Happy Sunday!

Good Morning Beautiful People!

Tune in at 10:00am for a live video broadcast from Destiny Family Center! Every service is archived on our website, just in case you cant make it for 10am. I just finished praying for you guys to have a super day!! So do that… have a super day and I will see you here tomorrow morning with another great blog!

A Friend Falls 50 Feet Rock-Climbing… And Lives!

Jon @ UVA Struggling to Recover

Good Morning Beloveds,

Just wanted to let you guys know that tomorrow morning, my very good friend is going tell his amazing story of survival at Destiny Family Center.

While Jon Higginbotham was rock climbing at Ravens Roost on the Blue Ridge Parkway a few months ago, his rope broke sending him crashing to the ground from a height of 50 feet! Amazingly, after more than a month in the hospital… Jon has not only lived through this near death experience, he and his family have grown in untold ways… untold, until now! Tomorrow morning, Jon and Wendy will share their story with us live and unedited… all the gory details and the amazing message of HOPE and GRACEthey found through this hardship. Don’t miss this historic service… believe me, everyone will benefit from it!

So, bring your tissues and make your way out to Destiny Family Center for this very special service! The DFC Praise & Worship Team, led by our very own Rob and Michelle Powers will get the celebration started @ 10:00am… so don’t be late if you can help it. Oh, and we broadcast LIVE for anyone who cant make it in person! Just go to our website @ www.destinyfamilycenter.com and follow the live broadcast link… it’s that easy!

Have a super Saturday… on this Thanksgiving weekend! We love you guys and we are praying for you again this morning! Cant wait for tomorrow!!

Wake up! It’s Black Friday!! O My Gosh!!!

Heaven & Me @ the Richmond 10K

Good morning frenzied shoppers…

My blog will be short this morning. For those of you who need more bloggage, please go back and read a few missed episodes. (I love comments)

Yesterday was so much fun… I have the best family! Ate way too much just like every Thanksgiving. But hey, its the only day of the year when we can EAT and EAT without feeling guilty. I am thankful for the 20,000 calories I consumed… they were all so very delicious!

I have a great shopping tip for all you black Friday shoppers…

It comes out of a speech I always give my daughter when she is going out. Since Heaven is so HYPER ACTIVE, from the time she was a toddler I’ve given her this speech several thousand times! Here’s the speech, “Heaven… pay attention to the way you are acting… and every once in a while ask yourself, “Heaven, am I being too hyper? Do I need to calm down?” Now that she is a teenager, we laugh as she recites that old speech back to me with absolute precision! Of course, these days I am using a different speech… the teenager version! LOL

So my speech to all you guys today… if you should find yourselves with a buggy brimming over… ”Blog Buddie, ask yourself, “Am I being too hyper? Have a lost control? Do I need to CALM DOWN?”

I guess what I’m saying is this. Please, don’t be HYPER like the rest of America and spend a bunch of money you don’t have. Yes, be kind and loving and express your gifts of love to family and friends. Just don’t go more overboard than you are capable of going. Be very careful not to get caught up in the heat of the moment… remember the speech and have a FANTASTIC FRIDAY!!

Thanksgiving: Giving of Thanks!

Happy Thanksgiving Blog Family,

I think it’s so amazing that America still has an entire 24 hours dedicated each year to the giving of thanks! Could you feel the excitement in the air this morning as you woke? All across our land, people will be saying THANK YOU all day long… or at least they should be. Throughout this day, we will say thank you to each other, thank you for our blessings, thank you to God, thank you for our health… and thanks for everything good in our lives. I bet we as collective Americans will say thank you 500,000,000 times today! I hope so!!!

Here’s my super duper thanksgiving advise for you guys today… say thank you more than any Thanksgiving in your history. Tell every person in your circle how special they are… let them know that even though they may get overlooked from time to time in cold world… that they are not overlooked by YOU! Warm up their hearts with your extravegant appreciation! Explain that you sincerely believe you would not be where you are today without their assistance. Look real hard, and you will find something worthy of thanks in every person. Then take the courage to open your mouth and SAY IT with PASSION! Everyone needs to hear thank you a whole lot more!

Look around your blessed life… even if you are going through a difficult time, as so many people are these days. Locate your blessings… every material and non-material blessing in your life. Trust me, there are THOUSANDS of them… look in any direction and they will start showing up.

This “THANKS-GIVING DAY” don’t get distracted away from your real mission. Don’t allow parades, or piles and piles of delicious foods, or football games, or hunting… or anything else keep you from EXPRESSING thanks!

