Is Go Into All the World Outdated?
I remember the cool feel of the wooden pew in the church of my childhood, that little hop I needed to get my seat onto it, the shimmied push to the back until finally ruffles surrounded m...
Read ArticleTopic
Identity & Belonging
69 articles gathered under this theme.
How Can We See Clearly In A Blurred World?
My husband and I hurried through the airport , to make our connection while dodging and squeezing between other fliers and their bags. It was the last leg of our flight back home and we m...
Read Article
Who Gets the Credit?
You’ve worked hard, poured yourself into the project, sacrificed and finally it’s done. And it turned out good. No, even better than expected. In fact, you feel down right euphoric about...
Read Article
The Measure of My Days
I hold one end of the measuring tape while my husband walks backward. The metal unwinds until he reaches the spot he wants marked. His thumb stops at the line and he bends the tape toward...
Read Article
What’s Good About That Put Down?
I had a little unintended smackdown. Probably well deserved, but still…it kinda stung. And the entire time, I chided myself on one thing. I knew perfectly well that it shouldn’t have both...
Read Article
Will There Be Peace in the New Year?
When we lived in Italy, going to the American Embassy was always kind of a big deal. We needed to have papers and identification in order. We prepared. Despite our home country’s flag and...
Read Article
From Uprooting to Belonging: How the Birth of a Savior Changes Everything.
An angel appeared. A virgin conceived. Thousands of miles away a ruler declared a census. Like a drum roll of Sovereign timing and unstoppable happenings, the wheels of prophecy turned. W...
Read Article
Can God Change Your Character?
“The temperature will be 94 degrees Fahrenheit, but it will feel like 104,” says the weather man. And I smile. That is my world. He is describing me. It’s kind of a faulty default. My act...
Read Article
Does God See Us Where We Are?
“I don’t know where we’re at,” Phil’s dad used to say from the front seat of his handicapped van. In his later days my father-in-law, sweet and intelligent seemed to live in an anxious st...
Read Article
Hold On To Great Treasure
It had been an overlap day, when one commitment led to another with hardly a breath in between. Three grandsons sped through their home kitchen where I tried to do some cleaning up after...
Read Article
The Upkeep No One Sees
There is a whole lot of unseen upkeep in life. Changing sheets, mowing lawn, washing laundry, servicing the car, making meals, planning groceries, unplugging drains, buying supplies, fixi...
Read Article
The Greatest of All Miracles
You know the type, right? The one who must correct every statement another makes. Someone who can wax eloquent on just about everything, and does. That person. The one who knows it all. T...
Read Article
Are You At Home with Your Passport?
I checked again to make sure the blue passport lay in my palm. Lines of weary travelers stretched long behind and in front of us. In tightly clasped fists, passports of green, maroon, and...
Read Article
Beyond What I See
I’m sitting inside and watching the perfect snowfall out our Virginia window. It came at a most inappropriate time, when our plans had to cancel, and schedules had to be re-scheduled. But...
Read Article
Do You Feel Like a Nobody?
I heard the door open and my husband’s heavy footsteps slowly ascend the steps. “Hi Honey,” I greeted at the top. “How’d it go?” We were young with a newborn in a new city, new apartment,...
Read Article
Jesus Meets Us Where We Are
It was back in the day of big over the lap Rand McNally Maps. One lay across my legs while I sat shotgun on the front bench seat of our 1966 Chevy Impala. Across the two big pages, lines...
Read Article
In The Father’s Arms
My eyes had been glued for a while to the little boy in the row ahead of me. He must have been about a year old. Fussy on his mother’s lap, I could see the parental exchange. “Should I ta...
Read Article
Peter, Cornelius and a God Who Sees All
My husband is a fan of split screens and simulcasts. The more the merrier. One corner of the TV can play a football game, while the opposite corner shows something completely different. T...
Read Article
Was It All A Waste?
It broke my heart and stole my resolve. As a writer, rejects come. It’s kind of part of the whole deal, it happens and though difficult, it usually helps me grow. But this email rejection...
Read Article
Who Really Owns My Time?
“I don’t have time” is one of those ridiculous things we say pretty much all the time. As if time can be owned. As if we could take charge of it, I mean really, “who’s got the time?” Righ...
Read Article
You Are Not Invisible to God
I heard the bang of a metal door next to me before I leaned down for that “underneath” the gas-station-bathroom-stall search. In my bent over rectangular view, two thick-soled black shoes...
Read Article
Old Backgrounds, New Creation, and A Happy Father’s Day
What is a “new creation?” Am I one? Are you? “…if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.” 2 Corinthians 5:17 (ESV). Who Gets What? B...
