6 years ago today

I gave my life over to Jesus Christ and I never looked back ❤

I love the word! I love the Lord!

I’m still far from where I could be, but I can confidently say that I have fallen more in love with God’s word and in turn have fallen more in love with him. I love opening up my Bible to read what God has to tell me and praise him for revealing truths to my heart.

My Bible study: Going through a chapter of the Bible each time I open the word. So, most days one chapter in the morning and one at night. Right now I am going through Proverbs because wisdom was something we were discussing in my Philosophy class and it interested me. What better book to learn wisdom from than Proverbs! I am enjoying it very much.

Confessions of an Uptight Planner

It always amazed me how different my sister and I are. She can wake up everyday not having a plan and still go to bed at the end of the day feeling good about how she spent her time. I on the other hand have always been uptight about my day-to-day activities, leaving little room for spontaneity. 

I can go as far as to try my best to look myself in my room for hours and bury my head in homework….even after I’m done with homework. Relationships are important to me, so of course I would come out to get some food in the cafeteria with a friend or two, but then I would get right back to my homework and studying. Certain friends this year, as much as I’ve tried to plan time with around my schedule have really changed the way I view planning and time management. I have spent so much more time than I ever have in my whole time here at college (2 years- 4 semesters) reaching out to people, letting people reach out to me and building Christ-centered, meaningful relationships. These friends and I have had a lot of fun in recent weeks joking around, laughing together and building each other up . Often times I worried about how I was spending my time and how my social life was going to affect my grades. I started to notice my to-do list look differently from my days and felt like I was acting in sin because I wasn’t sticking to my word of “do this, do that.”

Problem? I was leaving little room for God’s plans. Of course, he would want me to get my homework done on time and use my time wisely, but did he want me ignoring my friends in the process? Of course not! If I spend an hour talking to a friend about a theological question that has been on her mind over dinner instead of getting a quick bite to eat by myself so that I can get back to my cave in the dorms is it wrong? If I’m not in bed by midnight is that just stupidity?

Finding the right balance is key. It is very important to be diligent, I know that. I have just been working on letting God take control of what I do each day. Essentially, I am leaving room for the Holy Spirit and going but what he says I should be doing. It has not been without difficulty. Much prayer has helped me to change my mind, but old habits are hard to break.

I am still going to plan things….in fact I have a list of things I want to do over the summer and have made a list of those things in my journal. It is still hard to wrap my head around the fact that some of those things may not get done or be done the way I want the to be, but I am praying that God continues to work in my heart and let him take control.

In all of this I would like God to get the glory and I want to praise him for his work in my life.

 

 

The Honesty Corner Part 2

I thought I knew love until I found out I was feeling lust. I can excuse it for the first few years of high school and I’m sure God did. After getting saved, however there just seems no room for excuses from me to myself.

What am I saying here? For years I was under the curse of lust and I had no idea it was ruining my life. I didn’t have God in my life for most of my teen years and it greatly affected the way I viewed things. When my peers were beginning to lose their innocent childhood minds, I so desperately held on to mine only to have it snatched out of my hands when I allowed my fingers to wrap around movies, books, and TV shows that had non-Christian ideas on sex and romance. I was taken along for the ride of lust and I didn’t even know it. Getting a boyfriend became such a big deal to prove to my peers that I was normal like them and that I was pretty and could be wanted by a guy. I started wearing make-up, wearing low-cut tank tops and flip flops to school where at my Los Angeles County high school it was appropriate to do so.

I got saved as a junior and hoped I could change everything. But I didn’t really change in that part of my life. I was too embarrassed to admit I had a problem with lust and lusting after men. Instead I hid it, even when the subject came up in Bible Study or Youth Group meetings. If sex was going to be a part of my life when I got married, I was going to b sure to make it great. I wondered about it a lot. I liked guy after guy only for things to go sour before we could get into a relationship. God was protecting me, I later learned, because if I had been in a relationship with any of them, I would have had sex with them, no doubt about it.

Everything seemed perfect between me and the last guy I liked only for things to change when he started dating someone else I was devastated. I was so devastated that I cried out to God after a tearful prayer and asked him to change my filthy, lustful heart and change my life. A warm, comforting peace fell on me and I felt weight being taken off of my body. At that moment, sitting on my bed in my college dorm, I felt free for the first time. It was not an easy journey at first. The enemy attacked me- I had 2 or 3 fevers in less than 2 weeks along with other hard things. I had a hard time getting over my crush and his decision to date someone else.