As I close… I just want to say how thank FULL I am for my life! I have the BEST WIFE I could ever wish for! I have BEST son and daughter I could ever wish for! I have an amazing family… an amazing church… amazing friends… an amazing life calling… amazing health… an amazing future… and more than a MILLION other things to be thankful for today! The sun isn’t even up yet and I am OVERWHELMED with THANKS already! This is going to be my best thanksgiving ever… because I am going to inventory my blessings ALL DAY LONG!

The Balsamo’s love you guys and we are praying for you this morning! Until tomorrow, God bless you for all… and God bless the USA!!

A Humbling Confession

Happy Morning Friends,

Wow, what a difference a day can make! This is longer than usual… and VERY WORTH all 5 minutes of your time. Today, I have the creativity of a thousand artist! You want to know why?

Because, after posting yesterday… I prayed myself through to a PROFOUND VICTORY! And how glad I am for it! As mentioned in that post, we had a fire break out on our church property Sat night and it burned our neighbors storage building down. So I spent all day Monday gathering information to figure out whether we were “at fault” or not. I humbly and embarrassingly confess to you guys that my heart was absolutely in the wrong place. Having never met these neighbors put me in great fear that if the fire originated by vandals on our property, then we may be liable for damages… and the cause of unbarable hostility on our northern border. 

I had an appointment with these neighbors yesterday morning not too long after posting my blog. So after leaving you guys, I went to my office and PRAYED LIKE THERE WAS NO TOMORROW. This was good except my prayers were so selfish at first. I prayed, “Oh God, please let these people be kind and please work this out FOR US.” Within a minute of this gibberish, my heart convicted me and my paridigm shifted. I saw a vision of this couple innocently toiling their land, carefully manicuring this “blessing” they had worked so hard to beautify. I SAW THIS TRIAL FROM THE OTHER SIDE OF THE FENCE!

From this new vantage point, I started praying, “God, please give me the right kind of heart for these neighbors… help me to remove MYSELF from the center of this picture and show me how YOU feel about this fire.” I thought a minute about our church’s mission… about how our biggest desire is to BLESS our community. I thought about how fire had broken out on OUR property and harmed one of the precious families on our border. No kidding, I almost cried… this was such a moving experience for me.

So, they came into my office… and before they could say anything, I apologized in all sincerity and offered the strength of our entire church family to help them rebuild. They were an older couple, very kind natured. The wife began explaining how her husband had some kind of sickness that made it difficult for him to do physical labor… and that he started constucting this storage building 2 years ago… all by himself… a little bit at a time… and he had just finished it a few weeks ago.

As she was speaking, my eyes watered several times… the compassion that I received as I prayed for them prior to this meeting was reaching its crest… and I struggled so earnestly to maintain my composure. All I could think was, what if I had gone into that meeting self focused? What if I had not caught Gods heart just minutes prior to this divine moment? Something happened in my heart during that meeting that I will never forget!

As they were leaving, I asked if I could pray for them. While I prayed over this beautiful couple, my love for them just kept growing and growing. I prayed for God to heal the husbands body, restore their fortunes, bless their future, bless their children… and whatever else came to my mind. After the prayer, the wife said, “we have met you before… it was about 10 years ago at a home group bible study in Fishersville.” From memory, I said, “then you must know so and so” (people I met at that bible study who are now going to our church). She said, “of course we do… they are good friends of ours, in fact after they found out about the fire, they had us over to their house for dinner on Sunday night… to cheer us up!” And that explains why this church family was absent from bible college on Sunday night.

I have to wonder how much better life would be for us, if we could just see our trials from the other side of the fence? God forgive us for all the times we postured ourselves in defence when you we calling for us to posture in compassion. Selah.

Have a super thanksgiving… we love you guys and we are praying for you like crazy!!

Help! My Creativity is Hibernating…

Creativity Sleeping

Good Morning Everyone!

Wow, I woke up early today as usual… did my extravagant Bible reading routine… tried to have an extravagant prayer time… opened a blank blog page to start writing today’s exciting message… and realized that my creativity was still asleep! I mean, this is so scary… even with all the amazing things I read this morning and all the eventful things happening in my life these days… I am BLANK!

This only happens to me about once every few months… and I hate it! So, what now? Should I just come to grips with the fact that I may have to be like this until my creativity decides to come out of hibernation?

Why does our creativity just disappear on us like this… and in the moments we need to be most creative, we draw big fat blanks? Let’s look at my current creativity crises and see if we can work through this together. Yesterday was the suckiest day I’ve had for a while. All day long, one wierd circumstance after another… and Mondays are supposed to be my day of rest. Wait a minute… maybe this slump started before yesterday and I’m just now beginning to recognize it. On Sat night, apparently some vandals started a fire on our church property and burned a neighbors storage shed down… and that’s stressful! The only reason we have a church here in this community is to be a blessing… and when something like this happens it breaks my heart.

