Author: Bo

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God Boxing

(this is a picture from the internet, I have NO idea who the girl is in it, she is not my friend, just a picture relating to the story I’m sharing) I was out taking my walk today which is when I do my praying. I was praying for all the requests on my list and kept hearing from God about something that made no sense to me. He kept telling me a friends name and about boxing. It made NO sense to me at all. I love this friend, I know her well and she is NOT a boxer, sure, she has tried it in the past but she doesn’t box, she doesn’t take classes to learn how to box, to get in shape by boxing, there is absolutely NOTHING in her life relating to boxing in any sort of way. I put the prompting out of my mind and continued to pray for others. God interrupted every prayer I prayed with her name and boxing over and over. So I said “Ok God, I have ABSOLUTELY no idea what you want me to pray about but I’ll pray for my friend and boxing.” I prayed about her boxing, about her getting punched, about her boxing in the past and in the future, I prayed about people who would or could box with her, I prayed for her health, the health of her family members, pretty much everything I could think of to pray about for her personally as well as boxing and any relation it could possibly have on her life. It made absolutely NO sense at all in any way I could concieve.
Until this afternoon, I received a message from her that said “Well, it’s all done….I boxed” I said “what!?!?! what are you talking about!!?!?!?” having known NOTHING about her boxing. She told me she had to box today because of a situation that arose and that God spoke to her today through her boxing. I said “ohhhhhhhhhhh, now it all makes sense.” She said “what are you talking about” and I told her the story of how I had been praying for her boxing today all morning even though it made no sense to me, I had no idea what it was about and couldn’t comprehend what it was I was praying for her about, but I heard God, he put her on my heart, he put her boxing on my heart and I prayed for it while she was out boxing.

Again, I don’t believe in coincidences, I believe in God who orchestrates EVERYTHING and every once in a while, when we’re willing to shut up and listen to Him and to follow His promptings, we get a glimpse of His power and grace.

My friend and I both felt amazing, we felt like we had been used by God in his plan, we were obedient to him (her with boxing, me with praying) and both were blessed to see and feel His presence in our lives. We are both grateful and in awe of how God can use us if we obey.

(Just to be honest, this story was not actually about boxing, it was about something completly different but to protect her identity I used a metaphor which I think fit perfectly.)

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Divine Moment

I was out taking my walk today which is when I do my praying. I was praying for all the requests on my list and kept hearing from God about something that made no sense to me. He kept telling me a friends name

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Clipper Kitty

The before picture
When Bo and I got Bowser, she was nicely groomed. She had been trimmed “Lion Cut” style which means basically that her trunk was shaved short. She still had long fur on her head, legs & tail and the rest of her was buzz cut, it was adorable, soft, brushable, manageable and she didn’t shed much. It’s been 2 1/2 months and she’s gone back to full fuzzball persian status. We’ve wanted to get her groomed again for a while but all the places we’ve contacted charge WAY too much and we can’t afford it. So I decided we’d try it ourselves. I’m not sure why Bo didn’t stop me at just having the thought of it, he didn’t really agree and said he’d rather take her in to get her groomed but we just can’t afford it and it can’t be that hard to shave a cat right? RIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIGHT…. my bad. Here she is on the way to her destiny….(bo has a thing about putting her in plastic bags and swinging her around..)
We spent an hour in the garage with clippers a friend let me borrow (thanks K!) and managed to get a strip shaved down the middle of her back. That was all. We were done. So our poor kitty now has a nice skunk like stripe down her back of short hair and the rest is just fuzzy busting at the seams. It’s a really poor picture showing her pretty little short fuzzy stripe but it was the best i could get at the time. I’ll get better pictures next weekend after we take her into a salon to get her groomed. Yup, we caved, but we also found a place that said they’d do it for less than 50% of the price of all the other local places, they are insured, they’ve had the same cat groomer for 8 years now so we’re praying for the best.

And just for fun, here’s the snow that was falling just about 15 minutes ago. It’s sunny and bright outside now but we had snow for a few minutes.

