attack your children.

I pray for peace for the families that have sick children. Wrap these people in your loving embrace. Lord, for people that are hearing diagnosis’s for the first time, relieve their stress and fear. Your perfect love cast out all fear and we are standing on that promise right now. Send them people to support them and help hold their arms up like Aaron and Hur did for Moses. Teach them how to praise you in the storms of life. Don’t allow the enemy to use these devastating diseases to draw them away from Your love and comfort. I am standing in the gap today for families that are so overwhelmed that they cannot reach out to You. Lord protect them and wrap them in Your love.

Thank You Lord. Thank You for doctors with Your wisdom and for counselors that are willing to hear us out when we feel buried under our emotions. Thank You for supplying all of our needs before we even realize we are lacking. You are Jehovah Jireh! We love you so much!

In Jesus Name I pray, Amen.

With All of God’s Blessings,

Stephanie Smith

Day 1

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Today is the first day of our 30 days of prayer series! I am so excited to start this prayer journey with you! So to start this month long conversation with Jesus, we will be praying for God’s favor.

God’s Favor

Dear Heavenly Daddy,

Thank you for placing the dream of this blog into my heart. Thank you for all that you have done to bring me to this place in my life. Thank you for each and every person you bring to this blog to follow along with me. I pray for your Devine favor on each person that reads these words. I pray for blessings and peace that surpasses all understanding to surround them. Pour out Your Holy Spirit on them and their family and friends. Lord, establish the work of our hands and let your favor rest on us. Your Word says that out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks, so we proclaim your favor into our lives. We have faith that You will see us through and bless us. As we actively seek and live by Your wisdom; we will be highly favored and esteemed in the sight of You and men. Our enemies cannot overpower us because Your favor surrounds us. We love you Lord and we lift Your Name forever in gratitude and worship.

In Jesus Name we pray, Amen.

I hope these words bring you peace! With all of God’s Blessings,

Stephanie Smith

30 Days of Prayer

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So to kickstart my own prayer life, I’ve decided to do a 30 days of prayer series for anything and everything going on in life. This series will cover health, children, marriage, homeschool, work, finances, spirituality, and deepening our relationship with Jesus.

What is prayer? Prayer is acknowledging and experiencing the presence of God AND inviting His presence into our lives and circumstances. It’s seeking the presence of God and releasing the power of God which gives us the means to overcome ANY problem. Prayer is our greatest gift from God himself. He desires communication with us, He wants to be included in our everyday life and struggles. He created us with companionship in mind. To do life with us. We are spiritual beings in a physical world. Most of our fights are in the unseen. Use that in prayer. Remember that in battles. Hold on to that in storms.

SO PRAY

  • Pray, even if you think it’s impossible and will never happen. With God all things are possible.
  • Pray, even if you don’t know what to say. Just say Jesus. God knows your needs but He won’t step into a situation that He isn’t invited into.
  • Pray, even if you’re in a situation where you don’t think there is time to pray. God’s time is different than ours and He can change any situation in less than a second.
  • Just pray. Fervent prayer. Spirit filled prayer. Persistent prayer. Keep praying until you see the change you want to see. Pray with FAITH. Pray believing that God can and will do what you’re asking. Just pray.

Starting tomorrow I’ll put up the first post, so come back then to catch it!

With All of God’s Blessings

Stephanie Smith

Homeschooled or Unschooled

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We recently began homeschooling, just this year actually. God laid it on my heart to begin homeschooling early in 2018, but I was so hesitant to take that on. Just the thought of it overwhelmed my head and heart. However, when God brings us to something, He doesn’t leave us there alone. So He surrounded me with many homeschool families to help support me during this new transition. And still I hesitated, that is until my son Wyatt, was diagnosed with T1D. Then I jumped on this new ministry like my life depended on it!

