I don’t go to church because of all the hypocrites.

How many say this is true? How many say the church building is full of hypocrites? 

 Twice in the past month, different individuals have said this to me.  Both had been part of a church family before and no longer have any desire to go to church because of the behaviors and attitudes they experienced with the church people.  

As I sat and listened about the gossiping, haughty attitudes, lying, and the acting ‘holy’ in church and differently at work/school, I had to agree with them.  

I would not want to attend church with those people either.  

I did not fault these two people who, I believe, were daring me to counter them with words about the good of church. 

As I prayerfully considered my words, things popped into my head like ‘the church is for the sick, not the healthy’ and ‘you shouldn't attend church for the people but for God’.  And while these are true, the real truth is we Christians need to step up our game. 

These two conversations have made me think.  I have been prayerfully reviewing every aspect of my life.  I have areas that need change because I am a work in progress but there is hope.  One of  my favorite songs, Jesus Saves, says, “Freedom’s calling, chains are falling, hope is dawning bright and true. Day is breaking, night is quaking. God is making all things new. Jesus saves.” 

I am still delighting in the fact that Jesus provides freedom, He makes all things new.  It doesn't matter if you started your walk of faith 5 minutes ago or 50 years ago.  He makes us new and He calls us to be renewed. 

If you are the person who does not go to church because of the hypocrites, let me say this.  Your experience was wrong and did not please God.  You will not find a perfect person in the church for we are not God.  We have all sinned and fall short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23).  But that does not excuse us from living as redeemed beings (Hebrews 10:10).  I apologize for what you have experienced from the mouths and hands of pastors, teachers, laymen and laywomen.  Please know this is not God’s design for a Christian.  We have failed, we were wrong.  However, God is good and right. 

When sin entered the world through Adam and Eve, God provided a way for deliverance through sacrifice.  Each person’s sins were forgiven through the sacrifice of the most perfect animal that could be found.  This was not adequate to fully redeem because, after all, it was just an animal not the most perfect life and perfect sacrifice.  In order to fully redeem us to Him, God sent Jesus Christ to die on the cross, as a sacrifice for us.  Only this Lamb of God would do because he was without sin. 

It seems these two I spoke with have experienced individuals who realized they were sinners and prayed for forgiveness through Jesus Christ but have not made another step towards living a Christ-filled life.  Romans 12:2 says, "Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” 

As a church, we can not be satisfied with the knowledge that 'we prayed the prayer' and hug our friends because 'we are in', only to turn around and behave in ungodly ways. Instead we must immerse ourselves in God's Word and pray for the Holy Spirit to do a complete work in us and make us Holy as He is Holy. (1 Peter 1:15).

Church, it is time to kneel down.  It is time to pray for God to revive us.  We are the feet of Jesus, called to be his disciples.  

So I prayerfully sing, 

"Change my heart oh God,
Make it ever true.
Change my heart oh God,May I be like You.

You are the potter,
I am the clay,
Mold me and make me,
This is what I pray.

Change my heart oh God,
Make it ever true.
Change my heart oh God,
May I be like You.

Meal Planning Made Easy

While I am just now actually budgeting our meals, I have meal planned for a long time.  The trick is sticking to it in the chaos of life!  You know, fatigue after work, sickness, boredom.  Meal planning can be difficult and confusing and meal planning websites can be expensive to join  or difficult to use when your family has picky eaters.

I have found several little tricks to help me feed my family and keep my sanity.

1.  What does your family like to eat?  Sounds simple, right?  But I can't tell you how often I have made a meal plan based on what I want my family to eat or what was on sale.  In the end, we don't eat it and that cost us money.  Track your family meals for a couple weeks to a month.  This includes fast food.  Does your family like hamburgers?  Great!  Add that to your meal plan, just plan to make them at home, not purchasing them out.

2.  What do you have time to make?  In the perfect world I would make everything from scratch.  You know, like those recipes for condensed soup of  or the biscuit mixes.  Someday I hope to save money with these but to be honest, right now I need to open up a can of biscuits to put on my turkey potpie because guess what?  I will do this.  I have time for this.  If I had to worry about biscuits from scratch last night before church, the potpie wouldn't have been made!

