Some encouraging words from another blog.... Passionate Homemaking

I am subscribed to a blog called Passionate Homemaking (this is one that I am going to continue subscribing to!). I love it because she and I seem pretty similar in a lot of ways (she even has a daughter named Karis).
Some of her convictions and struggles are similar to mine as well. Here are some things that I have pulled from her posts:

"From the start let me state my posi­tion on fru­gal­ity. Fru­gal­ity is some­thing that all woman, it seems, love! Almost to an extreme some­time. We must guard against rais­ing the saving of every penny to a pedestal of idol­a­try in our lives. Per­son­ally, it became an idol in my life due to a lack of con­tent­ment in the resources I had to work with and an unthank­ful spirit for the hard work my hus­band was doing to pro­vide for us. I real­ized other areas in my life and home were lack­ing proper atten­tion because I was overly focused on saving my pen­nies. It caused stress, worry and anx­i­ety which did not allow for peace and joy to enter in my home, for they were run­ning out the window! We cannot serve God and money; there­fore, saving money should always come after strength­en­ing our rela­tion­ship with the Lord, serv­ing our hus­bands, and fam­i­lies. I began asking myself: Am I caus­ing more stress in my family by my overly focused atten­tion on fru­gal­ity? Is my house­hold lack­ing peace and atten­tion because I am fret­ting about money or the lack of it? Am I too focused on saving money over serv­ing the needs and desires of my husband?
On the other hand, we are called to be good stew­ards of the resources God has entrusted to us. There must be a proper bal­ance. Fret­ting will get us nowhere…but pur­pose­ful plan­ning will take us far, and keep­ing Christ the center will promise us suc­cess! My goal with this blog has been to keep a proper bal­ance between seek­ing to edify and encour­age my sis­ters in god­li­ness as well as being wise frugal home­mak­ers. But please don’t allow this topic to become a point of stress and frus­tra­tion for you. Seek to do your best, do what you can, but don’t become con­sumed to the point that you have no peace or con­tent­ment because you are always wor­ried about where the next dollar is going. We serve a mighty God who will pro­vide all of our needs accord­ing to His riches and glory in Christ Jesus! If he pro­vides every need of the spar­row, how much more will He pro­vide for your every need!"

"I must confess…I don’t have it all fig­ured out. I wish I did. I wish I could pro­vide you with ten simple steps to eat nutri­tion­ally and organ­i­cally on a budget. But no…month by month, it seems like it just doesn’t quite work out as I had hoped. My $300 budget has often resulted in a final bill of $350 (my goal has been to get it to $300, although our budget has a buffer of $50), and that is really with noth­ing fancy, and includes our gro­ceries and gen­eral house­hold products.
With my knowl­edge of health and nutri­tion and not being able to buy every­thing organic has resulted in fear and worry at what the end result might be. The Lord has gra­ciously and grad­u­ally brought me to the under­stand­ing that He is indeed sov­er­eign! I can fret till I am blue in the face, but God is ulti­mately in con­trol! I have a strong con­vic­tion that we are to eat healthy in order to be fit for the Master’s use, but again, it will not add a day unto my life apart from what has already been des­tined by the Father!"

These are exactly the things that I have been struggling with lately!! It was a great encouragement, and I thought I would share :).