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Sticker Monster

Chloe and Nana stopped by my work last week to drop some stuff off for Bo. Chloe KNOWS that when you go to the doctor, you get a sticker so she was very excited for her sticker!


We went to the back office and Chloe asked one of the staff for a sticker. She was so excited to pick out her purple “Dora the explorer” sticker. She was also given a tinkerbell tattoo and a sucker of course.

Sadly, Chloe was playing shy that day. I told her to say thank you for the sticker and the goodies, she silently stared at the floor. I told her again to say thank you to the nice girl who gave her the goodies, she didn’t budge. I started to reach for her sticker and goodies and she started to pull away. I told her I was going to take her goodies away if she couldn’t say thank you to the girl who gave them to her and she still didn’t budge. I tried to give her one more chance telling her if she would just say thank you, she could keep them, if not I was going to take them. She didn’t say a word. I got the goodies from her, took her hand and we left. I felt like a monster, a mean, evil, nasty, heart smashing, excitement crushing, smile stealing monster and it hurt my heart to the point of tears to take her goodies away from her. How can you take something from a face this cute?
I did. I ruined it. I took the smile away. And I didn’t make it come back. She never did say thank you, she didn’t get the goodies back. Ugh. It hurts. I don’t want to do it again. :(

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Kari Ann

I became a Christian nearly 6 years ago. My mom and I have been going to Women of Faith conventions when we can ever since. I remember a year when Marilyn Meberg was speaking about the state of your heart and keeping things hidden from the Lord. She even wrote a book about it called “The zippered heart” which I’ve read a few times. I love how she describes your heart as being zippered in the middle creating 2 completely separate sections. We believe the secrets we keep from one another, from ourselves, from our spouses, parents, friends, children, etc can also be kept from God in the zippered portion of our heart, the part we won’t let anyone get to or see. I’ve created an image of this in my mind (well, now in a paint document too…)
Long story short, I know I have a black part to my heart, the place where resentment, anger, unforgiveness, and all those other icky things lie. As well as the bad words I will think inside my head yet not say outloud, thoughts I’ll have about people, actions, things… Just all sorts of nasty stuff in my imagination that looks like tar. I don’t WANT that stuff in my heart or in my head. I want to be able to unzip my heart and let the red (purity, righteousness, grace, understanding, love, peace, wisdom, etc) ooze into the rest of my heart taking over my entire heart so I have nothing to hide from anyone, especially God. This has been a struggle of mine for the past almost 6 years. To let the goodness ooze into the cracks and crevices where the ick lies and let it take over. It’s dying to yourself a little bit more each and every day. And unfortunately there are days where I don’t die to myself at all, I live for ME at that moment in time. I’m working on it.

I’m in counseling now with an amazing woman of God from our church, I have so much respect for this woman, these qualities that I believe are of a Godly woman ooze out of her and that’s what I have been striving for are those qualities. I don’t want to be her, but I see the Jesus in her and that’s what I’m after. She gave me homework 2 weeks ago and I completed it. When I came back to her office after our 2 weeks in between sessions she asked me what I got out of it and how it went, what struck me the most. I told her what struck me the most was about who I am. How I see myself versus how Jesus sees me. I want to know who I am in HIS eyes, not my own, and I want to believe that is actually true for myself. I want to search the scriptures and see what God said about me and remember it because THAT is who I am, THAT is who God created me to be and I don’t know that person. My counselor got so excited as I spoke, I wondered what was going on. When i was finished telling her about all this, she told me that God told her to study my name for me, to tell me who I was according to Him and she had been doing a name study on my name for the past 2 weeks to find out about my name and my image in him. I was pretty impressed that God had orchestrated all of this. I found out that my parents chose my name because they had heard it somewhere and thought it was beautiful but wanted to spell it differently so it wasn’t the same as all the other Karis out there. My middle name is after my moms middle name “Ann”. And here’s what my counselor told me about me:

Kari – pure, rightesousness
2 Tim 2:22
Flee the evil desires of youth, and pursue righteousness, faith, love and peace, along with those who call on the Lord out of a pure heart.

Ann – graceful, understanding
Psalm 111:10
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, all who follow his precepts have good understanding. To him belongs eternal praise.