So when I make out a menu plan, I also look at the activities for the night.  Basketball practice at 6:30 pm?  We will have Ravioli and Garlic Bread.  Thursday night is free?  We will have grilled chicken green bean casserole with mashed potatoes because I actually have time to peel the potatoes and cook the beans.

3.  What is on sale?  I always look at the ads for two stores.  Unless both stores have some really awesome deals, I choose one (and Aldi) to buy groceries and then I make meals around those.  Around here chicken breast always seem to be on sale.  But we can get tired of chicken so I use my meat grinder to make ground chicken to add to chili or burritos.  Be creative but always remember point #1.  Will your family eat it?

While I do go for convenience often as point #2 stated, I stay away from all the junk from the ads.  Most of the convenience food I buy is to go with something I am making homemade, as in the potpie.  You can really eat up a budget (pun intended!) with the sale of junk.

The first time I even considered this was when I was using coupons.  I had read through the ads and looked through my coupons.  I spent a little more than $70 on things like cheese crackers, Capri Sun, BBQ sauce, granola bars and laundry soap.  We eventually did use all of those things but I had spent $70 without actually having any meals.  I then had to spend even more to purchase dairy, proteins and produce.  Now if I use coupons, it is only on items we use regularly.

4.  Meatless Monday, Taco Tuesday  I have heard many people will create theme nights and have great success.  I have done this before but found that it didn't always work for me and my style.  But I believe it was a great way for me to learn the concept of meal planning.  I have organized it by theme and main meat ingredient.

For example:

Monday: Mexican
Tuesday: Chicken
Wednesday: Italian
Thursday: Beans
Friday: Homemade Pizza

After deciding the focus for the night, I would look at the sale ads and come up with meals to match.  This does help me keep from a rut of chicken or spaghetti every night!

5.  Rotate your meal plans  This one is new for me and I find it is working.  I am saving my meal plans and rotating them out.  I may change a meal or two depending on the sale items, but making the meal plan is half the work!  By keeping these on file, I can easily have my plan and grocery list in a flash!

Best of luck with the meal plans.  Do not give up when you mess up!  You are taking steps to a healthier family and saving a few bucks in the process!

3 Things I learned About Sickness and Budgets

This past week I was sick.  You know, the sick where just lifting your head off the pillow requires effort.  This happened while working at staying on a food budget and limiting the cost of feeding my family to $150 every two weeks.  Boy did I learn that when mama doesn't care about the budget, no one cares about the budget!  Ease won out a few times and I definitely learned something from it.

So I made a very simple list of things I will have in place for the next time I am this sick.  I hope this helps you stay on budget, too!

1.  Have a reserve for medical expenses.  While medicine costs can vary greatly, I know how much I have to pay to go see the doctor and how much the most basic of antibiotics will be.  I am now going to have this amount reserved somewhere in an envelope or the bank that I can draw on when someone is sick.  This way I will not have to take from savings (or an emergency fund) to pay for it all.  Bonus points if you put enough for each family member when you all get sick in one month.
2. Have a few freezer meals.  My family is not big into eating freezer meals.  Boy have I tried. I can get away with some lasagna (like this one) but that is about it.  Well, that lasagna would have been very handy this past week instead of the Taco Bell we had…twice.  So I plan on making a couple freezer meals just in case.  I will also put those into my meal plan and ‘trade’ them out once every couple of months so they will not go bad in the freezer.
3. Talk about roles.  No, not delish yeast rolls but duties. The first thing I had to do when I was well enough was to wash a few dishes.  Normally, my role is loading the dishwasher (I do this, my husband does all trash cans).  My husband hadn’t taken over for me so when I was able to get out of bed and wanted to eat, I had to wash a fork.  Not my idea of recuperation!  I talked with my husband and he agreed that in the future, he would take note of all the dishes and would load the dishwasher (and he actually did for me the next morning).  And how does this tie in with the budget?  Because I was *this close* to ordering some takeout because I was still pretty weak.  We had food I could eat, but doggone, I had to wash a fork.  
   
   Literally, I went to the kitchen looked things over, had food out to eat, saw there was no fork, went and laid back down, got back up because of my complaining stomach, went back to the kitchen, looked at things again, turned around to leave and then decided to stick with the budget and washed the dang fork.  Yes, folks, pitiful but I was that sick.