Church was ok on Sunday and Bible College was fair as well… I felt only slightly off my game. And then yesterday! Had a bad writing day… I think I ended up with minus 2 pages by nightfall! We went to dinner to pray over a church family’s business… and my prayer line felt like it had been DISCONNECTED! Ever been there?

Kent Henry (www.kenthenry.com) taught me years ago, that creativity killer number one is VOJ (the Voice of Judgement). When we feel like harmed our neighbors and they might not be thinking happy thoughts towards us, or we are carrying the guilt of some past sin, or we’re not happy with a few of our recent performances… these become the VOJ that chases our creativity into hibernation.

The happy part of this story is that we can rise above this at will! The Bible says in Romans 8:1, “There is therefore NO CONDEMNATION to those who are in Christ!” So right now, I SILENCE the VOJ over my life. I chose to spend the rest of my day soaring above the fear of people, self condemnation, and anything else that tries to sedate my creativity!

So, good morning CREATIVITY… RISE AND SHINE… get up sleepy head… its a beautiful day and you’re not going to spend it locked up in a dark room! (I know I’m so weird sometimes… but its fun… and it works!) I’m feeling better already!

Once I post this blog, I’m going to pray for all you guys to awaken your creativity just like I awoken mine. Have a super day… and don’t forget to be thankfull for 167 things before you go to bed tonight!

Goal: Say Thanks 1000 Times in 7 Days!

Good monday morning everyone!

I’m having laptop “issues” today, forcing me to post from my iphone. Hope it turns out ok!

Yesterday was another great Sunday… And I’m ready for another great week. Since it’s thanksgiving week… I’m cranking up my jubilation level and I’m going to celebrate my blessings all week! Want to join me?

Yeah, let’s try to live out the most THANKFUL week of our lives. I’m gonna be fanatical… giving thanks to God, my wife, my kids, my church, my pets, my family and friends…

All week I’m going to try to COUNT my blessings. I plan to tell everone I spend time with why I am thankful for them. I’m gonna be thankful for the weather, our nation, my life calling, my house and cars and things… Thankful for my health, my book being almost finished, our twelve Christmas trees and decorations… and for Emily making our house so beautiful!

Before the week is over… I will have said the words THANK YOU a thousand times! That’s the goal… 167 times a day for six more days, and I’m there. Won’t that be FUN?

1Thesselonians 5:18a (Amplified Version) “Thank [God] in everything [no matter what the circumstances may be, be thankful and give thanks]…“

Disinheritance: The Very Sad Story of Reuben

Happy Sunday World,

I woke up today at 4am, came into my family room, put on my earphones with some old Kent Henry Worship… and started my reading for today. I began in 1Chronicles… and when I hit chapter 5, my eyes were watering up at a sobering illumination.

I’m going to make this short and simple… so read with careful focus and you will be able to see what I saw. Ok… so, what I read in 2 Chronicles 5 simply explains something that happened in Genesis 35:22. In the background of this story, we have the legendary patriarchs of Israel… Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. One night, in an all night prayer session, God changes Jacobs name to “Israel” and he becomes the start up of the Israelite nation. 

Jacob (Israel) had twelve sons… and these twelve sons were to become the historical “twelve tribes of Israel.” So the list of the 12 tribes should read as follows: Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Issachar, Zebulun, Dan, Joseph, Benjamin, Naphtali, Gad, and Asher. 

Reuben would have been listed FIRST because he was Israel’s oldest son! Reuben and his descednants were destined unprecedented renown… and it would have been so, except for what took place in Genesis 35:22. 

At the end of Jacobs life, he gathered his 12 sons so that he could give each one of them a prophecy and a blessing. Each of the 12 would receive their “blessing” except for Reuben. Let’s hear the reason straight from Jacob himself, “Come and listen, you sons of Jacob; listen to Israel, your father… Reuben, you are my oldest son, the child of my vigorous youth. You are first on the list of RANK and HONOR. But you are as unruly as the waves of the sea, and you will be first no longer. For you slept with one of my wives; you dishonored me in my own bed.” (Genesis 49:2-4NLT)

As history plays out, Reuben was taken off the list… and Joseph also bowed out, so his two sons Ephraim and Manasseh could fill these two openings. 

Don’t every forget the message of Reuben! If this man were a preacher in today’s world, he would be speaking one message: Don’t forfeit your inheritance! Not for anyone or anything… its not worth it! Guard your heart and watch your steps… for you are all destined for greatness, as long as you don’t fall prey to the spirit of “disinheritance!”    

