Recipe: Pioneer Woman's BBQ Pulled Pork Sandwiches

"You will always reproduce the environment around you that you cultivate within you"

I absolutely love this quote. It is at the bottom of every e-mail I send. I believe it is so true! Our external environment is a direct reproduction of our internal environment.

What we say and believe about ourselves, will reproduce itself in our lives.

I'm learning this still. I'm slowly grasping the fact that I, as a daughter of God need to see myself as Christ sees me, not as I see myself with my natural eye, or the way I was raised, or the circumstances of my life. I am royalty, I am a daughter of the king. I am not a pauper, I'm a princess. I need to remind myself of who God says I am, what God says about my life and His plans for it. I need to instill into my daughters and into others who God says they are.

I'm reminded of Gideon. Here he is hiding in the winepress when God finds him and calls him a "mighty man of valor. Gideon replies "uh, do you know who I am...I'm a nothing, from the smallest tribe..you've got the wrong guy". But God says in a nutshell..."you are not who you think you are, listen to what I say about you, listen to who I say you are.." As soon as Gideon believed it, his environment changed.

I know if I'm having a certain kind of day, whether it's feeling fat, being uptight with my family, irritated with every little thing, then something internal is going on that needs to be adjusted.

You can look around you and probably guess what goes on inside a person by what you see on the outside. You can take two people in the same circumstance and yet because of what they've chosen to believe and embrace their external environments can be completely different.

What environment are you cultivating within yourself? Within your children? Do you let the past dictate who you are or does your relationship with Jesus and what He says about you determine who you are? Do you fill your life with things that will strengthen your inner woman, or do you live for the soap operas and romance novels, the list could go on? Do you allow your circumstances to bring about depression and hopelessness? What's growing in your garden? What seeds are you planting in the soil of your heart and mind?

I look at children who are ridiculed by their parents and peers and it breaks my heart. Who's telling them that they are princesses and princes, not paupers. I want to be a woman who looks for the gold in peoples lives, calling out their greatness and not their weakness.

Blessings,

Kirstin

Okay....I'm extremely irritated with this post because I was trying to separate paragraphs and it is not cooperating. I hope it is not muddled!