So these are my suggestions on things to do now before sickness hits your house and causes you to think about blowing your budget.  Do you have any other suggestions?

Wall Collage in Progress

Funny how we can live in our house so long we forget to make it a home.  At least I have. Between raising kids, cleaning, laundry and life, I have become accustomed to things in my house that leave it cold.  Take the wall above my couch.  

Hang in with me.  Here is a long story to talk about the wall above my couch!

We had a fireplace and mantle....that we never used.  I didn't realize how few times I took pictures of my mantle...like never!  So I do not have a before.

When we purchased the house, there was a leak in the chimney that had not been disclosed. We discovered the leak while stripping wallpaper  and found the previous owners would just put up another layer of wallpaper when  it leaked through.  I did not know at the time that we could go back to the sellers and require them to fix an existing, known structural issue, but we were not aware of this. 

 It has taken us several tries (expensive tries) to finally fix the problem but the leak is finally fixed.

So, what did we have to do?

This.

And this. My hard little worker!

To make it this.

Then my awesome husband did some framing and we drywalled in the fireplace.  We made this decision for a couple reasons.  First, the damper was broken and made it really difficult to keep heat in. Secondly, we didn't use it but a couple times in the last 14 years. And finally, we needed the wall space.  

This is the layout of our living room.

We had very little room to sit!  With the chimney, the three doors going through (basically making a hallway), two windows and a cold air return that cannot be covered....  Well as you can see, we have a hard time putting in a couch, chair, tv, and anything else we needed to live!  That is why we decided to cover the fireplace.

Shwew!  Are you still with me?  So this left me with a blank wall where the chimney used to be and we now put our couch.  I have pinned many things like these because I think they add so much charm and texture to a room.  However, I have kept a blank wall for well over a year.

  

So I had to do my own collage to make my plain wall add character to my home.  Since we will be putting the house on the market, I am not adding personal touches like pictures.

First I took newspaper and traced all the items I have been collecting for a couple months.  I then taped the images up and lined it all on how I thought it would look best.

Next, I started to hang things up using a level.  A major OCD of mine is crooked pictures.

Finally, this is what I ended with. 

 Now I need to add things in these places to fill it out.

So keep watching for part two.  After I scour thrift and antique stores I can't wait to show you the final product!

Picking the right Avocado

Weeks ago while I was perusing Pinterst, I found an avocado ripeness test. I had never heard about this tests nor did I realize I would ever rely on it for the purchase of the only good avocados in the grocery.

http://www.nwedible.com/2012/05/never-buy-a-rotten-avocado-again.html

Because we are working to eat on $150 every two weeks, I was really glad to see avocados on sale for $.88 a piece.  As I was walking through the fresh produce, I had to search for the location of the avocados because there were only about 20 left in the bin. (Everyone loves a good avocado sale!) While I walked towards the bin, a woman looked them over and just walked away.  Most of them were mushy.  Really mushy. Thankfully, I had seen this diagram on Pinterest and started to pop off the stems and this is what I came home with.

Pinterest win!

Thanks, Pinterest post!

Feeding My Family of Four on $150ish

I am always in search of ways to help save money for my family.  Hubs and I work hard and this year we hope to sell our house and move into something bigger than a >900 sq. ft., two bedroom house. Sometimes we feel like we live in this tiny house.

http://tinyhouseblog.com/

Can you imagine?!?!

Anyways, in order to complete home updates in preparation of placing our current home on the market, as well as continue to save for a down payment, we are taking a hard look at our spending to save every penny possible.

First money saving change is to eat on $150 for two weeks.  This is only our second, two-week tracking of our food budget and here are a couple details up front:

1. This is a work in progress. I want to include more vegetables and less starch but I am working with what I know my family will eat and trying to slowly build menu plans that work for us and is a bit healthier.  I am not an expert and this is not perfect.
2. Hubs has to eat lunch out often during the work week and that expense is not included in the $150.
3. We eat every Sunday at either my grandparent's house or my parent's house which saves us one meal a week and often one extra lunch for myself and the kids.
4. I am using items currently in our food pantry/freezer and this is helping keep the overall expense down.
5. I will not include personal care items in this total. Eventually I hope to have a streamlined process and have cut even more expenses allowing this.  Right now I am concentrating on just making sure we are not eating out of an evening.
6. My family includes Hubs, myself, and two children ages 8 &11.