Read Article
I Wish My Kids Had Known My Mom Like I Did
I wish my kids had known her better, the woman I called Mom. I would like to have them remember how her hands flew over the piano keys, and see the line of piano students that came to the...
Read Article
Incomprehensible Faith
It is often the incomprehensible pieces about God and His Word that bring us back to the rudiments of our faith. “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things no...
Read Article
Christmas Greetings to Your Home from Our Home
“And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the inn.” Luke 2:7 KJV May your Christmas b...
Read Article
Chosen Isn’t So Special if You Are a Turkey
My kids used to say I should write a how-to-hide-the-turkey-recipe book. We ate a lot of turkey when we lived in Italy. Affordable and easily available, I disguised wings, thighs and brea...
Read Article
What Will You Find In the Darkest Tightest Folds of Your Soul?
When my husband and I travelled to visit-and hopefully encourage-global workers around the world, I confess, some countries got more prayer than others. The prayers usually had to do more...
Read Article
What Are Your gods of 2022?
“And when the people of Ashdod rose early the next day, behold, Dagon had fallen face downward on the ground before the ark of the Lord. So they took Dagon and put him back in his place.”...
Read Article
The Prayer Stump
My husband chiseled out what he calls a prayer stump from the trunk of a fallen tree. Its back behind our house where he is hidden from human eyes. It’s an uncomfortable seat, an earthly...
Read Article
Going Home
The scenery changes outside my window. From tree covered mountains to patchwork plains. I’m going home, although I’m not even sure where that is anymore. I’ve called so many places home....
Read Article
Grandparents Day And The Grandparent I Never Knew
“Gamma!” my little grandson shouts. He begins his own personal happy dance with one chubby knee up first, then a big hop on one leg and a galloping pivot that nearly knocks him flat. Thos...
Read Article
Do You Know Where You’re At?
“I don’t know where we’re at,” Phil’s dad used to say from the front seat of his handicapped van. In his later days my father-in-law, sweet and intelligent seemed to live in an anxious st...
Read Article
Is the Devil Really in the Details?
“The devil is in the details.” I’ve often seen the validity of that phrase in politics. It makes perfect sense when reading the small print at the bottom of a contract, or if one is faced...
Read Article
Going Beyond Clouds That Hide the View
I’m a cloudy kind of person. Something in my soul shuts out the light inside me like clouds that hide the view. But when the shadow passes suddenly it’s as if the glory of the sun explode...
Read Article
Jesus Gets Personal With His Disciples
It’s the craziest thing when you see someone who looks like someone else from some place else in a place they shouldn’t be found. When we moved to Italy across the ocean, across culture a...
Read Article
Who Will Be The Greatest
My six-year-old and three-year-old grandsons have never even seen Star Wars, but the way they go at it, you’d never know. They grunt and shout in victory and defeat. It is a run-for-your-...
Read Article
When You Struggle to Understand, Reach for the Light
Dad always wanted lots of light for reading in our old farmhouse. There were never enough and they were never bright enough. I remember well his hand, freckled with age spots as he settle...
Read Article
Kept at Home Faith is Easy to Hide
Her name was Candy. I couldn’t describe her if I had to. I never knew the color of her hair, the width of her smile or touch of her hand. Because she didn’t exist. Yet, every meal time fo...
Read Article
Is God Absent When He is Silent?
Our middle daughter was about the sneakiest two-year-old imaginable. Quiet, sweet and oh so cunning. But the one sneak I never got used to was the tip-toe out of bed escape. Because she d...
Read Article
Home Is A Lot More Than What Fits In A Truck
There’s a U-haul behind us. I will be home someday, and when I am, the U-haul’s not coming. We’ve been planning this move for a long time, still I feel like it snuck up on me. The details...
Read Article
What Does it Mean to be Close?
“Oh mom,” my college aged daughter said, and could it be I heard a tiny bit of impatience in her voice? “Half the kids I know in college live in the same town as their parents and they ar...
Read Article
Life Will Never Be The Same
The plans of the heart belong to man, but the answer of the tongue is from the Lord. Proverbs 16:1 (ESV) “Life will never be the same,” I told my friend. “No matter how this turns out, li...
Read Article
My Mom, a Bar of Soap and Clean Talk
My parents weren’t really the “let the consequences teach her” kind of people. They were more the “let’s give her some consequences” types. But since I could always count on what my actio...
Read Article
When Clouds Hide the View
I’m a cloudy kind of person. Sometimes something in my soul shuts out the light and then the cloud passes and suddenly it’s as if the glory of the sun explodes inside of me and everything...
Read Article
Where Common Sense Meets Brains
“Ain’t got the brains God gave a goose,” Dad muttered, shaking his head. He sat in his chair in front of the big old Zenith. Encased in a piece of furniture that fit the previous TV, the...
