sweet Septemer loving

Every Sunday on our walk from the train station to the church we attend, we walk by these very tall & pretty sunflowers, & every week I tell G I want to take a picture with them. But week in & week out it has never happened, for one reason or another. Until the first of September!

We were just leaving the church service & G was walking me to the Red Line, so I could get home & prepare to welcome Elimar & Julia who would be stopping by later that day! (A post about our day with them will be up soon!) During the service, the pastor preached on those lovely verses in Colossians 3:18-19 that say,

          Wives, submit yourselves to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord. 

          Husbands, love your wives and do not be harsh with them.

So after that message, I think G was feeling even more gracious & loving than he already is, and made sure we walked back to the station on the same street we came, so I could get my picture with the pretty sunflowers! (He's mine, just wanted to remind you.) So we get to the flowers, and I'm telling him to stand farther away and to angle his phone this way to get a better photo, while he laughingly reminds me if he goes any further he will get run over by traffic. 
Oops!

But as he's taking the picture this car comes next to us, and the woman in the car is yelling, "Beautiful! Just Beautiful!" over & over again! & I was so taken back because she sounded so much like my mom. But it wasn't my mom encouraging me and loving me like she often does, it was a stranger driving by showing me more love then she probably even realized. So my thoughts after this very unexpected blessing and display of love is this: show love to others! Just love people the way God made you to love people; it's that simple. I'm sure that lady didn't debate in her mind if she should tell me I'm beautiful, or think about what she could say. She just loved me in a tangible way by telling me I was beautiful. That was her natural way of loving me at that quick moment in time. 

God has really been impressing these profound words into my heart for a few weeks now: love God, love others. I know these words in my mind, but I think He's working on guiding them into my heart, so they can genuinely & naturally come forth through my actions and my words. 

Lord, help me to You and to love Others the way you have called & created me too. 

The photo below is the moment when the car drove by us so quickly & I could hear the woman talking to me. All I could do is laugh... & now I want to purposefully make someone smile! 

Self, let's not complicate things. Love God & love others.

Love, t Olive