All posts tagged: peace

He Bought the Farm by Candice Coates

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He wasn’t hiding. He wasn’t the type to do so, but he was the kind to slip away to think. He needed to think. Milo, his four-legged shadow followed him, nestling close by, gazing back at the house as if he too was weighing his options. Blake scratched behind Milo’s warm fuzzy ears earning himself a grateful dog-grin. “What do you think, buddy? What should we do?” As usual, Milo had no answer. He only licked his chops, gave a contend yawn, before bedding down deeper into the grass. Blake smiled. Maybe that was Milo’s answer. He was happy right where he was. Truth be told, so was Blake. They’d, Blake his wife Paisley and Milo, had happily moved out to the quiet country nearly five years ago. Happy may have been an overstatement. They not so simply needed a change of pace, a change in their reality. Past decisions had caught up with Blake leaving an unrelenting stain on Paisley’s career. Her employers had said as much, she was guilty by association. She needed to distance …

Gaining Status: Faith for Creatives

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“If you are always seeking a certain status to validate who you are, you’re never going to have peace. You can’t climb up to find yourself. You have to find yourself so (that) you can climb up! You have to know who you are so you can climb to status.” ~ Bishop T.D Jakes In all that we do, in every attempt to succeed, we are inherently challenged with the idea of “Status.” Even with something as simple as social media postings, we find ourselves judging our positions, condemning ourselves for not having X amount of followers or X amount of likes or views. “The proof is in the pudding, the validation is in the numbers“, we tell ourselves. We allow this wrong mindset to convince us that we are not worthy of what we are doing. This becomes our sad gospel when in reality these things are not completely relevant. Consider King David. He was a youth between the ages of twelve and fifteen when he was anointed by the Prophet Samuel as King of Israel (I Samuel 16). …

Rejecting the Burdens of Sin & Shame by Bri Lassiter

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This is what the Lord says of you, “You are cleansed, you are clear, you are clean you are free. Walk in victory” Sounds amazing, but a lot of times we agree with what the Lord says of us in our heads but not in our walk. We hear Him and nod our heads, that’s nice Jesus, now back to me. Here’s my checklist, can you fix this, this, this, and this about me? And the Lord just facepalms a little bit because we missed it. It’s done. We are already fixed. We have the ability and the right to walk in victory. We are free to receive our free gift of righteousness now. We don’t have to work for it, we don’t have to beg, we don’t have to be subject to shame in the areas we are still learning how to walk it out yet, we just have to believe what the Lord says and receive as we walk with Him. This is a bit different from the religious way of thinking, the …

In Awe of Him: A Moment of Musing

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Today, like many days, the Lord woke me up with a song of worship in my head and heart. The song that He deposited into my heart this morning was “Let Me Trade You,” sung by Mahalia Buchanan. If you’ve not heard the song before, I encourage you to click on the title above and take a listen. But the greatest beauty of the song this morning was the fact that I hadn’t listened to the song in nearly a year, but when I listened to it sparked such amazing joy. Why? The words are sung as if it is Christ Himself singing them, the Precious Lamb of God, the Mighty Lion of Judah, singing unto His creation, calling the lost unto Himself, offering healing, love, hope, wholeness, joy, and so much more in exchange for…our brokenness, our weakness, our anxiety, our sin. Meditating on this brings tears of awe to my eyes and such a love in the well of my being. It makes me stop and really think about the ‘fear of the …

A Heart at Peace: Pt 1 of Pursuit of Passion

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“The life of the body is a heart at peace, but envy rots the bones.”~PROVERBS 17:22 WMB Passion is a gift, be it passion for creative arts, passion for relationships, passion in your walk with Christ. The beauty of passion is that it is unique in design even if it bares similarities in concept with the passion of others. Just as there are an innumerous amount of snowflakes, each one bares a singular pattern unique in its form in comparison to others, so too is the design of your God-given passion and the drive and direction with which you pursue it. Unfortunately, many of us find our feet tangled in the trap of the enemy and the lies that come along in the game of comparison. We wonder if our process and pursuit should be like that of others. We question if the reason why our fruit is taking so long to manifest is because we are not following the plan and path of others. We judge, not only our dream but the plan with …