Read Article
Echoes of Babies Never Heard
“Mamma, where are you?” I hear it in my thoughts like light feather snow around me. It drops into my silence and stirs memory sticky and sweet, of little hands that cup my face and turn m...
Read Article
Each Day Is An Offering
You rode the rapids from the protection of my womb into the hands of a stranger. With that final push, our hello began but giving up started. Because each day is an offering. We separated...
Read Article
I don't want them to have a mother like me
“I don’t want them to have a mother like me,” my daughter said. I sat in a heap, shoulders bent, my right side propped against the hospital bed. The children were always on her mind when...
Read Article
That's What Moms Do
I lay on the couch, one eye open and one shut. An ice cube wrapped inside a damp washcloth balanced on my eyebrow. “I weally sorry, Momma,” he said. His face was level with mine, his eye...
Read Article
Mom, I'm such a sinner
The door opened with a bang against my front hall. “Mom!” Something was wrong. My heart revved like a racecar. I wiped wet hands against my apron and hurried to meet my daughter, home fro...
Read Article
Loving My Heroes
“Hi Beautiful,” he says from the doorway of her hospital room. He is slightly out of breath from hurrying, from untangling little arms squeezed around his neck, and giving the baby a bott...
Read Article
3 Days to Christmas: WAY
A dirt road led to the house I grew up in. I loved that road. Impassible in winter, a mud pit in spring, and like the dust bowl in summer. No other house sat on that road. It was the way...
Read Article
13 Days to Christmas: LIGHT
Christmas lights are evil, my friend wrote on a facebook post. I know what she means. Tangled strands that don’t light are irritating. But the original Christmas lights were a different s...
Read Article
There Is No Spiritualizing This One
And it came to pass in those days, the wife was harried, and the husband bombarded. Time was ticking like a clock, calendar pages flipped like a fan and a list of one million and two thin...
Read Article
When Faithfulness is Truly Great
The crowd raises to its feet around the auditorium, a representation of a myriad of countries. Former missionaries who served in Brazil, Mali and Russia stand to sing. An elderly man, his...
Read Article
Can you find joy in what you don’t enjoy?
Tired and worn after a difficult meeting, I’m eager to be home. The sight that greets me when I open the door is a dirty pan and a dish with lunch scraps. “At least he could have.... Read...
Read Article
When Blame Hits the Fan
It hits my life again. That inevitable desire to connect my circumstances with the actions of another and search for blame. “That woman you gave me,” Adam complained when confronted with...
Read Article
What’s Good About Good-bye?
From the back seat window the countryside slid by. Green grape vines draped across wooden stakes like outstretched arms. The road ahead curved to the left, I knew it well. A hen, halted m...
Read Article
Nobody told Me to Bring a Rocking Chair
“In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and confidence shall be your strength.” Isaiah 30:15; NKJV. When Phil and I left for Italy with a two-year-old, a four-year-old and...
Read Article
When the Troll Sings Russian
My name is Sylvia and I am technophobic. Technology scares the crud out of me. “Hover,” my husband advises. “Just hover and see if it is a good site or one that will eat your computer ali...
Read Article
Meltdown Dread
I plunked her diaper-padded bottom into the shopping cart and directed two little legs into the slots. The mission began. I had one hour, one child with me, two others at home, and a whol...
Read Article
Citizenship
“For our citizenship is in heaven…” I hold the blue covered booklet in my palm. Lines of weary travelers are long. They hold passports in green, maroon, and brown, irreplaceable identitie...
Read Article
Bye-Gones
“…if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.” 2 Corinthians 5:17 (ESV). Backgrounds. Everyone has them. They are the backdrop of our...
Read Article
Five Things to Repeat on November 9
I am writing this one week before the American election. I figure I will need to read it to myself after the election. Several times. Repeat after me. And the prize goes to… Romans 13:1-2...
Read Article
Are You Listening?
Hot tiny hands warm both sides of my cheeks, smooth and just a little bit forceful. They pull my face upward from where I sit engrossed in my screen so our eyes are even. Hers, translucen...
Read Article
Invisible Me
https://youtu.be/Vv6YnfUfD4U She knelt by the bed as if in prayer, the soles of her pajama footies upturned, her little body in plain sight. A blanket covered her head. In two-year-old lo...
Read Article
The Sixth Stocking
Today is my son’s birthday. I wrote the following story over 20 years ago after he was born. It may be a little sappy, but is it a taste of the blessing he has been to us ever since the f...
Read Article
Miracles
“I am so ready for an angel to come,” Phil said that morning. I’d been thinking the same. I got up from my cot next to our daughter’s bed and joined my husband where he stood at her side....
Read Article