Learning to Laugh Again
A notice comes on my phone. A picture of my great-grandson pops up. I open the app and find a video of his mommy talking to him, leaning over his little tummy and digging her head into hi...
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Spiritual Growth & Wisdom
40 articles gathered under this theme.
The Relevance of Truth
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Well, it turns out that its value may be much less. Fake photos on social media showed captured U.S. Soldiers and Tel Aviv in shambles. They...
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Holding True Today Prepares Us For Tomorrow
“Just do what’s right today,” my husband’s voice said into my ear. The cell phone pressed hard against me, as if the very pressure could somehow put his words into my being. But doing rig...
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What Does Practice Make Perfect?
My dad, talented in all things musical, had a sharp ear and perfect pitch. “Should have been a B-flat not a B-natural.” He could be working the back forty, but when I struck a wrong note...
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My Blessing of Struggles
I’m so excited to share with you something from my daughter Charity. As a result of a mass on her brain stem when she was twenty-six, Charity lives with incomplete-quadriplegia. She wrote...
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Keeping Your Balance In An Imbalanced World
She toddles toward me, hands outstretched. My eyes are wide, excited and inviting, “Come on,” I urge with a half whisper. A foot lifts, and then another. A wobbly sort of drunken-sailor-t...
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Are You Eating Solid Food or Milk?
“Eat your peas and carrots,” turned out to be a big order for one of our daughters. Solid food, that big step of introducing all manner of foreign texture and flavor into a baby’s mouth w...
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Be Imitators of Me
Three of my grandsons love baseball. And that is an understatement. Growing up they lived it. They chewed wads of gum, memorized plays, and spit. Yes, those little guys could spit with th...
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How Edgy Are You?
My dad used to have some succinct sayings to get his points across, as in, “ain’t got the brains God gave a goose.” This pronouncement, often hurled at politicians, portrayed a questionab...
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Ode to the Nine Foot Tomato Plant
Oh tomato plant that towers many feet above my head. Where is your fruit? I grew up on a farm in Kansas, and at the risk of embarrassing all my Kansas friends and relatives who put into c...
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Are You Barely Hanging On?
“Just hang on,” he told me. I was at the wrong end of a washing machine stuck cattywampus in the stairwell half-way down to the basement. The heavy metal box towered above as I tried to h...
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Numbers, Math, and Green Beans
“Eat the green beans first,” I told my homeschooled grandson. He grinned. He understood immediately what I meant. It really had nothing to do with vegetables, but everything to do with th...
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How Balanced Are You?
Balance. It’s a thing. She toddles toward me, hands outstretched. My eyes are wide, excited and inviting, “Come on,” I urge with a half whisper. A foot lifts, and then another. A wobbly s...
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How Mature Are You?
“Who do you want to be when you grow up?” I used to ask our kids. I liked to hear all the ideas. Their aspirations swung wildly. Everything had its season, from astronaut on Mars, to arch...
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What Appetite Are You Feeding?
My grandsons are going through the picky eating stage. I’ve watched all fourteen grandchildren hit it along the way, and it never fails to bring back memories of my own children’s fussy e...
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Who Are Your Wise Guys?
Calling all wise guys. Only what if they aren’t? Remember that old advertisement, “let your fingers do the walking?” It promoted a thing once upon a time called the yellow pages, which wa...
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Finding Balance When the Lava Flows
“Don’t step on the lava!” It’s a chorus of young and old watching little bare feet hop, skip, and jump from pillow to pillow, over and under chairs. My youngest grandson just turned four....
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Hold Tight, Keep Your Balance and Watch Out for Mud Puddles
“The steps of a man are established by the Lord, when he delights in his way; though he fall, he shall not be cast headlong, for the Lord upholds his hand.” Psalm 37: 23-24 ESV One tiny h...
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What’s Your Power Source for the Storms of Life?
“We are ill prepared for living here,” I told my husband on the third day of a power outage. He’d been shoveling the driveway, bringing wood into the fireplace and fire burning stove, and...
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Are You Feeling In-Between?
