Peace Family, do you have a child who is a star in the making? Would their smiling face be perfect on the cover of a magazine? We’re looking for the next cover kid for Peace Magazine in our “Peace Cover Kid Contest,” brought to you by Nikki Pederson Talent Network!

The winner will be showcased in a professional photo session with K. Norwood Portraiture, and will be featured on the front cover of an upcoming edition of Peace Brazos Christian Life Magazine!

THANKS to Nikki Pederson Talent Network. Nikki Pederson knows talent when she sees it; she’s been responsible for elevating generations of local talent to the entertainment industry. Find out more at NikkiPederson.com.

All entrants must be at least 6 years old. Your child could be our next “Peace Cover Kid,” from Nikki Pederson Talent Network and Peace 107.

Peace Family after one of the coldest winters on record, Spring is finally here!!! As a cancer survivor I celebrate the coming of each season because the ‘little things’ turn out to be the ‘big things’. When I was going through treatment I wondered if I would see the next spring and longed for the flowers to bloom and the grass to turn green. I don’t take those things for granted. They are precious!

Have you been looking for the bluebonnets?  They are late to bloom this year because of the prolonged cold we experienced, but I am happy to say they are beginning to bloom right now! I really want to get the traditional sitting-or-standing-in-a-field-of-bluebonnets picture. Do you have one? Well, after contacting a professional photographer I learned that most are already booked up by now.  Yep, people book photographers to take family photos in a beautiful field of bluebonnets. It’s a Texas thing :). You might book now for next year. I’m serious!

I guess the reason the coming of spring is so important is because it’s a reminder that God brings beauty again after a hard winter. That if you can endure the cold and storms there is a new beginning on the other side. God is faithful and his mercies never come to an end.

Lamentations 3:21-24 ESV

But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope: The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. “The Lord is my portion,” says my soul, “therefore I will hope in him.”

Peace Family, does God deserve the best of us?

The immediate answer is, “Yes, of course,” but we often don’t live that way. The temptation is to think to ourselves, “Haven’t I given enough of my time, talents, and resources to God? Hasn’t he asked enough of us? Don’t I have the right to keep this little thing to myself?” That’s dangerous thinking.

Peace Family, God has given us everything. The Bible says that every good and perfect gift comes from Him. Let’s offer our best to God. Let’s offer to him the things that we hold most dear to our hearts- our careers, our marriages, our finances, our futures, our free time, and everything else that we deeply value. He is deserving of it. We can never give too much to God.

If we’ve been living with selfish ambition, let’s relinquish it over to Him. It might be scary, but something important to remember is that he is already in control, and just because we offer something to God does not mean that he wants us to be miserable or wear ourselves out. He is a good father, not a wicked father, and he will not give us a snake or a stone when we ask for bread. Sometimes he will ask us to give something up that we treasure. Sometimes though, he will give that thing back to us.

What do you cherish in your life? What can you give and dedicate to Him today? Let’s you and me both make a fresh decision to give God our best. He is absolutely worthy of it.

Peace family, have you ever discovered that you’ve been doing or saying something wrong for a very long time, and never even suspected it? That just happened to me, and it really brought the need for accountability to my attention!

I learned to knit about about 20 years ago, but over the weekend, I discovered that I’ve been making a small, hardly discernible mistake that turned out to be a big problem!

I am pretty sure that I learned how to knit correctly, but somewhere over the years, I got off track and started knitting in a really weird way. If you know anything about knitting, I have had the working yarn in the correct place, but I’ve been going down through the stitch (like you’d do with a purl,) instead of up through the stitch.

I know that doesn’t seem like it would make much of a difference, but as I tried on Saturday to learn a new stitch technique called a knit-forward-back, my incorrect method made it impossible for me to do that stitch! Imagine my uncomfortable surprise when I looked up several “how to” videos, and each time, they told viewers to begin “with a normal knitting stitch,” but it wasn’t at all how I have been knitting!

