Forever Beloved

Faith, Love & Truth

Getting Over It

I have spent the last few months walking around in sadness.  I’m sure you’ve read my posts about losing joy and finding my Christmas.  I’m sure y’all could have guessed I was walking through a valley.  It’s true, I was.  I had lost a friend, someone I had left into my inner circle of circles.  Someone I trusted, wholeheartedly.  Someone I thought was the sister I never had, sent directly to me by God.  Our families were woven together.  Losing that broke me more than anyone, even myself, could imagine.

I love having lots of friends. After growing up an only child, my friends are my siblings. I especially cherish close friends. You know what I mean, the ones who know you in-and-out and the friendship just feels comfortable and familiar. Asking me to get rid of a friend is like asking for a vital organ. And that’s exactly what this has felt like…like a part of me was taken. I’m sure a few of you have just rolled your eyes and thought “oh she is sooooo over-exaggerating”. I wish you could see my heart.

The loss of a valued friend is a harsh reality…it hurts! When the ties of a super close friendship are severed the results can be devastating, as I’ve found out. Emotional anguish is often complicated and confusing.  The feelings of rejection, bitterness and resentment threaten to take over.  
This girl has licked her wounds long enough.  I am tired of the sadness, the lingering questions I ask myself over and over, the bitterness and the overwhelming void I feel.  I’m done.  My heart is ready to have some happy times!!
It’s time for closure y’all.  Wow, does it ever feel good to say that!  
So once that was decided, I had to figure out HOW to move on. How to get closure.  I surely didn’t know how, if I did I would have done it long ago.  So I turned to the person who created friendship, God 🙂  If He created it surely He knew how to move on from a broken one.

I needed to realize their brokenness. I had been playing the victim when really they were the ones hurting. God softened my heart and helped me to see the ways in which this former friend suffers and struggles in life. In fact, it was those very insecurities or wounds that often caused them to treat me the way that they did. By leveling the playing field and remembering that we’re all broken humans clumsily trying to follow Christ, God helped me to see these ex-friends the way He does: Sinners desperately in need of grace. It didn’t happen over night, but it happened.  Thank goodness because this girl right here is tired of being sad!

As Christians, we are called to live a life that sticks out and looks different from the rest of the world.  Being angry, throwing my hands in the air, walking around in sadness and shutting them out was the obvious answer.  But did that answer make me look different?  I have decided to let Jesus’ words be true of my life and love in a way that is shocking, radical and irrational to the world around me.  I am choosing to forgive, pray for and keep the option of reconciliation there (if it’s Gods will).  No more anger, sadness and pity parties here!  Woo!
Forbearing one another, and forgiving one another, if any man have a quarrel against any: even as Christ forgave you, so also do ye. 
Colossians 3:13


Happy Wives Club {Book Review}

I use Grammarly – the best plagiarism checker out there – because orange just isn’t my color.

Happy Wives Club
One Woman’s Worldwide Search for the Secrets of a Great Marriage
By Fawn Weaver
About the book:

One woman undertakes a worldwide search to learn the secrets of a great marriage—and finds one foundational truth that could change everything. 

Fawn Weaver was a happily married woman running a successful business—and then something happened. Maybe it was divorce rate reports on the evening news, The Real Housewives of Orange County, or any daytime talk show where husbands and wives dramatically reveal their betrayals. Everywhere she looked, Fawn saw negative portrayals of marriage dominating the airwaves and dooming everyone to failure. 

Looking at Keith, the love of her life, she knew that wasn’t true. She was determined to find and connect with women just like her—happy and optimistic about marriage, deeply in love with her spouse, and committed to building a strong marriage that stands the test of time. 

On a whim, she started the blog HappyWivesClub.com and sent the link to a few of new friends. What started as a casual invitation to five women exploded into an international online club with 150,000 members in more than 100 countries. 

Happy Wives Club is Fawn’s journey across the world to meet her friends and discover what makes their marriages great. Join her on this exciting, exotic trip across six continents and through more than eighteen cities. Walk the streets of Mauritius, the historic ruins in Italy, and the vistas of New Zealand and Australia. Go from Cape Town to London, Manila to Buenos Aires, Winnipeg to Zagreb. 

