Highlight Reels Life Matters - December 2024 Blog By Casandra Orsburn I know it has been quite some time since I’ve written to you. To be honest, this year has been a difficult one. In fact, if you had asked me if I was ready for Christmas, I would have told you I was just ready for 2024 to be over. Next year has to be better, right? Maybe you’ve had a year like this. Perhaps you’ve suffered a loss that has changed the joy of the holiday season into a grief so real and present you ache. Perhaps you are a parent with older or grown children and you are remembering all of the excitement and chaos that your house used to exude this time of year and now it feels strangely empty and silent. Perhaps you can’t quite put your finger on it, but this year just feels a lot less “Christmas-y” than it should. I could go over the list of hard things we’ve endured this year. I can identify with each of those listed above and then some. But yesterday one of my daughters called and asked me to send her a recent picture of me and my husband for her son’s baby book. As I scrolled through my phone’s photo album, I was caught off guard by the amount of great photos and wonderful memories that we had created over this last year. The trips we had taken, the family we had visited, and the friends that we had spent weekends with. How had I forgotten? And suddenly and powerfully, the Holy Spirit changed my perspective. Often we are taught not to look and judge others by their social media posts. Those are their highlight reels, their best and photo-shopped moments, and we aren’t seeing the full picture. But just as easily the enemy can blind us so that we no longer see our joyful memories but are only living in the challenging ones. We rush to get to the next, restless to get out of the now, and resentful of the then. But if you looked back, really looked, what would you see? The children of Israel were commanded to do something really important. In places where God had done something powerful, they built an altar or a monument. When they crossed the Red Sea, when Abraham was sent a replacement sacrifice for Isaac, when Joshua led the people across the Jordan River into the Promised Land, and many others are all examples of the people of God remembering His goodness and faithfulness. When future generations would see the rocks piled up giving long-standing testimony, they would remember the God they serve. What a great reminder for us when times begin to look bleak, to review our highlight reels, to remind ourselves of His faithfulness through every season. I was remembering the old poem, Footprints in the Sand. Many of us had these in our homes as children. I remember we had one in the bathroom of all places! But the message is so beautiful. A person is looking over their life and as they see the moments go by, they see that there are two footprints walking side-by-side in the sand. This was Jesus walking beside them. But then they notice that in the very difficult moments of life, the most painful and confusing, there was only one set of footprints. Confused and hurt, they asked the Lord, “Why, when I needed you most, would you leave me?” And the Lord replied, “My precious child, I love you and will never leave you. Never, ever, during your trials and suffering. When you saw only one set of footprints, it was then that I carried you.” I know that the Christmas season can be a difficult time for many people. The year is ending and life may not look like we thought it was going to. I want to encourage you this holiday to take a look back over the year. Review your highlight reels. Thumb through those old pictures. Look back at those piles of stones. God has always been right there with you. He promised to never leave nor forsake you. And when it feels like you can’t go on, it is in those moments that He will carry you. I pray that this Christmas, while it may not be perfect, can be filled with the knowledge that Jesus loves you so very much that He would leave his heavenly home to come to ours. Know that he gave up his position in heaven to come and experience human life with us. He knows your pain. He knows your grief. And he came to take it and give you hope if you’ll let him. Be encouraged this Christmas. God is good. He is faithful. And he loves you so very much. And so do I. Merry Christmas!

Pursuing Life Life Matters Blog - June 2024 By Casandra Orsburn As I recover from the busyness of May and all the end-of-the-year activities, I settle into the more relaxed, heaven-sent rest that is summer. I have just completed my second year of teaching at Runnels Classical Christian Academy, and the anticipation for the three months of unstructured time is absolute bliss. I have often wondered why I did not pursue this career path so much sooner. It certainly makes all of the planning and early mornings and late nights throughout the school year worth it! Now if you’re not in education, please don’t write this off. I promise this blog is not to rub my extended vacation in anyone’s face. This season has taught me a very important lesson, as God loves to do within my struggles. As I wrapped up two graduations this May, the unfilled calendar for the next three months had been taunting me with the question: what will we do next? My initial response is to book as many vacations as we can afford, take as many day trips as possible, clean out every square inch of the overlooked nooks and crannies of my home, and try to fit in some “me-time”. And on the surface that looks and sounds great. I mean, we only have so much time, right? We need to make the most of it. But as often happens, I felt a check in my spirit as I opened my calendar and rushed to make all the reservations. Over the school year, I had begun to feel like there were not enough hours in the day. Instead of a joy to begin each morning, I found myself wanting to hit the snooze button. I told myself that this was my daughter’s senior year and I should be enjoying these moments and taking it all in. But even as we were blessed to go on an amazing trip this Spring Break, I felt as though my heart was unable to fully enjoy and appreciate the little things. There