I’ve knitted with friends on several occasions, and I wish one of them had pointed out this mistake to me even ten years ago, so that doing things the wrong way wouldn’t come so naturally and be my default. Now, it is going to take focus and hard work for me to retrain my brain and muscle memory!

Peace family, sometimes, we start believing that we do things well enough on our own spiritually. We don’t feel like committing to a church, or we feel like we don’t have time right now for a Bible study, or we really struggle to give ourselves time to spend reading the Bible. We might even be afraid of opening up to others, or sharing our struggles. However, all of those things are so important to our walk with Christ! As much as we hate admitting it, every single one of us is sometimes wrong. When we don’t have other examples in our lives of people living in community with us, sometimes we can drift away from the truth, and forget what obedience really looks like. I didn’t intentionally start knitting my own, wrong way; I just thought I knew how to do it, and I failed to check back from time to time to make sure that I was doing things the right way.

We don’t like people to point out our mistakes, but if we want to do things right, honor God well, and remember the truth, sometimes we really do need someone else to lovingly point out problems that we might not see or have become blinded to. In order to do that, we need people who are sharing life with us, close enough to us to actually make observations, and safe and loving enough that we can be both honest and vulnerable with each other. We need to be checking our beliefs and life style choices against what the Bible says, and what Jesus teaches, and making changes as needed. The longer we travel off the path, the more difficult it will be to get back to how things are supposed to be.

Peace family, my challenge to you today is to examine your life. Let’s both take time this week to realign our focus, our priorities, and what we believe about ourselves and others with what the Bible says. Pick a small way you can become more involved with your church, a Bible study, or even just other Christians. Find a place where you can share and be strengthened through accountability! God created us for community, and even though it’s hard sometimes, in the end, it will be worth it!

A friend recently told me that the statement that people are “made in God’s image” was “the biggest lie in the Bible.” He said that if God is just and good, but people are so evil, how could we possibly be “made in God’s image”?

I’ve continued to chew over that statement, which I found to be pretty thought-provoking. The fact is, we are indeed made in God’s image; the Bible says so. When God made people and the world, everything was perfect and “good” (with the creation of people described as “very good” in contrast to the rest of creation.) As beings who are made in God’s image, we have the capacity to make choices, but with that capacity, we chose to do evil, so the evil of humans is not part of being made in his image, it is merely enabled by us having free will, as He does.

As for creation, with the failure of humanity and being banished from Eden, nature changed to reflect the brokenness of the relationship between God and people, the pain of it, the consequences of it, and the death that we now earned (physical and spiritual death, pain in childbirth and being regarded under men for women, and struggle in lifelong work.) However, even within the passage where humanity receives the consequences of sin, even then, God foretells the plan of redemption through Jesus, and that evil might hurt, but goodness will triumph through the messiah (“He will crush [Satan’s] head, though he will bruise his heel.”) Other parts of the Bible also talk about how creation will be restored, and made even better.

God then set up the pattern of death as payment being necessary for restoration, like on the future cross. He made clothing for Adam and Eve out of animal skins (something had to die) to cover them, because they were ashamed and the fig leaves they sewed together were useless.

In all fairness, people have debated what exactly it means to be “made in the image of God” for centuries. I tend to hold with the idea that it is referring to our eternal souls, with our spirits/personalities, minds, and bodies also somehow a reflection of God’s character and glory, even if it is only symbolic. However, one thing all the believers agree on, is that the wickedness, selfishness, pettiness and vindictiveness of mankind is definitely not part of being “made in His image.”

So Peace Family, what does this mean to us? It means that you matter and you are valuable. You are made in the image of the Greatest Being to ever exist! It also means that the people you dislike and full-blown enemies, even if they are failing to act in the good capacity that God designed for them, are also made in his image. This is why murder and hatred are wrong.

So, if you struggle with your self-worth, remember it today, Peace family: you are precious and made in God’s image!