Tag Archives: #recovery

Clothing Ourselves This Labor Day With The Goodness And Love Of God!

Psalm 23:6, Surely your goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

Clothing Ourselves This Labor Day With The Goodness And Love Of God!

Happy Labor Day, Friends and Family!  Are you celebrating Labor Day on the lake boating and skiing?

Oh, how my kids and I spent many fun-filled times on Folsom Lake.

Maybe your day was filled with great sales and shopping?

Hello…

Who doesn’t love retail therapy? 

How about a day filled with family and friends celebrating while barbecuing after the annual Labor Day parade?

I celebrated with a bike ride in Squaw Valley/Lake Tahoe and felt as young as my granddaughter.

Blameless' Founder, Grammy Tammy

Admittedly, I never realized the significance of Labor Day beyond being a much-needed three-day weekend announcing the demise of summer, hot dogs and wearing white. 

Then again, who follows trends?

White is ALWAYS right!!!

Interestingly enough, Labor Day started as part of a worker’s labor union movement. Labor Day pays tribute to the achievements and contributions of the American men and women in the workforce.  Around the 19th century, many U.S. workers were working twelve hours a day, seven days a week making barely enough to get by.

Those were not the good ‘ole days…

Blameless Isaiah 40:8, The grass withers, the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever.

Due to poor working conditions and to compel employers to renegotiate better pay and hours, around 10,000 bold and courageous workers decided to take essential unpaid time off from work and march in awareness and protest from City Hall to Union Square in New York City, holding the first U.S. Labor Day parade! 

Their endeavors weren’t immediately reciprocated or without cost, including deaths and destruction due to riots, but I have so much more appreciation understanding this great cost. Change always costs someone or something.

Embracing God’s amazing grace is the essential key in running this race victoriously.

And yet with another deadly mass shooting in Texas this past week, celebrations seem futile when there are so many hurting, suffering and grieving beloveds who have lost loved ones due to evil and in need of strength and compassion.

Topped with this tormenting hurricane, Hurricane Dorian, layered with its imminent destruction leaving hearts completely exposed and tattered due to the sting of chaos and opposition, lives are surviving in crisis mode.

Talk about a breeding ground making people more stressed and even crazier!

A heart can only take so much…

This season of threat being in constant limbo not knowing where, when and how to evacuate, or to even find a place of safe refuge these days, we have a lot of hurting and scared people. Going through catastrophic events exposes many needs requiring everyone’s help and patience.

Blameless No Longer A Slave To Fear

Admittedly, last week I was full of woe and worry for my own family. This week I am filled with gratitude and determination to make a difference in the lives of so many hurting beloveds because God filled my own bleeding heart with His word. 

I hear the Lord saying to all of us, “I will stay close to you, instructing and guiding you along the pathway for your life. I will advise you along the way and lead you forth with my eyes as your guide. So don’t make it difficult; don’t be stubborn when I take you where you’ve not been before. Don’t make me tug you and pull you along. Just come with me!”

Psalm 32:8-9 TPT

God oftentimes has to often grab us by the bit to redirect our stubborn fits.

So in order to eliminate the terrible duo of fear and loss, I don’t know about you, but I believe working together with human kindness through God’s love and goodness is a great start. 

Colossians 3:12 reminds us to start each day as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothed with compassion and kindness, to name just a few.  The only way we can be dressed with compassion and kindness is to layer these virtues with His Great Love.  Love holds these virtues into place like glue.  When we let Love guide our life, the peace of Christ will rule in our tender hearts. 

Hurt, healed, ready to help. Ask and you shall receive!

Love Is The Glue Holding Compassion and Kindness In Place

People are fearful and need someone to help bridge the gap between chaos and peace. Without love, none of this can be accomplished. God’s kind of love is not a feeling, it’s an action that moves forward. God’s Great Love is selfless, requiring us to love whether we feel like it or not. 

Where there’s sorrow, a sign of God’s Great Love is to show compassion.  Where there is malice, kindness flows from the love that exists in our hearts. Where there is hate and bitterness, love remains long after words of assassination and is not easily irritated or quick to take offense.

Love is a safe place of shelter, for it never stops believing the best for others (1 Corinthians 13:7 TPT).

