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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2021
54 articles published this year.
New Birth’s First Breath
In the sweat and grime of one contraction bursting upon another, I concentrated on a child yet unknown, but one already knit with my own heart. Birth in that moment was all about bringing...
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How To Bring Glory Into Your Christmas Celebration
I’ve had Christmases without snow, gifts scarce, and family missing, but I’ve never had one without Handel’s Messiah filling my airwaves. When I think of Christmas glory, it is always wit...
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My Christmas Gift Bought with a Child’s Heart
My son’s eyes sparkled like sun kissed waters when he pulled a bright red package from under the tree. His little hands reverently held the wrapped box, its smashed bow wobbled, as if rea...
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What Kind of World Did Jesus Enter?
“And it came to pass in those days” Luke 2:1, “that there went out a decree from Caesar Augstus that all the world should be taxed.” (KJV) What were “those days?” If your feet walked the...
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I Fell in Love with American Thanksgiving While Living In Another Country
I learned to really appreciate this American tradition in a place where it was not celebrated. Our first years we felt alone without family. We joined with fellow North Americans, friends...
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Thanksgiving Transforms Hearts
As we enter the season of thanksgiving, I love the emphasis on remembering, being aware of the little things, the falling leaves, slivers of sunshine and raindrops of life. We talk of the...
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How To Know Right from Wrong
We went to Italy back in our young days knowing my husband might have an advantage in language and culture. He grew up as a missionary kid in Ecuador. I grew up a farmer’s kid in Kansas....
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The Purpose of Suffering
Almost three years had passed, since our daughter’s illness, but the pain hadn’t lifted. It wrapped around me like a lead blanket. Peter, Jesus’ disciple and I were buds. “While walking b...
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How Was Your Day?
One of our grandson’s started first grade this year. He is the first of our son and daughter-in-law’s children to begin first grade. It is a shell shocking experience for all parents. And...
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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...
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Do You Like Me?
“Do you like me?” the elder three-year-old asked his little brother. He rolled onto his side and hugged the little body of his two-year-old brother lying beside him. In a world of Faceboo...
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Bitter Roots
I yanked and pulled until the weed snapped, its root still intact like a vein under the skin of the earth. I’m not a great gardener. I might even be a lousy gardener. Roots like those, wi...
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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....
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If a Tree Falls in a Forest?
"If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" I’ve not lived a long time in Virginia, but in the time I have, I’ve seen a lot of trees. Coming from...
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Becoming is a Journey
From the back of the car, three kids sang with megaphone voices. “Do everything without complaining, do everything without arguing, so that you will become blameless and pure, children of...
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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...
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Kinda Like God Who Sees All We Do
My youngest grandchild has begun to climb out of his crib with his mattress as low as possible while wearing his sleep sack. It’s a feat. The security camera recording shows his formidabl...
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Standing on the Other Side of the Line
Landing on Italian soil in 1982 The first time I boarded a plane for Italy, I left with one husband, 24 suitcases, a child on each hip, one holding her daddy’s hand and the absolute assur...
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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...
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Hope for the Worrier
Recently I wrote a requested article on the subject of worry. It caused me no end of worry. Worry is my middle name. I’ve been put to the test in a crazy worrisome situation in the last f...
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Seven Verses To Remind You God Goes Behind, Before and All Around
I saw them in a lush green park, a family three-some. Sandwiched between mom and dad, a little girl with pudgy legs, light-up shoes and brown pig-tails lifted her legs high. I stopped to...
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We Remember Needed Words At The Right Time
“Remember what I told you,” I said to my little girl with golden hair, long and silky. She tilted her chin upward, her blue eyes fringed in black lashes locked into mine, digging deep, sh...
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Who is in Control Of Generations?
“He established a testimony in Jacob and appointed a law in Israel, which he commanded our fathers to teach to their children,” Ps. 78:5 ESV “Who’s in control here?” I asked the mirror mi...
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Do You Really Wanna Be Full?
“I wanna be full,” my grandson says. Tomato red rims his mouth, like the ring around a bullseye. Sauce lies draped down the front of his green shirt. A whole lotta food didn’t hit the mar...
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What My MisMatched Shoes Taught Me About God
I wore mismatched shoes to the Doctor today. It’s taken us a year with the COVID backup and restrictions to establish a base doctor in our new town. I finally had my first visit after mon...