She had studied my name without even having a clue that this was what was on my heart and told me who I am which is who i’ve been striving to be since I came to know Jesus. I don’t believe in coincidences, I believe God has His hand all over this and has something in store for me or my counselor or someone else neither of us know and will be blessed by His work in our lives.

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Valentines Day

Bo cleaning up the Valentines day dinner mess…. Me so excited that I don’t have to clean it up!
We didn’t actually celebrate Valentines day ON Valentines day this year, but I think we will next year :) We did go out on a date the day after to our favorite restaurant Benihana, I called them the week before to make reservations and they were already booked for Valentines Day so I was too late scheduling us a date on the actual day. We know next year to put a little advanced planning into celebrating the day! We hung out on Valentines day then had dinner together at home and watched a movie. The day after, we got to go on our date to Benihana, our favorite!
If you’ve never been there, GO! It’s pricey but we were able to use a gift card we received for our wedding to pay the small portion of the bill we owed. Thanks to my parents, we had a diners card which gave us buy 1 get 1 free on the dinner and the gift card to pay for the non free dinner! Anyways, they put 8-9 strangers all together at 1 table surrounding a hibachi grill and everyone’s food they order gets cooked together on this grill.
The meals all come with soup, salad, shrimp appetizer, veggies, steamed rice, entree & ice cream. Bo had the chicken and steak, i had the prawns and steak. We also get the fried rice, it’s almost the only reason we go there and pay $28 for dinner is to get the fried rice… The stranger who was sitting next to bo gave him her entire bowl of fried rice becuase she was on a diet and couldn’t eat it. He was 1 happy boy….
They put on a show for you while your here as well, banging their utensils around making noise, throwing food and even lighting it on fire. He made the stack of onions, lit it on fire then started pushing it around on the grill yelling “Wooo Wooooooooo Wooo Wooooooooooo” as he flipped the lights off and on (like a train). then he flings a raw egg still in the shell all over the place flipping it up and catching it with his spatula only to flick it up again. Too bad we didn’t have tal with us to break it for him this time :)

We had a pretty cool chef, his name was Pai (pie) who told jokes, played with everyones food and even posed for pictures as long as we promised not to put them on the internet. (oops)

Stuffed stupid….I ate everything except for my steak, i took the whole thing home with me and ate it for breakfast this morning! Bo was able to finish his entire plate as well as the strange lady’s rice she gave him!
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Alaska # 2

Day 2 in Alaska…. It’s amazing how everything is WHITE all day long even when the sun is just beaming all day long. It’s beautiful. We went to get coffee on the way out at Kaladi Coffee (which does put starbucks to shame I might add) and while the boys and I grabbed coffee, Ali took her daughter Grace to the toy store next door. We went over to pick them up with our coffee… We spent quite a while longer there when the boys found the robotic toys…
This was the baby moose we drove past just down the street from their house.

Back at home it was video game time. Bo and Chris were Wii Bowling…. I’m not quite sure what Bo was aiming for with that bowling swing (I don’t know what it’s officially called) but that doesn’t look anything like how I used to bowl (and I used to bowl on a league!)
Chris on the other hand seemed to have perfect form which could be why he smoked bo at most of the rounds they played.
Us in the snow. Our 1 picture we took together all weekend. I NEED to be better at getting pictures of us out together.

More of Alaskas beauty. Bright sun, crystal clear blue skies and white frozenness all over.
They are surrounded with white mountains all around
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The gift of Life