Letting God’s Great Love Guide Our Lives

Allowing God’s Great Love to guide our lives through human kindness offers freedom. Laying down one’s life to act as a bridge so another beloved who is filled with fear and loss can walk safely over to the other side where love and kindness can comfort. That’s what Jesus would do and did for mankind.

Until next time…

Thank You For Being Beautiful You!

God’s Great Love Changes Everything!

Blameless Martin

God’s Great Love Changes Everything!

Love Offers Hope.  Hope Develops Confidence.  Confidence Leads To Action.  Action Results In Change!

Albert Einstein was onto something when he stated, “The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing!”

When we encounter homeless beloveds, our natural reaction generally triggers dismay along with blinders because it exposes the depth of our hearts.

Shallowness!

Ouch!  If you’re anything like I used to be, you become appalled when you encounter the homeless.  Do you discount them as losers?  Even refer to them as junkies and beggars with mental illness?  Or do you judge and group them together as lost souls who are polluting our rivers and streams and becoming public safety toxins?

Sadly, Einstein’s analogy is exactly how we, as a society, have been operating and dealing with the homeless.  We need to facilitate an emergent change because this homeless epidemic is out of control and it’s birthing hate, division and war instead. 

Casting and shifting blame onto our overwhelmed governmental programs, lack of law enforcement implementation and nonprofit organizations scrambling to find needed finances to create shelters, carrying the full weight of society’s expectations in finding a remedy obviously has failed.  We need education and awareness of this process while becoming part of the front lines that are no match to this Goliath.

Blameless and Forever Free Ministries continues to become equally frustrated at the increasing numbers.  This nonprofit has found that incorporating God’s Great Love and treating the homeless as our own family with the addition of their “A Beautiful You” homeless events where outreach is geared towards providing nourishment spiritually, physically and emotionally is conquering this battlefield one life at a time, one day at a time.

Should we give up because society dictates a numbers game so responsibility is relinquished? 

Every life matters so one life saved is victory!

The founder of Blameless and Forever Free Ministries has spent the last year doing life with the homeless, getting to know the need underlying the needs, and is going to try as humbly as possible to share her raw, true feelings comparing the pain and shock from the loss of her own first husband succumbing to the death delivered from alcohol addiction, depression along with homelessness, to spending a Friday evening eating dinner and listening to the story of a working homeless man, to starting a charitable organization catered to the many facets of homelessness.

Homelessness hurts and effects everyone.  Whether you’re a family member, an ex-spouse, a child/parent, taxpayer, you name it, we’re all being effected one way or another.  We can no longer relinquish responsibility.

I pray that I can somehow share openly my past judgments with candor while offering awareness to just how long it takes to cut through the bureaucratic red tape to find governmental help along with the stigma that mental illness carries to a world who is just now being introduced to the painful consequences that has been swept underneath the rug for generations. 

I am going to start showcasing one homeless beloved a month so you might understand their story; how they get to where they are and why they still remain abandoned and rejected.  Shame is a hard outer shell to crack through, much less rehabilitate.

The man above is Martin.  Martin thought he was going to die homeless with his Stage 4 colon cancer.  Outreach offered me the ability to befriend Martin, engage in fellowship with him, along with introducing him to Christ. 

Martin’s lens had been clouded and tainted by life, pain delivered through tragedy and rejection, but once we got him reading glasses, a Bible, and a whole lot of love emulating our Beautiful Jesus, Martin soon realized his life mattered.  He didn’t need as much alcohol that once dictated every decision he made (liquid courage, NOT!!!).  He realized he belonged and is now living comfortably in Sacramento with his sister and family. 

Martin, I love you and miss you dearly.  Thank you for teaching me the simplicity in sharing that I’m not the only one who becomes giddy watching the twilight of the moon dance through the trees while howling like a wolf when the moon becomes full. 

Blameless Homeless Rite-Aid

My mission with Blameless and Forever Free Ministries is not to encounter the appalling picture above anymore encamped alongside of our grocery stores.  Not all homeless want help, including Martin’s friend passed out in the photo above, but roughly 40% of our homeless do. 

And with our amazing God and all the precious beloveds dedicated to being His hands and feet, contributing to the welfare and outpouring of God’s Great Love, rehabilitation is awakened, proving with God, all things are possible! 

Until next time…

Thank You For Being Beautiful You!