Menu: February 1-14

Breakfast:

• Cereal 
• Egg/Bacon Biscuits
• Oatmeal
• Sausage/Egg Burritos 

Lunch

• PB&J
• Ham Sandwiches
• Mac-n-cheese
• Salad
• Leftovers
• Sides: Baby Carrots, yogurt, chips

Dinner:

• Crock-pot Jambalaya
• Loaded Baked Potatoes
• Crock-pot Enchilada 
• Baked Spaghetti
• White Chicken Chili (I use this)
• Hawaiian Ham Sandwiches
• Turkey (Just like Thanksgiving)
• Meatball Subs
• Turkey Bake
• Black Bean & Lentil Soup
• Crock-pot Turkey and Dumplings
• Cheese Ravioli
• Turkey Potpie
• Turkey Pesto Wrap

Sides:

• Broccoli 
• Jiffy Corn Muffins
• Green Bean Casserole 
• Mashed Potatoes
• Corn
• Garlic Bread
• Doritos
• Stuffing
• Brussels Sprouts
• Salad
• Kale

Snack:

• Chips/Guacamole
• Ice Cream
• Oranges

The Food, The Price

How did I spend around $150?  I shopped at Aldi and Kroger and with many items still in my pantry, I can make two weeks worth of meals.

Frozen: $14.49

Cheese Ravioli- $2.49 (purchased two)

Meatballs- $4.39

Broccoli- $3.99

Brussels Sprouts- $1.13

Meat: $17.60

1 lb Sausage- $2.39

1 lb Deli Ham- $3.00

1 pkg Bacon- $2.50

Chicken Breast- $9.71 ($1.99lb)

Dairy: $14.83 

Yogurt- $1.79

Sour Cream- $1.29

Gallon Milk- $1.99 (purchased two)

Half Gallon Chocolate Milk- $1.79

Sliced cheese- $2.99 (purchased two)

Fruits & Vegetables: $14.00

Broccoli Crowns- $.99

Navel Oranges- $2.89

Organic Baby Carrots- $1.49

Grape Tomatoes- $.89

Organic Spring Lettuce Mix- $4.99

Avocado- $.88 (purchased two)

Organic Kale- $.99

Dry Goods: $11.53

French Fried Onions- $1.99

Rice- $.99

Old Fashioned Oats- $2.29

Guacamole Mix- $.99

Jiffy Corn Muffin- $.47 (purchased two)

Cornbread Stuffing- $1.00 (purchased two)

Garlic Bread- $1.33

Salad Croutons- $1.00

Canned Goods: $9.09

Organic Chicken Broth- $1.79 (purchased two)

Cream of Chicken- $.59 (purchased three)

Great Northern Beans- $.59

Pinto Beans- $1.19

Mushrooms- $.59

Black Beans- $.59 (purchased two)

Tomato Paste- $.39 (purchased two)

Grocery Items: $15.60

Pesto Sauce- $1.29

Peanut Butter- $1.69

Ketchup- $1.77

Spaghetti Sauce- $1.79 (purchased two)

Pickles- $2.59

Miracle Whip- $3.49

BBQ Sauce- $1.19

Bakery: $9.07

Flour Tortilla: $1.69

Sweet Rolls: $2.89

Sour Dough Subs: $1.99

Wheat Bread- $1.25 (purchased two)

Junk Food: $11.47

Sour Cream & Chive Chips-$1.49

Cheese Curls- $.99

BBQ Potato Chips- $1.49

Doritos- $2.50 (purchased two)

Ice Cream- $2.50

Beverages: $6.39

Concentrate Apple Juice- $.95

Concentrate Orange Juice- $1.19

Soda Pop- $1.25

Soda Pop- $1.50 (purchased two)

Total: $124.07

Some major food items I already have are a turkey I purchased after Christmas, some ground beef, eggs, cereal, and mac-n-cheese.  If I were to buy those things today, I would be a hair above the $150 but not by much.

Food Prep

After I came home from shopping, I divided up the chicken breasts and packaged up lunch items for the next week. I will be pulling the turkey out of the freezer in a couple days to allow it to thaw.  Finally, I put my feet up and ate this healthy delicious dinner.  Grocery shopping wears me out!