was a heaviness, a burden in my spirit, and even though I knew that I needed to be spending time with the Lord, my first response was to look at it as one more thing to add to my to-do list. If I’m being honest, as I always try to be, I felt very distant from God. That is a hard confession to make when you work at a Christian school and teach students about the Lord. But we’ve had a difficult year for our family. We had a lot of financial challenges hit at once. We had some medical scares. There were some questions about what our next year might look like and we had to place a lot of things in the Lord’s hands while trying to make the best decisions we could. And while I knew that God was good, I still felt as though I couldn’t rest at his feet. There was too much to do. I had read The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis in one of my classes at the end of the year. It was obvious that one of the enemy’s greatest tools in his arsenal for spiritual warfare, was the weapon of distraction. I knew that that is exactly what I had been dealing with. I had been distracted by the busyness of life. I was wrapped up in the things I wanted to control and many things I knew I couldn’t, but was worrying over them. And here I was, about to start a season of rest and instead, I was looking at piling up my calendar with more and more distractions and things to do. I forced myself to pause. I knew that I couldn’t go into another school year without the presence of the Lord walking with me. I didn’t want to go another week. I needed him. Where had he gone? I began to make myself search the scriptures again in the morning, a routine that used to bring me such joy and now felt almost like a chore. Why had I let myself get so far? I pushed through it, and little by little, the light began to break through once again. I felt the numbness give way to life. I began to feel warmth and hope and joy. I am embarrassed to admit that this pattern of closeness and distance with me and God has continued for more years than I’d care to count. It seems that it gets harder to bring myself back to a position of seeking him each time I allow the distance to grow. When we think of the prodigal son, we imagine the child who walked away for the first time. What I have discovered is that God is just as excited when the child comes home for the 50th time as he is for the first. His arms are always wide open. And what a relief it is to rest in them. So, I want to encourage you, if you’ve experienced the numbness that comes from a season of just getting through it, if you’ve been trying to hold everything together and you’ve been trying to walk this thing out, only to realize that you aren’t anywhere close to where you need to be, then come back. Come back to the Father that loves you and wants nothing more than to have a relationship with you. The things you are carrying are often not things that he has given you. Are you trying to do it all yourself? Have you told yourself that if you just do these few more things, if you can just add these couple of extra steps to your routine, then you’ll be happy, then your life will be more on track? The enemy wants to keep you busy, tired, stressed. He wants to keep you reminded of your shortcomings. But Jesus had an answer for that. “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light” (Matt. 11:28-30). His arms are open. I promise that as you seek him, place him first, he will help you to prioritize everything else. You don’t need to carry it all yourself. Pursue life. He is Life. Life abundant. You Are Loved!

Magnify the Lord Life Matters - April 2024 Blog By Casandra Orsburn I had recently done a Bible study in which two questions were posed. The first was how do you see God? The second, was how do you see yourself (in light of what scripture says about you)? I quickly noticed that I had no trouble confessing that I believed that God was good. I could confidently say that I agree that He is Savior, Comforter, Counselor, Healer, Father, Shepherd… all the names attributed to Him in the Bible. However, when it came to me also believing that I am holy, a saint, righteous, set apart, etc., I had a much harder time confessing and confidently declaring those things about myself. I was frustrated that I could believe what God said about himself, but I couldn’t quite commit to believing the things he said about me. I was discussing my frustration at this with a coworker. I was fully expecting them to give me the affirmation that I was a good person who loved the Lord and that I just needed to see myself the way God sees me. But they didn’t. What they actually said, and I’m going to paraphrase here, was: “When comparing God and yourself, you’re better off setting your focus on God.” Light bulb moment! This gave me such a pause that I began doing some soul-searching. To my dismay, I quickly realized how much time I had been spending in my conversations with the Lord talking about me. Our conversations were so one-sided. No wonder I had a hard time believing I was worthy to be called a child of God. All of my prayer time was spent reminding God of what a horrible sinner I was and begging him to fix me. This had to change! As I was working through this, one phrase kept occurring in my spirit. It was as though the Holy Spirit kept whispering, “Magnify the Lord”. Was that the key? Instead of focusing so much on myself and my shortcomings, did I just need to focus on Him? You see, there are two kinds of magnification. You can use a magnifying glass or a microscope. In these scenarios, you are taking something very small and placing magnification over it and making it look much larger than it actually is. We do this in our lives all the time. We do this with problems, with situations, with people. This is exactly what I was doing when I kept bringing all of my shortcomings to the Lord. When I was showing God all of my sinfulness as if he didn’t already know, I was magnifying myself, something small, and making it so much bigger than it had any right to be. Then there is the other kind of magnification. The kind in which we use a telescope. When we use a telescope we