Be Loved: The Passion of Christ’s Pursuit

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“I can touch more than the hem of Your Garment. I can touch Your heart.” ~Candice Coates Messiah Yeshua, Jesus Christ, the Mighty Right Hand of God, God Himself, the Creator of all and the Lord of all, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace, The Mighty King…made Himself humble just to be near to us. How great the depth of His love, often misunderstood, often misrepresented. But His light is too fierce for darkness to overshadow. His love is too tenacious and open for us all in Spirit, Grace, and Truth to be denied. His passion on the cross is the evidence of His pursuit of you and me. Even in our sins when we were counted as enemies Christ chose to step into the darkness to draw us back to His heart with His cleansing light.  “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” ~ROMANS 5:8 NIV No matter where you may find yourself, be it on the outside of faith looking in, secure …

Weapons of Thanks-Giving by Bri Lassiter

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By Bri Lassiter I love Thanksgiving. It’s great, okay. I love the idea of taking a whole day to be thankful. I like a whole day of celebrating with food and family. It’s polite and reasonable. Anyone can take one day of the year to be thankful. But I want to talk for a minute about the heavy kind of thankfulness. This one’s messy and not pumpkin bedazzled. It can be ugly and painful and powerful. This kind of thankfulness is the kind you fight with and the kind you win with. This kind of thankfulness is a practice and a difficult habit to form on the inside of you. This is the kind of thanking you do to your Father when life sucks. When you are at THE END. When there are no answers from anywhere for you. When life is beating you up and only He knows. When you’re carrying around sorrow and pain or you’re still in the ‘not yet’ part of seeing your healing. When you’re fighting hopelessness and you’re not …

Chasing the White Rabbit: Our Struggle with Time

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Right here and right now! That is the attitude of most people that live in the modern world today. We have been blessed with many great inventions that have made the idea of waiting passé and almost more appropriately stated, fictional. We do not have to wait on our meals due to the greatness of fast food chains not to mention the beauty of the microwave. Although our modern conveniences have made life in effect ‘more convenient’ they have also robbed us of our patience and our ability to wait. Alice in Wonderland. The attitude of the White Rabbit. We all know the story. Alice sees a little white rabbit running nervously, rushing to get somewhere. “I’m late!” He cries out over and over again as he rushes to get to the tea party of the Mad Hatter. How many of us have rushed to do or get something or get somewhere that was steeped in madness? Our Heavenly Father makes a prophecy over our lives and even though we need to walk in faith …

Dreaming & Sowing Seeds

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“Dreaming is not wasting time, it’s peeking into your future ahead of time.”   In all truth, even though I polished up the words to make them into a quote, they are actually the result of a conversation I was having with the Lord Jesus. I have said it a bazillion times, that I am a stickler for time. I like to make the best use of every second of every day…its akin to squeezing blood from a turnip the way I can be when it comes to time management. “Dreaming is sowing seed.” This is not always a good thing, although I still stand on the fact that being wasteful of time is not good either. Once before, several years ago, also while having a conversation with God, the topic then being money, He asked me, “What happens to a fist full of sand when you squeeze it as tightly as you can?” My response, “The tighter you squeeze the faster it seems to slip away from you.” His response, “That is exactly what happens …

It All Begins with a Dream

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*Article updated from August 25, 2014 “I sleep to dream, I dream to be inspired, and through inspiration, I live. Jesus  is my Inspiration.” ~Candice Coates I came up with that little ditty when I was sixteen or seventeen years old.  It was then that I created the image of myself resting and dreaming yet holding onto the Spirit of Peace.  For years I have been gleaning inspiration from the dreams that I live in each time I lay my head on my pillow at night. But even though I understand the importance of dreaming, I often encounter people who have no concept of dreaming at all. Not only do they shun the concept or idea of dreaming one’s way into a tailor-made future but they scoff at the idea of dreams born out of rest. “…dreaming is the pinnacle of imagination and thus the root of creativity.” What many fail to realize in their efforts to remain ‘practical’ is that dreaming is the pinnacle of imagination and thus the root of creativity. Authentic creativity …