News of some great new opportunities for us to keep in touch!

First, my Everyday Inspired blogcast. Spend a few minutes with me everyday and we’ll find God’s inspiration in our lives! I believe God is always inviting us to notice the blessings around us. When we do, marvelous things happen. Subscribe to the blogcast and listen live everyday, or download it later.

Second, come settle into The Shack with me and author Wm. Paul Young, July 8-9, 2011. Paul Young visits the Shrine of Our Lady of the Snows, and we’ve put together a wonderful, one-night retreat to reflect on his book. I’ll be hosting/facilitating the retreat. Register here.

So, whaddaya say? Let’s live everyday inspired!

When will you walk today?

The power a simple walk has to restore our spirit and clear our mind is remarkable.

Most days, the tasks and concerns on my mind weigh heavily, and sometimes seem impossible to complete or solve. The last thing I can do is take a walk — what a luxury!

When I do walk, though, the world changes. Somehow the rhythmic movement and fresh air work together to prioritize my tasks and calm my concerns. The world seems much lighter on the other side of a simple walk. So really, the best thing I can do is indulge in the luxury of a walk and let the blessings that come benefit everything else in my life.

Today, step outside and let a stroll work its magic on you!

Check out self-care for women for more great ideas (and great prizes!) for women who are tending to themselves this week!

What is one thing, person, or circumstance in your life for which you are grateful? Why? The “why” part is important. That’s where our hearts are lifted up and a bit of calm enters our hectic day.

So, to sum up in two easy steps:

• Be grateful.
• Know why.

A great way to take care of yourself.

Visit www.livingselfcare.wordpress.com for more great tips on self-care and to enter the challenge and win some great stuff! You’ll be grateful you did.

Please join my friends at Living Self-Care during this week for the Self-Care Challenge! All week, their blog is filled with wonderful ideas to help you take better care of yourself. Great prizes, too!

Remember, it’s not selfish to take care of yourself. In fact, as you are nourished, the more you have to give to others with quality time and attention to the people and tasks that are important to you.

More as we go!

Now, to introduce you to our fabulous featured challenge champions who’ll be providing inspiration and incentives (prizes) to cheer you along.  They are: pregnancy.org;  BabyKid Expo;Working Moms Against Guilt (WMAG); Postpartum Support International (PSI); Postpartum Progress; St.Louis Kid’s Magazine; MamasOnBedrest; Maria O’Rourke Communications and us.  Prizes include a $50 gift certificate to Amazon.com, a free massage at Massage Envy, a $25 gift certificate to  Shutterfly.com, and a deluxe gift basket filled with self-care goodies and a copy of Life Will Never Be the Same: The Real Mom’s Postpartum Survival Guide.

You don’t have to be a mom to enter, but you’ll need to subscribe to livingselfcare.com by 11:59 CT Friday May 6 to win our prizes.  This Friday April 29, we’ll reveal our blog’s new look with expanded features and resources .  Wednesday evening May 6 at 9pm ET at #MEChat we’ll host the self-care contest/challenge twitter party with more prizes and fun.

This Saturday April 30th, if you live in the Lou (St.Louis), Dr. Diane Sanford will be offering “speed therapy” at the BabyKid Expo at the St.Charles Convention Center.  Visit her in The Pamper Me Mom’s Zone for advice and self-care.  Babysitting will be provided.  See you there.

Prepare Your Heart for a Great Christmas is on sale now at a special 2-for-$20 price!  That’s over 20% off the regular price.  Order your copies today and get started on these timely, brief daily devotions when the holidays officially kick off on Thanksgiving Day.  The books are great hostess gifts, too!

Unique in the field of career search guides is Richard Nelson Bolles’ What Color is your Parachute?.  What sets this perennial favorite apart from the others is a section at the end entitled, “Finding Your Mission in Life.”  In it, Bolles takes the seeker beyond finding a great job to identifying one’s life’s work, or calling—the work one is uniquely created to do.  To the Christian job seeker in search of his or her mission, Dick Staub’s About You is the ideal companion piece.

Staub’s timely reflection on the true mission of believers—to be fully human—is a powerful call.  Given today’s celebrity culture of fame based not on accomplishment but on media exposure, Staub offeres a different perspective on success by inviting the reader to contemplate and cultivate his or her talents and skills.  These are a kind of blueprint for one’s work in the world.  By developing their talents and skills and putting them in God’s service, believers will fully express their humanity and in doing so, fully express the divine.

Staub clearly underscores humanity’s need for God’s redemptive grace.  Believers participate in this redemption through the power of Jesus’ resurrection and his model of a human life fully lived.  Staub’s message is empowering in its focus on the dynamic gifts of our human nature, and how they can be raised to even further heights in collaboration with God’s grace.  We are fallen, yes, and we are raised beyond our wildest imaginings when we open our lives to God’s dream for them.

Affirming, empowering, filled with inspiring quotes and practical applications, About You is a must-read for all Christian seekers, career or otherwise.

Fredrick Buechner from his book Telling Secrets:

Events happen under their own steam as random as rain, which means that God is present in them not as their cause but as the one who even in the hardest and most hair-raising of them offers us the possibility of that new life and healing which I believe is what salvation is. 

For instance, I cannot believe that a God of love and mercy in any sense willed my father’s suicide; it was my father himself who willed it as the only way available to him from a life that for various reasons he had come to find unbearable.  God did not will what happened the early November morning in Essex Falls, New Jersey, but I believe God was present in what happened.  I cannot guess how he was present with my father—I can guess much better how utterly abandoned by God my father must have felt if he thought about God at all—but my faith as well as my prayer is that he was and continues to be present with him in ways beyond my guessing. 

I can speak with some assurance only of how God was present in that dark time for me in the sense that I was not destroyed by it but came out of it with scars that I bear to this day, to be sure, but also somehow the wiser and stronger for it.  Who knows how I might have turned out if my father had lived, but through the loss of him all those years ago I think that I learned something about how even tragedy can be a means of grace that I might never have come to any other way. 

As I see it, in other words, God acts in history and in your and my brief histories not as the puppeteer who sets the scene and works the strings but rather as the great director who no matter what role fate casts us in conveys to us somehow from the wings, if we have our eyes, ears, hearts open and sometimes even if we don’t, how we can play those roles in a way to enrich and ennoble and hallow the whole vast drama of things including our own small but crucial parts in it.