For some of us, this day brings a slow ache. The fragile edges of that lace doily your kid gave you can feel like shards of glass scraping across your tired heart. Every grocery store stocked with roses near the checkout, every card boutique with aisles upon aisles of cards and heart-shaped boxes of candy, every commercial for romantic dinner ...
Each of us have causes that make us come alive, things that move us and make us eager and burdened with a word to share. God has given us passions, people, and things that we want to fight for. When the Spirit convicts our hearts and the words are on our tongues, our bodies just want to move and act, help and protect, love and embrace for Christ ...
We sit together just enjoying the stillness. We refer to the place we’re in now as the sweet spot. Peace lives here, and this moment is not lost on us. It wasn’t always this way in our marriage. We’ve come full circle, and the sum of the journey would not be complete without each part. We met in high school, dated briefly, broke up, and then ...
The one who walks with the wise will become wise . . . Proverbs 13:20a I sat in the church pew with my friends — Michelle on my right and Lyla on my left — to sing the songs, eat the bread, drink the wine, pray the prayers, and listen to the message. I wanted to reach out and grab my friends’ hands, but I didn’t. Fear of freaking out my friends ...
“Does your grandmother still live there?” eager learners ask me as I unfold a personal family story related to the history of American housing discrimination and redlining. In short, from 1933 to 1968, while increasing America’s housing stock, local, state, and federal housing policies mandated racial segregation. The government’s efforts were ...
The word came up in two conversations on the same day. Whenever that kind of repetition happens, I try to stop and pay attention. The first was a conversation with a colleague. She’d had an uncomfortable interaction with a client who was dissatisfied. The nature of the dissatisfaction was minor, and it wasn’t the result of anything she did wrong. ...
When motherhood and I were just getting acquainted, I thought I could approach her like taking a test. If I prepared well and made few mistakes, I could ace this thing and therefore send my children into the wild blue yonder with nary a carry-on size bit of baggage. I assumed good parenting would fit nicely within my hard work ethic and efforts, ...
Well, it's February. January has come and gone. Nobody has asked about your one word in weeks, it's possible to find a parking spot at the gym, and on the rare occasion you are required to write the date, your hand automatically draws a nine. We are fully into the new year now, and yet some of us are still living in the past. We're not even ...
I've felt for a while that I had drifted away from the intimacy I once shared with the Lord. I'm still steadily involved with good and godly things, and I haven't gone off the deep end. But I began to take inventory of how I had been spending my time and energy, and I wasn't too surprised. In this age of streaming everything, I admitted to ...
I would have thrown my head back in nervous laughter if you had told me a year ago what I’d be doing today. It all started last spring when God led me to have a complete hysterectomy. I knew He was using it to heal me from almost thirty years of suffering. He kept whispering to my heart that this surgery was my path to freedom. He was calling me ...
