Amazing Grace How Sweet the Sound

We all need a little encouragement from time to time, some of us more than others. I usually like to be the one to encourage others, but yesterday I had a small shock that left me feeling quite down. I have a rare disease, systemic mastocytosis, that requires me to drink a liquid medicine 4 times a day or I can't eat. For the last year and a half I've been down to only two foods (that didn't make me sick or give me rash) and they've given me trouble the last month. Nausea is not my friend. But when I found they had raised my medication cost by 82% and I'll be paying over $800 a month for just this one generic med for most of the year I went into shock! I knew I needed to turn this burden over to God. I went back and forth between worry and prayer. Today I was comforted by 1 Corinthians 12:9, "My grace is sufficient for you, for my strength is made perfect in weakness." So here's the card I made maybe for myself, but eventually to give someone else. I was inspired by the sketch at Freshly Made Sketches and the colors at Color Throwdown this week.

 

Challenge Up Your Life today encouraged us to make our own backgrounds so I embossed the back panel with Cuttlebug's older Allegro embossing folder. I stamped the Honey panel with Saffron ink using Our Daily Bread Design's "Amazing Grace Hymn" stamp and stamped and cut the "Amazing," "Grace," and "how sweet the sound" with PTI's "Inspired - Grace" stamp and die set. The inside used the same stamp set and blue washii tape like the front.

I also wanted a sympathy card for a dear friend who just lost her husband to cancer. We were reading teachers in the same program and district who also loved scrapbooking. Before her teaching days she worked for the National Park Service, so I chose the trees and a Cricut Flower Market cut of a Maidenhair fern like I'd seen in Zion National Park.

I decided to make more of these with a slightly varied design using the Sizzix embossed birch trees and the Sea Glass tree pattern from the CTMH "Oh, Deer" papers.

I'm also sharing this card with Word Art Wednesday #264-265.

Thank you for visiting. When you encounter your need for encouragement, I hope you'll also find strength in the knowledge that God's grace IS sufficient to see us through any trial.