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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...
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When Heads Come Together
Two heads are better than one the saying goes, but besides the obvious intellectual melding of minds, a much sweeter truth is communicated when two heads come together. A mommy rests her...
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Recognizing You on Father’s Day Even Though Your Hair Is Gray
“I didn’t recognize that gray haired man,” my husband and I squinted together at the photo on his camera’s screen. I saw him immediately in the group picture. He wasn’t so ready to claim...
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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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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...
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Catching Up with Life
My mother-in-law, Esther Kangas Schroeder went to be with Jesus last night. Life has a way of spilling one thing onto another, and stuff can end in a big heap. Yes, even for almost-retire...
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Are You Looking High Enough?
Are you looking high enough for connection? You know that wonderful feeling of finding someone with your same interests, passions or thinking? “She gets me,” you say. Or “he knows exactly...
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Little Boys, Escape Artists and Cunning Hearts
We have an escape artist in our family. The kind that scales double safety gates across the stairway, the type who climbs out a crib in a sleep sack, through open windows and sneaks out l...
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When Mom Forgot Me
“Where do you live?” she asked. Wind whipped her white curls into a crown around her head against a blur of golden wheat fields as we sailed along the dirt road. I glanced her way. She sa...
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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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The Resurrection Isn’t Over
Hey, not so fast. Although the Easter holiday is past, the resurrection is not. “After his suffering, he presented himself to them and gave many convincing proofs that he was alive. He ap...
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Resurrection Hope Moves the Stone Away
Things had begun to get dicey. Fame’s two sided coin’s darker side threatened. Not everyone was a fan of Jesus nor of those who claimed to be His followers. Jesus laid out coming events,...
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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...
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Should the Church Put Up With It?
Do you know where the term “green with envy” stems from? Shakespeare is credited with the English idiom in Othello. Before he came along to make it popular, the Greeks are thought to have...
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What’s Wrong With Grandpa?
When I think of my grandchildren, there is a sweet glow in my mind of happy holding-on-the-lap book reading, coloring pictures together or baking cookies. Quiet blissfulness. Togetherness...
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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-...
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Do You Know Gawd?
“Do you know Gawd?” Arched back, hands on hips, lips puckered, the question comes from knee high, completely out of the blue. I look down at his upturned face. A light saber pulsates in h...
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Mistakes of Grasshoppers and Other Regular People
“We seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them.” Numbers 13:33 (ESV) It’s impossible to read about the Israelites’ long exodus from Egypt without being convicted of s...
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How to Combine Sincerity, Love and Others
My acquisition of the Italian language really doesn’t reflect the amazing teacher I had in Florence, Italy, or the excellence of her skills. Like Michaelangelo she chipped away, always co...
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We Were So Alike Until We Got Married
(This post may have a familiar ring to it. You may have read it on the first go around Feb. 14, 2017, but it’s especially appropriate for a revisit before Valentine’s Day sneaks up on you...
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Covid Fear is Also Affecting Our Children
Featured recently at Just18Summers.com "It was a Facetime call. I held it up and saw some of the cutest little faces looking at me. “Grandma!” My five-year-old grandson and his three-year...
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Do You Know How to Define Your Terms?
“It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.” -Bill Clinton. Every time my husband and I round a particular corner, political signs crop into our sight like spring tulips. The law...
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What impact will my life have in the future
My husband has a carpenter’s chalk line. He rolls it out, squints down its straight line and lifts it slightly between thick fingers, then lets it snap. It leaves a distinct chalk line ma...
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Do You Want to Change Course?
“…my feet had almost stumbled, my steps had nearly slipped.” Ps. 73:2 (ESV) I feel like a lot of us are walking into a log across our path, or maybe on quick sand. The Psalmist Asaph writ...
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Don't Touch
“Uh, uh, uh,” I hear the warning in three short grunts. I turn quickly to find out what my not-quite-two-year-old grandson is doing. My quickness is due first to fear for his safety and s...
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A Time For Renewal
Another year has passed. No wait a minute, I hear you say, not just any year. 2020 is behind us. But like a nightmare that drags its headache into the day, we feel its shadow as 2021 begi...
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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...
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