First of all I want to apologize for neglecting you all for so long. I'm not making any new commitments to post more often, but I just wanted to share something that has been on my heart.

There are so many people, including myself, who have trouble with being disciplined. We all love to take it easy and slow things down. When is sleeping in till 10 not welcomed when we have the chance? When do we pass up the oppurtunity to have some extra junk food? How often do we put off our  school work (we are all homeschooled here) to goof off a little? It is amazing how easy these things are to slip into. In our culture, self indugence is praised, and pleasure is the way of life. How can we reflect our Christ in our lives if we are captured by this culture lie?

"God has not given us a spirit of timidity, but of power and love and discipline" ~2 Timothy 1:7

Discipline is so crucial in our lives of service to God. We must completely deny ourselves, pick up our crosses, and follow Him. God's plan for us is to serve him with our entire selves, and laziness and lack of self-control is not going to cut it. During the end of summer this year, I thought about discipline a lot. I had been wasting my time, goofing off all summer doing nothing, and I realized that my relationship with God was going nowhere. I remembered that our goal in life is to serve Him, and I knew I had to change things around a bit. "Discipline yourselves for the purpose of Godliness" (1Timothy 4:7) I knew that to become closer to Jesus, I needed to start striving for Godliness.

Sometimes I find that if we restrict our faith to believing only, we become no nearer to perfection in Christ. By all means, believing is essential, but it is dead without service. What is a relationship when we give nothing back to the other person? When God gives us His Sacred love, we must return it by loving Him back with our entire heart, mind, soul, and strenth. This is the only way we can achieve perfect communion with God.

With this in mind, Discipline is vital to our service to God. Discipline is the parallel to "denying ourselves" as Jesus commanded us. I looked up discipline in the dictionary, and found the exact definition to the word. Apart from the meaning of training children, discipline means orderly conduct, self-control, efficiency, and good conduct. How can we keep these things in our lives? Love. When love is our ultimate motivation, every good thing will come of it. "For the greatest of these is love" for the love of Jesus our Savior, we deny ourselves.

The first thing that I wanted to fix in my daily routine, was sleep. Don't we all love to sleep? I was sleeping in every single morning of the long hazy summer. How did this contribute to my routine? I would wake up and lounge around, which would cause neglect of my devotions and my chores. I couldn't do my best in loving my family when I would get up late. When I get up early I get things done. Everything is more efficient. Plus, I don't stay up wasting time in the evening because I am tired and ready for bed. I've found that I'm all around less crabby on days when I'm awake on time. I guess that's a posotive too (for me and for everyone else).

Another vital adjustment I added to my routine was food. Food is wonderful. It's delicious, it's filling, but we all just eat too much of it. Eating between meals exhibits a lack in self-control and is unnecessary for our health. I was finding myself eating all day long; I was filling up on junk food, like pretzels and chips, and chocolate. I was always munching to keep myself happy. I know now that there is one goal that can make me happy: Jesus Christ. Now that I try to keep that out of my life, I've found that I enjoy my normal meals much more, because I'm actually hungry.

These two are the main obstacles for me. There are still so many more selfish habits that I've fallen into. But I know that all of these desires of the flesh are a deception, and to find real satisfaction, I need to go to Jesus. You know when you're asleep, you think the most wonderful place to be in at that moment is in your bed, and you wish you could go on dreaming forever. Later in the day, you wish you had gotten up and done something real instead of wasting it in a sub-reality of dreams. I think that is a lot like the way it will feel at the end of our life, when we are awakened to the fact that we can no longer change what we've done. We'll look back and wish that we could have been awake and concious to the things that really mattered. Because this life is a lot like a dream; We think we know what we want, and we try to stay asleep as long as we can. We are overcome with desires of the flesh and are lost. But when we wake up to Jesus Christ, it is plain and clear that truth is found in desires of the spirit, and we pursure that truth with all that is in us. We need to wake up to reality and love Jesus as much as we possibly can.

Wow. just did a lot of rambling. This post has no format or orginization. Oh well. It was an effort at expressing my thoughts. I'll get better as time goes on. ;)

~The Halfling

---EDIT----

Haha....I just realized how ironic this post was since I haven't really been very faithful with my blogging. Okay, I'm really only an occasional blogger. I am making no commitment. In fact, don't expect me back too soon. I strive for discipline in other areas, thank you very much. :P

I had decided to post every other day on my blog and I have already missed my goal. That's pretty lame. Perhaps it's a foreshadowing of my *cough* dedication of blogging in the future. Well, of course, I'm sure you can understand with Easter and everything.

I, personally, had a wonderful Easter. When we went to Church in the morning it was very special because there were so many flowers and it smelled SO nice, especially when we hadn't had any floral decorations all Lent. I got to play the co-Easter-bunny with Sylvia and Leandra this year. THANKFULLY it wasn't raining so we got to hide all  the eggs outside around our house.

In my Easter basket I got a pair of knitting needles, which I'm really thankful for. Sylvia taught me to knit and I've already done about 30 rows on a scarf. It a sort of ugly scarf, to be honest. It's slightly too fat and there are a whole bunch of imperfections in the stitches. What can you expect? It's my first time knitting and I've only been working on it for 1 day!

Today is the beginning of our spring break, so I slept in until 9:00. It was SO nice. I'm really teribble at getting up in the morning, so It was refreshing to not have to worry about it. Today I'm also going to have my belated birthday cake in the evening. I can smell it in the oven cooking...*long in-hale* ....aaaaahh. It smells so good. It's an angel-food cake, which is my favorite. Yum!

The fuzzy red slippers that I got for my birthday are showing signs of being worn by smelly feet. I have worn them evey day at home because they're SO comfy. That was a really good gift Mom! Thanks!

I need to go now; I have to babysit  while my mom goes to a meeting. Yay. Maybe I'll bring my knitting.

Well, I finally got a blog. I really don't know what to say right off. I can't promise you that I'll post regularly, and I can't promise you that my posts will be interesting either. I guess It will become easier the more I do it. This blog will be an enormous contrast in writing quality to my sister Sylvia's blog, but I plan on doing my best.

I guess some people who already know me might want an update on my birthday yesterday. And yup, it really was a happy day. I got some clothes that I really like, I got a bright red fuzzy house-coat that makes me look like Elmo, I got some fuzzy red slippers to match them, I got some much wanted stamps to add to my collection (yep, I'm a stamp collecter), and some book marks. I also took a trip with Sylvia downtown while my family did some shopping. We went to a books store and spent 50 *cringe* dollars on books. Yeah, they were great books too! Sylvia got The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, War and Peace (by Tolstoy), Don Quixote, The Grapes of Wrath, C.S. Lewis for the Third Millenium (Kreeft), Emma (Jane Austen), and Tess of the D'Urbervilles. I, on the other hand, got two books, Oliver Twist (I'm a Dickens fan) and Freckles by Gene Stratton Porter. Porter also wrote A Girl of the Limberlost, which was very good; I'm excited to read more of her writing. As you could guess, Sylvia spent a litte more than me while we were there.

Well, Anyhow, once we had decided we had spent enough, we lugged our purchases down the road to a litte Cafe. There we had some cookies, ice-cream, and a Sprite. They were reeeeeeeeeeeally good. We chatted literature and thought about how when we were old grandma's we'd look back and realize what nuts we used to be....

We went home and had pizza and presents. I didn't really have a cake. Oh well, we'll just have to get some on Easter. Ha...I'm sure there will be no shortage of sweet things whatsoever. Tell me if you want details on the clothes I got (haha...no one).

Okay, enough about me. Please go over to my friend guardedmodesty's blog and wish HER a happy birthday.

~Turwethiel