My New Business: Soul Delights Launches with Your Fast for Life™


I have not been blogging but have been busy developing a new venture I am excited to share with you: Soul Delights LLC, my business dedicated to offering products, programs and services to nourish the body and soul, launched this week!

As you have read my posts these 3 ½ years you know my heart is for Christians to live lives deeply committed to Jesus by knowing God’s word and reflecting that knowledge in our attitudes and actions, including healthy eating. God used this blog, which has in part chronicled my 20-year spiritual- and nutritional-growth journey, to prepare me to develop Soul Delights, with its signature program, Your Fast for Life™.

Your Fast for Life™ is a 40-day online food and lifestyle program that gives you the spiritual and practical tools to change your health right in your home, but you don’t do it alone. Through a private social media site and a weekly conference call, you connect with me and a community of people on the program. Your Fast for Life™ is a perfect vehicle to help you obtain and maintain good overall health without the guesswork. You get devotionals, menus, recipes, shopping lists, and more to help you always be dedicated to God, even through food, which is so often a constant stronghold. I created this program for you to succeed spiritually and nutritionally, not just while you are on the program but also for the rest of your life.

Check out my website, http://www.souldelights.com, for more information about Soul Delights, Your Fast for Life™ and my new blog, Take a Risk: Radical Love for the Soul. I hope you will pray about joining Your Fast for Life™, signing up for my periodic newsletter and subscribing to the new blog to participate in weekly love challenges.

This is the season for me to launch forth into uncharted territory. I will no longer be blogging at Musings of a (Recovering) Strong Black Woman, but I pray you will journey with me into the new.

God bless you and thank you for your faithful readership!

Operate from Purpose, Not Pain

If god dwells in me, with me, He should be evident in what I say and do. I must remember that He dwells and give Him free reign to respond for me, to say and do what I should say and do. Sometimes that’s hard when people have hurt me. My focus can be on the pain, responding to it instead of the present issues regardless of their merit. I know I’m not alone.

We can take this habit into all our relationships, including parenting, and the pain response only complicates issues. I explore this further in my latest EEW column, which begins below:


I recall only one painful moment at the hands of my parents, my mother actually. She called me snotty. I don’t remember what I had done, but I remember the crush in my spirit when my mom called me a name. There may have been other times, but they haven’t stuck with me.

Overall, my parents encouraged me, provided materially well for me and gave me a good moral foundation. They were good parents. My dad has since passed and was only able to see me parent the first of his grandsons. My mom has seen my husband and me in action, up close this year for the six months she lived with us. Without going into detail let me just say she has tried to impose her parenting methods on me, and some of her comments have been painful. She has even caused me to question my parenting skills.

I can only imagine what impact the pain on those of you who grew up with abusive parents has had on your psyche and all your relationships, including your parenting one. I empathize with you; my childhood painful moment still stings a bit and my adulthood painful moments are still fresh. But in all of your pain and mine, one thing remains true: Jesus died to set the captives free. This is more than us being loosed from Satan’s bound but includes us being loosed from our broken hearts, our setbacks, and our letdowns (Isaiah 61:1-3). We know Jesus is the remedy for all our pain, helping us to parent out of purpose instead of pain. Read the rest here.

My One Thousand Gifts List

#761-770
Faydra Deon responding so quickly to fixing my website
Tyora responding to fix my site according to our previously worked out conditions
Christen being here to care for the children while I resolved my website issue
Going on a double date with Nicole and Jeremi
Jeremi wanting to preserve the moment with a picture
Attending and covering the EACH Resource Fair
Working with Ruby Bailey
Seeing Charyse flow in her gift on the EACH artists’ stage
Brother Joe telling me how proud he was of me contributing to Your First Year of Motherhood
Seeing LaSonjia and Sterling volunteer with EACH