view something that is very large and begin to appreciate the magnitude and the beauty of that object. When David says in Psalms, “I will magnify God with thanksgiving,” he doesn’t mean, “I will make a small God look bigger than he is.” He means, “I will make a big God begin to look as big as he really is.” David is saying we are going to place God first. We are going to focus on the beauty, the majesty, of our very big God. I knew I needed to make this change. I had spent far too much time putting myself under the microscope and telling God to look at me when all along I should have been holding up the telescope to see just how big and glorious our God really is. The important thing to note is that when we focus on him, we aren’t using a telescope to see some cold, foreign object that’s so far away we can’t ever imagine reaching it. We are magnifying all the beautiful facets of a massive God, creator of the entire universe. Nothing exists that he did not speak into existence. The sun and stars, the gravitational pull, the oceans, the creatures, time itself. He is big and he is mighty, but he is also tender and intimate. His love for you and me is so great. He looks at us and he calls us his children. Our relationship with him is so important, he didn’t want us to look at him as some foreign being who was out of reach. No, he said “I am going to put my Spirit in them. They will know me, and I will be their God.” As I was praying about this I was reminded of the trip I was recently so blessed to take. I was able to chaperone my daughter, Tori’s, senior trip to Europe this past Spring Break. It was a once-in-a-lifetime trip and I will never forget it. We saw so many beautiful buildings and works of art that, up until then, had only been in books or movies. But I remember walking into this chapel, and chapel sounds like such a small word because it was massive. The ceilings were so tall and they were domed with these beautiful frescoes. The marble floors stretched out, inlaid with incredible mosaics. The walls were so ornate with gold and beautiful woodwork that reflected the warm glow of the lights. There were marble statues that were so lifelike you could feel every emotion carved into them. Stained glass windows towered over us. And the sound… the sound echoed so powerfully through the space. And I remember having tears in my eyes as I looked around because everything was so big and so beautiful. My heart felt like it couldn’t hold it all in. I passed one of the other parents who had the same look on their face as I did. I whispered, “I feel so small.” They smiled at me with this knowing smile and said, “I think that’s the point.” We are so small. And God is so big. We are not enough. We are not God and that is ok because He is enough. And in Him, we are fully accepted, fully loved, fully seen. In our relationship with the Lord, we just need to focus more on him- more on his promises, his goodness, his might and power, his love, and his sacrifice. And less on us. Let’s put away the microscopes, pull out the telescopes, and behold our mighty God. May we magnify the Lord.

February Blog

Stop the Scroll Life Matters Blog - January 2024 By Casandra Orsburn Do you have a New Year’s resolution that you’re hoping to tackle this year? I think the older we get the less likely we are to make them. We know the outcome. It’s almost as if the cosmic universe replies, “I see your bet. I’ll raise you ten extra pounds and a new credit card bill” when all you wanted was to lose some of the weight you wanted to lose last year and tackle a sliver of debt you swore you wouldn’t accumulate again this Christmas. The cycle continues. While it may not exactly be my New Year’s resolution, the Holy Spirit has been loud and clear in His insistence that I get honest about the amount of time I spend in front of a screen. Somewhat ironic as I type this on my computer, but the reality is more and more of us have become more interested in our phones than the people in front and around us. Is that not true? For the longest time, I swore off many social media platforms, except for my Facebook. I of course justified that by being able to keep up with all my children, friends, and relatives in other places. I’ve watched as family members and friends became obsessed with our electronic devices. My kids would lay in their beds or on the couch for hours with their little fingers poised above the screen just swiping from one video to the next. I’d hear chuckles coming from the bathroom for far longer than anyone should spend in that particular room of the house, knowing that they had been sucked into the black hole of a screen. I’d watch at restaurants as our family would sit down to eat and in the hands of each of us, perched our cellular device, obviously far more engaging than one another. Why this fascination? As my resolve to steer clear of other social media apps crumbled, I found that I too had trouble resisting the lure of the screen. I began to struggle with my prayer and devotion time in the morning. When I woke up, the first thing I would do was reach for my phone and do a quick Facebook scroll. Then, instead of letting my Bible time sit with me for a minute and allowing my mind to be still, I just checked the box complete and used the rest of my morning quiet time to check emails and friend’s posts. Throughout the day and into the evening, any moment that wasn’t filled with immediate obligation became an opportunity for me to reach for my phone. It didn’t take long for me to recognize that this was a problem. What exactly is the problem? You’re not hurting anyone. Everyone is doing it. Some videos may be educational. Most people now admit that social media is where they get their news. So why did I feel like this was becoming less of an innocent, or even beneficial activity to pass the time, and more of a life-stealing addiction? I did some research on the negative effects of scrolling. Not surprisingly, all of it is programmed to make you want to watch more and more. You sit down for ten minutes of idle screen time and find yourself glued to the chair for two hours when you finally look up and realize that you’ve spent time in the lives of others that you’ll never get back to yourself. Each new video or photo gives us a fresh shot of dopamine, making us eager for the next. Lucky for us, it’s just one more swipe away. Studies show that excessive use of social media and other screens can lead to decreased attention spans, disrupted sleep, increased loneliness and depression, and the development of unhealthy habits like procrastination and avoidance of real-world tasks. I hear those words and my immediate reaction is a palm to the forehead as I shout, “Duh!”