Can you believe this all started 3 weeks ago? Today I am doing much better and I am looking forward to knowing what loving a guy feels like, what God’s view romance looks like. Soon it will be mine to discover. I can wait for sex with a patient, happy heart because it is God’s gift to me and my husband and he is the only one who chooses when we can use it. I almost feel like I’m starting over. All those guys in the past don’t count anymore because my outlook is new. Although my teen years were not as I now wished they were, my adult life will definitely be different. What a beautiful thing. God is good in his perfect timing and the way he turns situations around for good.

 

The Honesty Corner Part 1

I feel it is the right time to let all of my readers know what has really been going on with my life these last couple of months. My recent posts have no doubt suggested that everything was fine. I thought it only right to let you know that those posts were queued up from when I created them over winter break. I wasn’t sure how often I would be able to create posts with my spring semester schedule, so just to make sure I had a good enough amount I made them to go along with what i would create during the semester in my spare time.

Anyway, mid-January was when I came back to school and things were looking great. Then I went home the first weekend of February to hang out with my family for Super Bowl weekend. I wasn’t upset or anything, but I was holding a lot of emotions inside. Come Monday when I woke up for chapel, something wasn’t right. I had upset stomach, felt dizzy beyond belief, and my wrists were in great pain, making it difficult to write or even to pick anything up properly. I skipped all three of my Monday classes and saw the nurse.

Some of her expertise and research on my part revealed to me I had Generalized Anxiety Disorder. This was not new to me at all, but it was certainly upsetting. See, I had anxiety in high school just months before I got saved. I bunch of people prayed for me and I was no longer anxious. Sure, like any human being I got nervous about things, but I wasn’t anxious.

Why would anxious return? I wondered.

Well, to say it plainly, my family life is not the best right now. Issues here, issues there. Yelling, cussing, disobedience, and selfishness. What happened to my loving, church-going, Jesus-worshipping family? When did the cigarettes get here? When did he get this drunk? When was dating an unbeliever okay? Such things worried me. I care for my family so much, it hurts sometimes.

I couldn’t hold it in anymore. The headaches, muscle aches, and other symptoms were only getting worse and I was having panic attacks multiple times a day. I had to tell someone….anyone.

So I told my RD and a trusted female Bible Department professor. They helped me by listening and giving counsel and advice. But I also had to (suggested by the professor) tell some trusted friends. That’s where it got a little tricky though. As much as I loved my female friends I had a hard time every time I tried to tell them. To bring the mood down any time we were together just to bring up what was going on was a constant thought in my mind. Also, I was becoming much more comfortable hanging out with and telling things to boys. Working with a whole group of them here on campus several times a week in the cafeteria this year might be why that is, but anyway I told two of my male co-workers/friends and a friend of mine whom I met the semester before and had had some pretty cool conversations with. I knew he would not go around blabbing to everyone if I told him my issues. All three of them have my trust 100%.

Their prayers along with those of the professor and my RD have been showing so much fruit in my life lately. Lots of Bible reading and prayer on my part has brought me closer to the Lord.

God also recently showed me that ever since I became a teenager things had not been easy for me (like I said, the anxiety back then and being sick in general) because I focused my thoughts on lustful things. God didn’t bring 10 years of hardship on me, I allowed it to happen. The way I viewed guys and the way I let myself become swayed in the mindset of lustful teenage girls from my high school affected my relationships and caused me to question my life for so long. I prayed for forgiveness and have seen God working in me this past week.

Would you all keep me in your prayers for continual recovery? God is so good and I can’t thank him enough for sending his son to die a death I deserved to die. I will try to be more honest with you all and will take any prayer requests you may have. Thank you for following my blog.

Kris Toni Salvador

The Passionate Pursuit

 

Are you moved with compassion…

when a person is sick? When they are helpless in their sickness and pain? What do you do when they say they are okay, but you know they are not?

I believe that the Lord provides healing for the sick. Sometimes it is the kind words and genuine care that another person displays that begins the process to wholeness.

Pray for them, yes. Care for them, of course. But more than anything, be there for them when they can’t fight anymore.

When you step back

Sometimes when you step back you see things more clearly then you did when you had your nose in it….kind of like a painting.

You may be going through a situation right now and it may look like the worst thing in the world, but trust me, in time you will be able to look back on it and if you ask God he will show you where he was in the whole thing.  You will see that his hand was in everything you went through, the good and the bad and realize that even when it seemed like he left you he never did.