Along the way, you will meet everyday women whose marriage secrets span cultures. You will hear their stories, witness their love, and be inspired by the proof that happy, healthy marriages do exist—and yours can be one of them! 

It turns out great marriages are all around us—when we look for them. Go on a trip with Fawn and learn the best marriage secrets the world has to offer.

In a time when the world basically hates marriage, this book was a breath of fresh air! Actually, this book was awesome! It was interesting to read through each individual woman’s story and see her marriage through her words. I found myself nodding in agreement as she brought me into the lives of many different couples.

This was a well written book each chapter, every country that she visited, and every wife she interviewed I clearly was able to take something away about marriage.  Isn’t it amazing that, all around the world, women have the same outlook on marriage!

I realized how blessed I am and how happy I am in my role as wife to my best friend. I would recommend this to anyone, especially those who are tired of “self-help” or “improvement” books. This is fantastic and truly inspiring!

Want to check it out for yourself? The book is now available in stores and on Christian Book Store. What a perfect bridal shower or wedding gift for a friend or family member!

This book was provided to me free of charge by booksneeze.com in return for my honest review. The opinions i have expressed are my own.

How to Handle Unwarranted Advice

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I know you’ve been there.
Have you ever…
Did you think of…
Why don’t you try…
If you are trying to lose weight, no doubt you’ve heard those statements at one time or another.  I think we all have.  And some of us might even be the ones saying them.
That morning, you just realized your favorite jeans are just a little too tight to button.  You’re upset but you remember you still have your absolute favorite t-shirt to comfort you.  You slip it on over your head only to find out it now fits differently as well.  Frustrated, you throw them on your bed and go back to your comfort zone…sweats and your husbands t-shirt.  
Still feeling down, you head downstairs to weigh yourself.  You know you’ve been following your eating plan, exercising more than usual and following along in the daily dieting devotional.  You take a deep breath and step up onto the scale, looking straight ahead, afraid to look down.  When you muster up the courage and look down, you see an additional 3 pounds that wasn’t on there before.  NO no no, surely that can’t be!  
Sadness overwhelms you.  You decide to sit at your computer and try to get your mind off of things.  As you sign on to Facebook, you are bombarded with images.  How can there be so many thin people in the world and I can’t even fit into my fat clothes?

And then it happens. In that very moment of wishing you were in a dream, someone messages you with just a simple suggestion on your dieting journey. Ugh. As you desperately attempt to hold back the tears, you don’t understand how others can be so blind.  For minutes, or hours, you stare blankly at the screen. Speechless.

I’m sure you and I could sit down over a cup of coffee and tell all the stories of unwarranted weight loss advice we’ve been issued. In fact, couldn’t we replace the word weight loss with parenting or basically any other activity?  One of my never-forget stories from years ago is the one where a gentleman, a total stranger, thought it was appropriate to tell me the food on my plate was all very fattening.  I wish he knew how much that one sentence broke me.

We’ve all encountered the times when someone, whether family, friend, or stranger, has offered advice in poor timing or tough circumstances. At this point, we have to choose how to handle the overload. Here are 4 tips on how to handle unwanted advice:


Pause and pray – Breathe deeply, ask God for grace, swallow any sassy words and smile.

Everyone has their own opinion – Even Godly people will disagree and you are not accountable to others for your actions. We are accountable to God for our decisions and actions.

Understand that they don’t know your journey – They don’t know your journey and their words may come from a genuine part of their heart. They don’t know the struggle you just had with jeans not fitting, stupid shirts fitting weird and the scale being dumb. Cut them some slack.

Expect it and prepare your response – When that stranger told me my plate of food was fattening, it broke my spirit. But thankfully, I thought before I spoke. While I might have seemed rude by turning around and walking away, trust me, it was better than what would have been said. Since then, I’ve established a mental plan for handling unwarranted advice {or rude statements} so that I can deal with it graciously. That is how God would want us to deal with it, with grace.

To those of you issuing the advice…please please please please think before you speak. While you might be offering advice from the bottom of your heart, understand that some subjects (weight loss, parenting, etc.) are touchy and feelings are easily hurt. Taste your words before you speak them.