. But I think it’s important to realize that it’s not an innocent addiction. It is not only stealing your peace, but also your purpose. I’ll say that again. The enemy is behind the addiction to “the scroll” and he wants nothing more than to distract you from meeting the needs of the people around you. He wants to keep your mind so busy and loud that you can no longer hear the voice of the Lord. Even worse, you find yourself in a state of depression, lacking the motivation to make the changes to get yourself back to closeness with God even though you know it’s the one thing that will “fix” you. That sly devil is at it again! If you don’t have a problem with your screen time, this may seem extreme. But likely, even if you don’t have a phone addiction, you’ve seen the effects on someone you know and you can attest to this. It is vital that we address this issue. We must put some safety measures in place to protect our call from the one who comes to steal, kill, and destroy. I’ve started leaving my phone on the charger when I wake up. I have my devotion time in another room and look at a clock instead of my phone to keep track of time. I make time to pray and listen. I’ve started asking God to help me with my distractedness. I’ve begun to limit the screen time for my kids as well. They don’t have their phones at school, which is a blessing, but after school, we have a cut-off time and the phones go to another room to charge so they aren’t disrupted by the notifications, tempting them to start looking through their phones again. It’s made such a difference! There are limits you can set on apps; you can delete them all together. Whatever you have to do to protect your peace, your heart, your purpose. Stopping the scroll is a resolution that has rapid results! This is a little different from some of my other posts but it’s something that I think is so important. God wants us to be tuned in to what He’s doing. He uses His people to effect change in this world and this world desperately needs Jesus. But we can’t be the hands and feet of Jesus if our hands are constantly holding our phones. We can’t see the needs of those around us if our eyes are always trained on a screen and not the Lord. Don’t give the enemy a foothold. Make a change today and share this with someone else who needs to hear it. Stop the scroll! We have an abundant life waiting for us when we look up to see it.

Enjoy the Manna Life Matters - November 2023 Blog By Casandra Orsburn Teaching jr. high students has really caused some personal reflection. If you have raised an early teen, or perhaps simply had the opportunity to casually ask them how their day was, you notice that they easily have something to complain about. Now this might seem a little stereotypical, but I think most of us can agree that seldom are our teenagers grateful about the blessings that are so obvious to us older and wiser folks… wink, wink. I don’t say this to make fun of my students (and children for that matter), but it got me thinking about the way in which we think of the things that God has blessed us with. Too quickly I’ve recognized, we start to look at our blessings and ask God to tweak them. “Yes, Lord, I know I asked for this large house, but couldn’t you do something about the electricity bill and maybe a little help with a maid service?” “Yes, I know I prayed for this job but could you do something about the hours and that awful coworker?” We complain about our circumstances to God and miraculously He hears our prayers. However, too often do we receive that blessing and are off to complain about the next thing. How exasperating we must be! The children of Israel were no different. No sooner had the chains of slavery been broken and they watched the Egyptians buried at sea, did they begin to complain about dinner. Even after receiving manna from heaven each morning, they quickly began to want something else. Eventually their continual complaining and dissatisfaction with the Lord’s provision would cause an entire generation to miss out on the blessing of the Promised Land. All because they couldn’t appreciate what the Lord had given them in that season. I felt the Lord showing me this afternoon that He really loves to bless his children. Like, really loves to bless us. But like us, no one enjoys giving in to a spoiled child who is going to immediately become dissatisfied with a new toy as soon as they see what their neighbor is playing with. If we are continually looking at our lack, then we cannot appreciate our provision. Let’s face it, God has been so much better to us than we deserve. If we just look at the gift of salvation and unmerited grace and favor, we have no right or reason to ask for more. But the crazy thing is, he wants us to. He wants us to ask for good gifts and for blessing. He wants us to ask for protection and wisdom. But he wants us to thank him first. We should thank him for allowing us to live this in a country in which we can gather and worship freely. We should thank him for his Word that was given so that we might have the opportunity to seek him. We should thank him for his presence. We should thank him for his promise. We have many, many reasons to thank him! This Thanksgiving I want to encourage you to enjoy your blessings. Might you want more? Sure. But could we just look up to our Father who art in heaven, and say, “Thank you… for everything”. Maybe then as we begin to enjoy the things we have, will our hearts be ready to receive the things he still wants to give us. Enjoy the manna. It is a good gift.

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