Esau was disinherited over a bowl of stew… Judas Iscariot, over thirty pieces of silver! What’s your price? Everyone has a price. And hey, if you’ve already done a few stupid things with your life… repent and move on… we are living in the age of grace and God is merciful. I can’t promise you that every rippling effect will fade away… but I can assure you that God is a REDEEMER. He can help you make up for lost time and recover lost dreams!

I hope to see you guys today at www.DestinyFamilyCenter.com either in person or online… I’m praying for you often! Have a super Sunday!

Chocolate is an Affordable Luxury!

 

Cocoa Mill, Lexington VA

Happy Saturday Friends!

Since it’s the weekend, I thought to give you something “light” and relaxing! Last night… Emily, Heaven, and I went to the most amazing chocolate store! It’s called the “Cocoa Mill Chocolate Company” and their website is http://www.cocoamill.com just in case you decide to bless yourself or someone you love! They are located in Lexington, VA.

The owners have been coming to our church for several months and they invited us out for a tour of their operation… had to be one of the funnest experiences ever! We got to look at the molten chocolate basins (dark and light chocolates spinning around in a glorious flow)… they showed us how truffles are made… we held a TEN pound chocolate bar… got to see how the finished products are packaged and shipped… and we sampled and sampled until we almost thought we had gone to heaven!

Cocoa Mill, Lexington VA

No wonder these guys are world renouned for their amazing chocolates! Their kitchen was so CLEAN… their chocolates were the best we have ever tasted! And trust me, I know chocolate! Since Emily and I have traveled so much over the years, we have tasted chocolates from many countries… even Switzerland and Germany. And Cocoa Mill Chocolate Company stands above them all! 

When I called to schedule our visit (1-540-464-8400), I loved their slogan… “Chocolate Will Make Any Day Better!” Yeah, I know this isn’t as spiritual as you may have hoped for today… but our experience last night was! The owners are Christians… and we three Balsamo’s smiled from ear to ear over the entire trip home! Coree, you missed it!

Even though the website is a little out of date… and world class chocolate is a little pricey… all my friends should indulge yourselves with a visit to Cocoa Mill sometime before you die! If you live far away in some distant land… place an order online! They do amazing customized chocolates for company gifts… they even make chocolate boxes to package the chocolate treats!

That’s it for today… I will see some of you at church in the morning… and others I will see on the live video broadcast (www.destinyfamilycenter.com)… have a SUPER SATURDAY!!

Fantastic Friday!

Good morning world!

This is it… the final work day in our PERFECT week! Finish strong today… do something FUN and restful tomorrow… and GO TO CHURCH somewhere on Sunday to launch your next perfect week! Even if you have to work on Saturday and Sunday… make sure you do something CRAZY FUN on Saturday to de-stress yourself from anything that may try to carry over into next week. Tomorrow night when you go to bed, this week is OVER! So, then all day Sunday… celebrate like a crazy person over all the blessings you’ve received this week. (Don’t forget to memorialize the blessings of your week!) Then spend the rest of the time, advancing God thanks for the next amazing week of your ever improving super amazing life! 

I read something really powerful in 1Kings today… chapter 21 was talking about King Ahab, calling him the most evil King in the history of Israel! Verse 25 says this… “No one else so completely sold himself to do what was evil in the Lords sight as did Ahab, for his wife, Jezebel, influenced him.”

Notice that HE SOLD HIMSELF COMPLETELY… and that he didn’t do this on his own. Ahab was INFLUENCED by someone close! In chapter 17, we see that Ahab started to worship other gods on the day that he married his wife. This is because Jezebel was a worshiper of Baal and she INFLUENCED her husband to do the same.

The message for us in this very sad biography is this: Be very careful selecting the people you enter into covenant with. Be loving and kind to everyone everywhere… but when it comes to your bubble… BE SELECTIVE! Surround yourself with people who will INFLUENCE you positively… and don’t ever settle for less. If you want to be wise, walk with wise people. If you want to be compassionate, spend time with compassionate people. If you want to be influential and do something big with your life, spend as much time as you can with influential people. And beware… because if you spend time with prideful people, you will most certainly become prideful… if you spend time with perverts, you will become perverted… if you spend time with dead beats, you will become dead beat. 

Influence happens slowly… many times, too slowly for most of us to recognize. This is why we must be intentional about WHO we bring into our circle of influence. I have been so blessed over the first third of my life… having spent time with so many beautiful people!

I pray that this blog is the kind of influence that leads each of you into untold greatness. Happy day my Friends!