Homeschooling

We started homeschooling with my heart set on all of these curriculums that I had brought together for one big idea. I had this picture in my head of me reading aloud daily to happy children who never misbehaved or got frustrated. Then God popped that bubble of a very unreal idea of homeschool and set a much smaller plan in my heart. Since this is our first year, we only do the bare minimum with fun stuff thrown in the mix. So basically by homeschool is a mixture of school at home and unschooling.

Unschooling

When I first read about unschooling, I was repulsed! My organized teacher heart did a back flip and landed in slime with a disgusting PLOP! How could any child learn from the unschooling technique? That’s what I would ask as I read all of their ideas. Then when I started homeschooling and God started whispering to my heart to go “At the pace of the children,” I started to love the idea of unconventional teaching. We have stopped curriculums after 3 weeks and tossed them out the door if they tried pushing to hard or overwhelmed either of my older children. We spend a lot of our days letting God lead our school. We focus majorly on biblical principals and biblical history. We learn our math facts with God’s truths thrown in and we learn literature and handwriting from passages of Psalms and christian authors like C. S. Lewis.

At the Pace of the Children

God whispered this to my heart one evening when I was becoming increasingly concerned with the pace my youngest was learning the alphabet. He caught my attention very suddenly and said “Daughter, I never rush you to take steps you are unprepared for, so why are you rushing him? This ministry is for you and your children to grow more in love with Me, not the alphabet. Let him lead this while you lead him to Me. Trust me to fill any void that is left.” And that was it. I was hooked. We would go only as fast as the children were comfortable and the rest was left for God to fill. Trust, faith, and grace are all needed to homeschool, and thankfully God fills me every morning with each of these sufficient for the day.

If you have any homeschooling advice, or curriculums you love, please let me know! I love hearing from other homeschool families!

With All of God’s Blessings

Stephanie Smith

3 Ways to Keep the Faith During Disaster

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If there is something I’ve learned throughout the course of my life, and majorly in the past year, it’s how to keep my eyes on Christ during very serious situations. I’ve had, in my opinion, way to much practice with this. But never the less, God gives us these experiences so that we can help others walk through their own messy situations. This post will be short and sweet and to the point, because I know we all want that straight arrowed path to the cross. However, the cross is always readily available to us, so take this post with a grain of salt.

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Eyes on Christ

Step 1: Prayer, prayer, and more prayer.

This is the single most important aspect of keeping our eyes on Christ. Pray with your emotions, whether those emotions are good or bad. Yell at God if you’re angry, trust me He is big enough to take it. Cry out to God if you’re scared. Just sit in silence and weep with Jesus if you’re overwhelmed. Ask for help from Him. Ask for peace. Ask for Him to send the angels. JUST ASK. Talk to Him, He is the best listener.

Step 2: Write the Word.

There was a time when I had no words for God. I wanted to talk, but I was all talked out. Especially since nothing could bring my daughter back from the dead, so why ask for it?…. So instead of using my own words, I turned to the words of David. I started by writing the Psalms as my own personal prayers. I could really resonate with the passionate feelings of David at that time. I felt what he felt and cried out how he did. Me and David were the same person at that point in time of my life. So his words became my words. Every day I’d find a new Psalm that really touched where I was in life and I’d write that in my prayer journal. That helped me to find my voice again.

Step 3: Remind yourself of God’s goodness.

After Wyatt was diagnosed with T1D, I went through this dark spot of not knowing if God was good….its scary to admit that out loud, but its truth nonetheless. So I started writing it down. Standing on my faith alone to keep me steady. I knew that God was real, I knew that God’s promises were yes and amen, and I knew that God was good. BUT, I didn’t feel that God was good to me…..So I wrote:

“God is good, even when life is not.”

“God is good, even if I cant feel it.”

“God is good to me.”

“God is good.”

Everyday I would write that under my prayers. I’d write it more than once on the days I didn’t particularly believe it. Then eventually, I felt it deep in my heart, that THIS was TRUTH.

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With All of God’s Blessings

Stephanie Smith