By Misty Strieff Prine “If only we freely forgave with as much strength as we grip grudges.” – Rachel Wojo Grudges, they are nasty little things. What is a grudge anyway? A grudge is a persistent feeling of ill will or resentment resulting from a past insult or injury. Ahhhh. Yep, that would be pretty accurate. I want you to think about a grudge for a moment you may be carrying around. We all have at least one that we carry around or have carried around at some point in time.

By Misty Strieff Prine                 “I do not understand the mystery of grace – only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.” – Anne Lamott                 Grace is such a small word with such a HUGE meaning that we often tend to overthink and misunderstand. So, what is grace? The definition of grace is the free and unmerited favor of God, as manifested in the salvation of sinners and the bestowal of blessings. Grace is sometimes hard to gras

By Misty Strieff Prine “The closer we are to the shepherd, the safer we are from the wolves.” Jarrid Wilson             Have you ever wondered why you seem to have one bad thing happen after another? Maybe your life feels like a suspenseful movie that always seems to have a bad ending. Maybe you go to dodge a ball, and you raise up to get hit by ten of them. Bam! Can I ask you something? When is the last time you prayed? When is the last time you got real with God? I'm not ta

By Misty Strieff Prine This is probably one of the most profound statements I’ve read in a long time. Think about it for a second. Here you have a person dangling a fishing line. (The Instigator) This person usually has no place in the argument to begin with and just wants to stir things up. At the end of his fishing line is a lure. (The Culprit) It gets yanked back and forth and jumps up and down, all at the hand of the fisherman. Think of that lure as the person that spews

By Misty Strieff Prine “I don’t think outside of the box; I think of what I can do WITH the box.” – Unknown I have always been the type of person that looks for ways to do the most good with what the good Lord gave me verses thinking too far outside of the box that it overcomplicates and overwhelms me, ultimately making me not want to do it. We so often sell ourselves short on what we can achieve. We may not think we have much but, rest assured, God made us uniquely us and pe

By  Misty Strieff Prine How many times do we pray and pray for something and then, in God's time, we receive the answer that we've been praying for...but then something happens. We find ourselves not praying like we once did because we longed so much for that which He answered that we lost sight of the fact that prayer is something that we are supposed to do every day, not just when we need something or when our heart desires something. We must remember that prayer is a privi

By Misty Strieff Prine “May I live like the Lotus at ease in the muddy water.” – Unknown.             I have heard of a lotus flower but never knew the meaning...until I researched it today...and I thought it was fitting for this week’s message. A lotus flower is a stunningly beautiful flower that lives amid murky pond waters. Its beauty radiates to those who see it as it sits among the muddy, still pond water. It symbolizes three very important things: purity, beauty and reb

By Misty Strieff Prine “Should you ever find yourself the victim of other people’s bitterness, jealousy, lies and insecurities…don’t be mad. Remember things could be worse: You could be them.” Unknown. Have you ever found yourself saying, "I just can't understand why people treat people the way they do" and then you get the response "Well, not everyone was raised like you." It's such a sad situation to know that so many people have faced such hard lives. You are not born with

By Misty Strieff Prine “There comes a day when you realize turning the page is the best feeling in the world – because you realize there’s so much more to the book than the page you were stuck on.” – Unknown             Often, we get hung up on the past, too much drama, bad days, bad decisions and even the opinions of others around us, that might not be our own but consume us as if they were. We get stuck on a page that starts to repeat like a broken record. We repeat what we

By Misty Strieff Prine “May I never forget on my best day that I still need God as desperately as I did on my worst day.” – May ALL of us have this mindset!!                  This is something that I pray not one single one of us ever loses sight of. We need God JUST as much on our good days as we do on our bad ones. Why? Because we are nor will we EVER be exempt from our need for grace. No matter what good place or bad place we are in our lives, we need God every second of e

By Misty Strieff Prine                   “Today you could be standing next to someone who is trying their best not to fall apart. So, whatever you do today, do it with kindness in your heart.” – Unknown                 We all must remember that each and every one of us has a story, a story that most people do not know. We need to remember that we don’t know what battles we’ve had to fight behind closed doors or the emotional toll it has taken on our lives. We are all out here

By Misty Strieff Prine “Thank You, God, for putting periods on sentences that I wasn’t strong enough to end.” – Unknown I’m so thankful for the sentences that God put a period at the end of when I was FAR from strong enough to put one there myself. God knows when we are not strong enough to find our way out of situations we often find ourselves in the middle of. His word tells us in 2 Corinthians 12:9-10, “And He has said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is p

By: Misty Strieff Prine “Life is too short to wake up in the morning with regrets. So, love the people who treat you right and forget about the ones who don’t and believe that everything happens for a reason. If you get a chance, take it. If it changes your life, let it. Nobody said that it would be easy. They just promised it would be worth it.” – Unknown.                 Life. A four-letter word that encompasses so much as we live it out each day. Life's too short to dwell

By Misty Strieff Prine “Kindness is not an act; it’s a reflection of your soul” – Unknown             I found out that November 13 th  is World Kindness Day. Kindness is something that I truly believe comes from the soul. It comes deep from within you, weaved into your soul. Having a kind soul enables you to read a room and be able to see someone’s body language or facial expressions and see that they may stand in need of a random act of kindness. A simple smile, holding a do

By Misty Strieff Prine Don’t allow your emotions to be your decision maker. Stop and pray. Let God lead you.” – Unknown. Nothing will ruin your day, your testimony or your relationship with someone like letting your emotions get the best of you and letting them take control of a situation. One thing you can’t take back is words or actions spoken out of anger or haste or the emotional toll it takes on the other person(s). Now this doesn’t mean just a single situation, I’m talk

By Misty Strieff Prine “Just be a good person. Love who you can, help where you can, give what you can.” – Unknown I always try to live my “every day” life by this theory but with an added mindset of “if I could shine the light of Jesus so that others will 100% know I’m a believer and what He’s done for me”, I’m doing it!” You see, through being just a good, kind and humble human being, REGARDLESS of how you’re feeling or how bad your day has been, THAT alone is your testimon

By Misty Strieff Prine                 “God didn’t call you to be LIKED, He called you to be LIGHT. And LIGHT, by its very nature, makes darkness uncomfortable.” – Unknown                 I wrote this as one of my devotionals the other night on my Facebook Page, The Upward Way and the Lord REALLY laid it upon my heart to share this message through this platform as well as it reaches many who do not do social media. It moved me so much and I felt like it was meant to be shared

By Misty Strieff Prine                   “I wonder how many whales swallowed me up before I finally said, “God is God and I might as well...

By Misty Strieff Prine “Beneath the thoughts and feelings, you have worn on your shoulders for so long, there is the real you., who is...

By Misty Strieff Prine                    “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break...