Living Hope Ladies Retreat

This past weekend we had our first ever Living Hope Woman's Retreat. We teamed up with Life Point Church which I was super excited about because one of my favorite cousin's is the pastor's wife at that church and I knew that meant we were going to get to spend some time together!


It was a great time of really digging into the word of God and getting to spend time with some wonderful people! Above is one of my bffs Emily. She is the Miss Marysville I talked about in this post. haha. She has the most awesome testimony; maybe I'll get her guest post sometime.




I went early to help get everything together and set up the encouragement table where the every woman had an envelope with her name on it and during the weekend you could write notes of encouragement to your friends or someone you just met. I got the idea off a a post by this lovely lady about her women's retreat.


I had TONS of paper for the ladies to write notes to each other and we completely ran out of paper! I was soo excited that people really participated in this. It really was such an encouragement to me (of course because I am a words of affirmation love language. :) )


Amy Barron and Diane Daniels were our speakers and they went through the story in the book Restore My Heart by Denise Glenn. It was a very special time. Above is Amy, her daughter Becca, and me and below is Diane. Amy discipled me for a little while when I was engaged and Adam used to live with Becca's husband! It was so neat to get to catch up with these women!!


We talked about being the bride of Christ all weekend and this was the wedding dress they had on display. It was gorgeous, very antiquey. (My camera battery died so these are iPhone pictures in case you were wondering about the quality of the pictures!)



I had to catch a photo of Amy with her Razorbacks cup!! These are few and far between in Ohio! haha!


Oh and this is sweet baby Nolan. He was the only baby at the retreat. Every time I missed my sweet babies I went to see him!


Angie Fulks is the cousin I mentioned at the beginning of this post. Love her to death and LOVED getting to spend time with her and the ladies at her church. I led a small group and it was full of ladies from her church and they really did bless my heart!!


The leaders of the retreat, Angie and Jennifer. They did such a great job!

I learned so much at the retreat. I decided I am going to just type out a few things that really stuck out to me so that I will remember so here goes...

~God doesn't always change our circumstances but He does promise to be there for us and He will change us through our circumstances for the better.

~We talked a lot about marriage and how our earthly marriage is a picture of the heavenly marriage between us and God and how the ring God gives us is the Holy Spirit. That's so awesome; I've never thought of it like that before!

~Keep your lives free from the love of money and be content with what you have, because God has said, "Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you."Hebrews 13:5

~They gave us a free toothbrush and used the illustration that just as a toothbrush is set apart for the purpose of brushing our teeth and so you would not use your toothbrush to clean the toilet. We are also set apart for God's work and we cannot fully function correctly if we are all entrapped in the world's "stuff."

~Letting the Holy Spirit enable us to live by the fruit of the Spirit makes us a beautiful bride to Him.

~God is not going to bring up our sin to us; He forgives and it is as far as the east is from the west so if you are dwelling on sin, it is either your flesh or the enemy. This can become a major stronghold in your life so be careful.

~And no where in the bible does it talk about u forgiving ourselves. It is God's business or others that you have wronged to forgive you; saying or thinking we need to forgive ourselves puts us in God's shoes and that's no good! Our problem is not God forgiving us, it's us forgiving ourselves!

~Process of a lie. Hear the lie. Think about the lie. Believe the lie. Act on it. Then we think, How did I get here?? We have to combat the lie right when we hear it and we have to know the truth so we can. We can know the truth by knowing God's word.

Awesome stuff huh? I wish I could write awesome about the time Adam had with the girls but I can't. Friday he called me at nap time and said Annabelle wouldn;t go to sleep she was just crying and saying, "Mommy come back." I was soo sad and told him not to tell me anything else like that. That night he called and said he got the girls in the car just to drive around because they were so cranky. Later I found out he took them to Jeremy's house to get help. :( Saturday he said was a little better but on the way home we got a flat tire and it was a crazy situation but God kept us safe and I was so thankful! I've never ever been so excited to see two sweet little babies in all my life!! What an amazing break but I was ready to be with my A's again!! I am so thankful for Adam watching them for me; he sure does appreciate my job even more now!!!