Reading from different passages today, a theme jumped out at me:  God as the center of my life, my thoughts, my desires.  As I continue to protect His place in my heart, my life becomes more and more wide, free, open, fulfilled.  Amazing words.  

When I read them, that stirring of God's Spirit that expands my heart and makes me aware of His presence, compelled me to take these verses as my "God~message" for today.  I love it when He speaks so clearly ~ gently confirming and assuring me of the lessons He is teaching...    

"If your first concern is to look after yourself, you'll never find yourself.  But if you forget about yourself and look to Me, you'll find both yourself and Me." Matthew 10:39 (msg)

"Obsession with self in these matters is a dead end; attention to God leads us out into the open, into a spacious, free life.  Focusing on the self is the opposite of focusing on God.  Anyone completely absorbed in self ignored God, ends up thinking more about self than God.  That person ignores who God is and what he is doing.  And God isn't pleased at being ignored.  But if God has taken up residence in your life, you can hardly be thinking more of yourself than of Him.  Anyone, of course, who has not welcomed this invisible but clearly present God, the Spirit of Christ, won't know what we're talking about.  But for you who welcome Him, in whom He dwells ~ even though you still experience all the limitations of sin ~ you yourself experience life on God's terms.  It stands to reason, doesn't it, that if the alive~and~present God who raised Jesus from the dead moves into your life, He'll do the same thing in you that He did for Jesus, bringing you alive to Himself?  When God lives and breathes in you (and he does, as surely as He did in Jesus), you are delivered from that dead life.  With His Spirit living in you, your body will be as alive as Christ's!" Romans 8:8~11 (msg)

This assures me that as long as God is the center of my life, my dreams, and my desires, I can rest assured that I will find myself and Him!  My life will also be open, spacious, and free ~ and I will be alert for whatever God is going to do next!  In this regard, I'll never be left feeling shortchanged - instead, I won't be able to round up enough containers to hold everything that God will generously pour into my life through the Holy Spirit!

"We continue to shout our praise even when we're hemmed in with troubles, because we know how troubles can develop passionate patience in us, and how that patience in turn forges the tempered steel of virtue, keeping us alert for whatever God will do next.  In alert expectancy such as this, we're never left feeling shortchanged.  Quite the contrary - we can't round up enough containers to hold everything God generously pours into our lives through the Holy Spirit."  Romans 5:3~5 (msg)

For those of you who are way into music as well as social networking (i.e. Facebook, Xanga, Twitter, etc) here are a few sites I found this week that I made use of and thought were pretty cool and interesting.

http://www.playlist.com/  ~ This site is cool because it's versatile.  Some players will only work for MySpace or Facebook but this one works for a number of sites listed and also offers an option to get a code that will work on any other website you might have.  I've been keeping an eye out for a play list that would work for my Xanga profile - had tried a few - but hadn't been able to come across anything compatible.  Good news!  This one works.  I simply went to "edit my theme" and clicked on "create new module".  When the box popped up, I named it, added the code for the player and voila! it worked.  Since music means a lot to me, I was pretty excited!

http://blip.fm/all ~ This site I found through my new fav. site:  Twitter!!  yeah!    So cool, because you can create an account easily enough, then type a song into their search bar.  When you find the one you want, you can "blip" it - add it to your profile page along with your thoughts or comments.  In this way, you can be your own DJ, can add your friends so that they can listen to your music, and can attract other users who might like your selection.  However, the feature I really like, is that you can connect it to Twitter, so that when you "blip" a song, it automatically "tweets" it, along with your thoughts/comments.  Want to add a song but don't want to "tweet" it?  Simply put a "!" in front of your blip - and your blip stays on blip.fm without being "tweeted".  My blip.fm username is "b_girl" fyi!

Anyway, just wanted to share - for some of you who are social networking, Twitter, or music addicts!