Anna M. Aquino

A few weeks ago, I was talking to a good friend of mine and I was telling her of some of the issues that we are believing God to handle. I found myself continuing to say in the conversation that, “I didn’t know how we (meaning Dan and I) were going to do this.” After I got off the phone, I could feel something wasn’t right. As I began to pray, I felt the Holy Spirit say to me, “Stop confessing you don’t know how this is all going to come together. I know how it is, and you’re not going to do this. I am. So you do know how it’s all going to come together. I’m going to do it.” Since that encounter, I’ve been trying to guard my tongue more. I have to choose to stay in faith that God knows what He’s doing even if I’ve certainly stepped out of my comfort zone. Proverbs 18:21 (NIV) The tongue has the power of life and death, and those who love it will eat its fruit. You have to choose to speak life or God’s will about a situation even when it would be easy to focus on your fears....

My last blog I spoke of how excited we were to find our couch on Craigslist. While we’re still excited about that find when we got home we got a little surprise. There was dog hair in places of that couch; I’m not sure how it got there. Honestly I grew up around dogs and I’ve never seen a dog that can shed like some of the hair in that couch. I spent a lot of Sunday night scrubbing the couch down in the garage. Dan has continued to work on it and we’ll both get it eventually where we want it. Then we’ll move it to our living room. We were so excited that we’d found the couch we didn’t notice all the dog hair until after we got it home. As I was scrubbing on it Sunday I began to think how often we relate to the things God is bringing us to like this couch. We’re excited when a new door opens for us. We rejoice then when we get there we realize there may be some work involved to get it where you want it and we start to grumble. The Israelites were like this. They were headed to the land ...

Dan and I had been in need of a new couch for quite awhile. Our sofa had long since been broken. Dan continued to try to fix it at various times and it was getting worse and worse. While it still looked nice it really needed replaced. It had become a joke in the house and a bit embarrassing when anyone came over. About a year ago Dan went couch shopping. We found a sectional we fell in love with, but there was something about it. It just wasn’t the right time and neither of us felt a peace about doing it. I really didn’t want to pay retail for it. I wanted to find one on Craigslist, but the thing with that is Craigslist isn’t always the place to go if you’re particular about what you want. So the days went on. I didn’t look for a couch consistently but every so often I’d look for one. About a week ago I really started to look. I wasn’t about to get what I didn’t want, but if someone was selling what I wanted then we’d talk. Two days ago, I answered an add on the website....

My family and I have been watching a lot of ‘The Cake Boss’ recently. It’s a TLC reality show about Carlo’s Bakery in New Jersey. It appeals to both the creative and Italian side of our family. The first two seasons are on Netflix and it’s been a family show that we’ve been enjoying. There was one episode that we just watched I had to write about. It’s on the first season like the 4th or 5th episode. A bride, who seemed less than thrilled about getting married and there was a lot of stuff that seemed going on with her, decided to show up the day before her wedding and criticize her cake. Buddy who is the main character/decorator of the show left her alone for a couple of moments with the cake to figure out what he could do to fix the cake for her. Despite the fact he’d designed exactly what she and her mom had agreed upon. So she decided that she was going to make a point and took all sorts of colored icing to this beautiful ivory wedding cake. She iced various colors all over it so he...

I started talking about my refrigerator some weeks ago because while we’d been out of town the electricity had been left off to it, and when we returned it resembled a science fair project. I compared it to hidden sin in our lives and how we needed to look at our own lives and clean out the junk. Then, last week I told you about the container that I found that still smelled like my rotten refrigerator and how it can be frustrating to think you let go of something when really you didn’t. I had to suck it up and throw out the container. Today I bring you the final episode in my refrigerator tale. I buy milk once every two weeks. I didn’t realize when I bought my supply of milk that I had to wait to go grocery shopping for awhile because the refrigerator had lost a lot of his cool air and thus my milk would turn bad quicker. It came as a surprise to me when I reached into my refrigerator for the milk and what waited me was more foul smelling nastiness. Because the refrigerator ha...

If you read my blog a week ago you heard the story of how my refrigerator was off for the three weeks that we were out of town and I returned to an unplanned science fair experiment in my kitchen. I compared that to how sometimes there are things lurking in us that we need to deal with and if you don’t deal with it, the stuff in our lives can get worse and worse. Today, I have a continuing saga of the fridge episode. There had been a couple of containers that had left over’s in them while we were away and lets just say those left over’s were barley recognizable after three weeks of no refrigeration. As part of my cleaning out the fridge I threw out all the left over’s and cleaned out all the containers. I thought the containers would be fine to use again after they’d been washed and figured this attack of the smelly fridge was past me. So, after making dinner a week ago I reused one of those containers for left over’s. A few days ago I reheated some left over’s that had been in one of ...

When I was up in Canada I went to my in-laws’ church. It’s a denomination that is very different than what I’m used to. It’s not a church I would normally choose to attend. Every time that I enter into a church that’s like this I always try to keep myself open to hear from God. This particular Sunday the message was on Matthew 1:20 (NIV)But after he had considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary home as your wife, because what is conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. I began to think about this story as the message continued. Joseph had been making his own plans to put Mary away peacefully once he learned she was pregnant and obviously he knew he wasn’t that baby’s daddy. He started to make his own plans. If you read in the context, Joseph wasn’t going to raise this child. But God intervened and gave him a dream telling him basically that Mary was telling the truth and for him to continue to take M...

Exposing the spirit of Balaam is set to release in March of 2012, and not 2013!!! Wow so I've been prophesying that 2011 we'd be able to accomplish more than we could in 7, I just feel like the acceleration has been turned up a notch!!

Divine happenings at the border Last week I was traveling back into the US from the Windsor Canada border. The ordeal is always one filled with tense moments. My kids who are 9 and 4 were in the back seat. They were getting restless and starting to argue. We had nothing to hide; my husband though he’s been a citizen of the US for the last several years, always gets nervous when we cross. I looked in the mirror. I looked pretty rough having opted to wait and take a shower when we got to my mom and dad’s. The line was taking a really long time. So I start praying for wisdom and discernment on the border guards. To me they have one of the hardest jobs out there. They have a split second to make a decision that could affect the country and the people in it. That’s when I noticed the border guards walking through the line of cars and randomly stopping to check cars and question people. In all my years of traveling back and forth across this border I had never seen them do this before, and w...

As most of you know I just spent the last three weeks in the North. We had an awesome trip and it was hard for me to come home. Right before Dan left our house, due to an electrical error our fridge lost power. While I didn’t have much of anything in the refrigerator, at various time throughout our trip I kept mentally going down the list of things I knew that awaited me when we returned home. It was a really good thing that our flight returned mid day because as soon as we got home, I got to work. What awaited us could only be defined as a science fair project. It was nasty! Mold in places that should never have mold, and the smell lingered for a couple of days even after I bleached and bought baking soda. Many times we treat things that are going wrong in our life like my refrigerator. We know that there is a mess in certain areas. Sure, we may mentally give it some thought now and then. But we find ourselves procrastinating about it. Thinking we’ll just deal with it later. In realit...