I’ve received many gifts in my life, some things I loved, some things not so much (rude I know but it’s true and you feel the same about some of the gifts you have received over the years, I am just willing to say it.) God and my parents gave me the gift of physical life but I just recently received a new life gift from someone. There is a person in my bible study group who noticed I had a small bible one night. I actually have at least 7 bibles, 4 versions I’m currently reading out of (NIV & the Message – 2 are small travel bibles, 2 larger study bibles) and many more at home to chose from if I change my mind. But this person noticed my small bible with TINY reading (I can hardly even read it myself anymore) and said to me “Well that thing won’t get you anywhere, you can’t even read it” and showed me their bible, a large print study bible with an actual compass attached to the nice cover it was in. They said “this one will show you the way” handing me the Word of God and showing me the compass.
I said that it was a nice bible, cute idea with the compass saying “this will show you the way” and they handed me the bible, in the cover with the compass and said to take it. I told them I couldn’t take THEIR bible, I had my own that was perfectly fine and didn’t want to take THEIR gift of life. They were relentless and when I left bible study that night, I had a new bible in my hands. A bible that was given to me out of love, a bible that has someone elses name engraved on the front cover, a bible that has bent and torn pages from being read and showing them the way. They gave me THEIR personal gift of life.

I can’t think of a gift more meaningful than that. It wasn’t planned in advance, they didn’t go out and buy me something for a special day, it wasn’t a birthday gift, it was a gift of sacrafice they gave me out of love. Talk about giving someone in need the shirt off your back….

I have a friend who longs for her moms bible, it’s been re-bound countless times, duct taped together, highlighted, underlined and has her own personal notes everywhere throughout. She WANTS her moms bible, she knows that bible holds her moms heart and it would be the ultimate gift of life to have her moms ‘heart’ when someday in the future her mom might not be around to share it with her herself.


I dream of someday passing my bible onto my child, hopefully I will be the kind of mother, like my friends, whose heart is in her bible, visible to anyone’s eye and I can leave that as a gift to my child when I’m not around to share my heart with them anymore in person.

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Alaska #1

Off we go! Our friend picked us up at the house at 4:00am this morning and we were on our way! I went to bed last night at about 10:30, Bo stayed up ALL NIGHT and hasn’t slept yet….


Until we got our seats on the plane… it didn’t take him long to crash. Lucky for us there were only about 15 people on the entire plane that seated about 150 so there was pretty much 1 person in every row so we had a whole row to ourselves. Here I am, excited to go to Alaska for the first time ever! We were preparing to land looking at all the “ice water” below and I told him I want to go to the frozen zoo while we’re here. I’m on polar bear alert now to see if i can spot one while we’re here! (they all tell me no)

So cute are we in the snow!


This is the home we’re staying in. It’s beautiful and very comfortable. We’re staying with Bo’s brothers dad, his wife, her daughter & their 2 dogs “Bonnie & Clyde”

Chris took us out on his snow MOBILE (machine – whatever) for a test run. It only takes about .7 seconds going 50 mph for your face to freeze in place.
frozen face….
that’s it so far for today. We’re heading out to dinner with everyone in a bit then who knows. More cold, snowy fun I assume!
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Soup Day

Aunt Sharon & Gary

At Thanksgiving, my aunt Sharon & Gary mentioned having a “soup day” get together… make some split pea w/ ham soup and turkey noodle soup with the leftovers from the Thanksgiving feast to all get together again. We had that day today (yup, over 2 months later with the same leftovers!) Just kidding. Here are some pictures of everyone that came to their house today to hang out. Mom was home sick with the flu but I’m pretty sure dad packed her a doggy bag so she could have some fresh home made soup & bread as well. My aunt & Gary made a fantastic clam chowder (and i HATE clams but it was really good) as well as chicken noodle soup and a few loaves of fresh baked bread. It was so good, and nice to hang out with everyone for a few hours again.

Grandma
Trina & Joseph

Cousin Ron, Grandma, Dad & Aunt SharonCousin Kelly & her 3 daughters: Chelsea, Chandler & Chayce, Joseph & Chloe, Bo & Trina

So Trina & Joseph brought some blocks for Chloe to play with…… do you see her playing in this picture???
She did get a LITTLE time to play with the blocks…
But was quickly shoved out of the way so “unco bo” and poppi could play with her blocks.
At least they built her a tower taller than her to get a great picture with out of them. She may not be able to play with them but she can stand next to them and look cute anyways.
Poppis birthday is Tuesday… Trina & Joe brought a cake so we could celebrate today.
Chloe of course got to blow out the candle on the cake.
That’s it for soup day! Missed you mom, maybe next time :)