Friday Feature: Guerilla-Style Cold Cocktail Method

This week I had to do all out warfare fighting colds that I heard coming on me and the boys. I needed them to be well so I wouldn’t have to miss teaching my second week at our homeschooling co-op. I went guerilla-style with the cold cocktails and all of them are fine. I should have used my onslaught of natural medicines for me. Now, though still small, I have more symptoms than the boys did. I only upped my meds a little bit but should have upped them more when considering my schedule this week: My husband’s 15-hour days and my having to educate and then take the boys on outings on three days wouldn’t allow me to get the additional rest I needed. After considering how the mix I gave the boys worked, I am now on that regime and want to share it with you. You’ll find more details on all these medicines in my previous posts that are listed at the end of this post:

Acidophilus—I gave this to them in the morning, afternoon and before bed.
Astragalus—I gave this to them three times a day, generally in the morning, before being around a crowd and after coming home from being around a crowd.
Echinacea—I administered this the same way I did the astragalus.
Garlic—I cut up a clove into tiny pill-sized pieces and had them take them like pills.
Oranges—We didn’t have orange juice this week but had a few oranges so they ate them.
Water—The boys always drink water with meals but they got extra ounces of water throughout the day to flush out the viral infection.

As soon as you feel a cold coming, why not try this guerilla-style cold cocktail method to prevent your cold from progressing and to cure it? Better yet, incorporate each of these daily to decrease your chance of getting a cold. I’m going to remember my own advice. It works!

No Other Gods

What Do You Think? Wednesday

Joshua thought he knew them all, the 10 Commandments that we’ve spent the last few weeks on. As I told you Monday, he snarled a bit and glanced for something else but realized these rules can easily escape. I did, too, only my realization wasn’t of a memory loss but something I had yet to even consider.

Thou shall have no other gods before me (Exodus 20:3).

I had this first commandment locked in mind when my eyes opened to all the idols that consumed my life: African décor; my hair; my Sunday dress; and my need to defend myself were at the top of the list. I wrestled with these gods for years, finally pinning them down and not bowing to them again. But my desire to defend myself is rising again as I wrestle with the loss in the eyes of some loved ones of my good reputation, my new idol that I just recognized as such.

My loved ones have always felt free to challenge me, the way I handled a friendship, responded to my boss or even wore my hair. For the most part these challenges were occasional, but now their challenges are a constant strum and the music seems so loud! I have loved ones who question the effectiveness of the boys’ home education though they have seen the benefits; a friend who questions my social justice record; and some who say I’m insensitive, harsh even. None of the challenges are new. Now they just seem to be a concentrated steady beat.

I thought because some of the challenges—like my decision to home educate or my less visible focus on social justice—were old that my people would have settled my decisions in their minds. Not so. Even though my loved ones are a minority and their challenges oppose the many notes and face to face comments I get, I focus on the noisy minority. I have contemplated returning to an idol to try to get them to see the merit in my decisions, and this is troublesome. My focus, however, is understandable.

We all expect that our loved ones who we believed knew our good character would not question our character (e.g., positioning my children for failure or disregarding those in need). It hurts that the person our loved ones knew to make wise decisions is no longer treated as wise when our decisions go contrary to what they believe. To make the pain go away, to make our relationships right again, we consider what we might not otherwise consider, in my case defending myself. When I wrote a post about how a change in you may change others’ view of you, at that time I didn’t know that the pain associated with their changed view of me is really coming from the death of my reputation. I had a good name among them, but now my character is challenged as I seek to do what I know God has called me to do.

Of course in my attempt to obey Christ I mess up. I say some things the wrong way, at the wrong time, in the wrong tone, but never did I suspect my decisions would negatively color my character. I didn’t suspect that because I had a stellar reputation, one I held in high esteem when I should have viewed it as nothing.

The Apostle Paul commands believers not to put “confidence in the flesh,” citing that his human pedigree could cause him to be the most boastful of all (Philippians 3:4-6). Instead he says,

Indeed, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God that depends on faith– that I may know him and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, that by any means possible I may attain the resurrection from the dead (Philippians 3:8-11).

That’s the confidence I need; that’s the confidence we all need as we attempt to surrender all, even a reputation.

What are some of your idols that you have recently uncovered? How have they affected the way you worship God? Please, tell me what you think.