The last week of December always feels a little like an in-between to me. It’s between holidays, months and years. Akin to adolescent years, somewhere between child and teenager, life has...
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Does Putting Ourselves First Come Naturally?
“Putting ourselves first doesn’t come naturally,” a glossy magazine lay open on my lap. I said aloud to absolutely no one, “Well that’s a bunch of bologna.” The article continued in the s...
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Slow Food, Fast Food. What’s Your Spiritual Palate’s Recipe?
“How sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth!” Psalm 119:103 ESV When fast food started flipping burgers in Italy, it raised a commotion. Protests and picketers l...
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Birds, Brains and Semi-Retirement
Our yard is full of psychologically needy birds, and my husband is the reason. For those of you who know this man that God gave me, you must realize he will not grow old like the rest of...
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No Thank You
I’ve written before about my hatred for goats, but somehow this year, it seems appropriate to revisit that dislike. No Thank You I hated goats. Dorothy hated being milked. She was an ugly...
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Reacting to Authority
A finge of black lashes, thick and long shadow his blue eyes. They only partially hide his hurt and uncertainty. They tug at my heart like a messy knotted umbilical cord. “…For the Lord…”...
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It’s Time to Grow Up
My husband and I stayed in a motel in Nashville two nights before a tornado ripped through the area. We watched the destruction on television and wondered at the fact that we were just th...
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If You Aim at Nothing are You Really Bound to Hit It?
In the month of January, when people sit down with year planners and good intentions, I realize, I’m not a great goal setter. I don’t like to see on black and white what I’ve kept locked...
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Is your practice helpful or harmful?
My dad, talented in all things musical, had a sharp ear and an equally sharp tongue. His pitch was perfect. He judged without apology. “Should have been a B-flat not a B-natural,” he burs...
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I Want to Hold You Too
“I want to hold you,” he begged at his mommy’s knee, arms upraised toward her, little toes tipped his almost two-year-old body up and down expectantly. “I want to hold you too,” she said....
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Get rid of the Filth and Put on the Clean
Before farms had fashionable “mud rooms,” they existed. “Don’t you come in the front porch,” my mom insisted to my black-dirt-clothed brothers before supper. Because of course on the farm...
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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...
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Who is that Baby in the Manger?
Every year, of my childhood, the first Saturday after Thanksgiving, Christmas pageant practice began. The characters were the same every year, the players different... ...In all the sweet...
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A Lesson in Mommy-Wisdom That Broke Through My Insecurities
It was a sincere question, “What are some weaknesses you see in my parenting?” I thought I really wanted to know. My husband and I were both twenty-three with a still-young marriage and a...
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Hold My Hand
“Mommy?” Charity whispered into the dark still night. “Hold my hand.” I felt the soft skin of her little hand slide smoothly into mine. It fit perfectly, like it was meant to be there. Th...
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What to do with your New Year's False Start
They called it the 50 yard dash. I was introduced to it at recess in first grade. I knew I was bad before anyone told me, in fact maybe that’s why I was so pitiful. I knew when we lined o...
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8 Days to Christmas: RULER-Shepherd
“For out of you (Bethlehem) shall come a Ruler who will shepherd My people Israel.” Matt. 2:6; NKJV. I love the idea of ruler-shepherd. It’s almost an oxymoron, two impossibles joined tog...
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Mom and The Week of the Goat
“The week of the goat,” I will label it. It began the day I came home from school to find a goat tied up in our yard. For a thirteen-year-old it wasn’t cool, and as the bus came to a stop...
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Pink and Blue
Ephesians 5:33 (ESV) However, let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband. As Pastoral care workers for our mission agency, my husband...
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Heading the right direction
Squiggled blue and red lines crisscross between Kansas City and our destination. The map divides my screen into roads and rivers. I know where I’m headed, but I don’t know the route. This...
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Food Fights
A wise man doth not comment on his wife’s diet. Certain subjects within marriage wisdom doth behoove us to tip-toe past. Weight gain and loss is one of those. Is important to keep yoursel...
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