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...
Read ArticleYear
2025
50 articles published this year.
The Family Tree Before the Manger
Growing up we called it the “Mennonite game.” Within a short span of meeting someone new, we somehow managed to find a connecting relative within a massive tangle of roots. When one of ou...
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
A Christmas Search for Jesus
Every year for the last five years my three youngest grandchildren have come to our house in December for Starry Night. The idea birthed in 2020 when the “Christmas Star” appeared. It was...
Read Article
Thankful Hearts Are Tied to Trust
Long before America created an overflowing and beautifully sophisticated Thanksgiving table, thanksgiving was a thing. Before pilgrims gathered around a rough wood hewn table, or a sweet...
Read Article
What If You Don’t Feel Like Giving Thanks?
In everything give thanks; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you. 1 Thessalonians 5:18 (NKJV) Last weekend I picked up my grandson’s big fat backpack to throw over my should...
Read Article
Thanking God For All I See
“Thank you for the sghetti,” the little voice said. My daughter’s hands, folded in prayer sat against the edge of the kitchen table. Those first prayers were so pure and yet so very contr...
Read Article
Is Your Accent On the Right Thing?
When we moved into a tiny Italian village, we gained immediate notoriety as, The American Family. In fact, we were the only Americans in the area. We were an anomaly. I could feel the ten...
Read Article
What Message Are You Giving?
What is it about autumn that calls all gnats into my kitchen like the plagues of Egypt? And woe to the one who leaves out the banana peelings. Jesus’ message in Matthew, chapter 23, seem...
Read Article
Autumn’s Dappled Light
It’s been a long yawn to full Autumn in Virginia. Trees have hesitated to blush but few have succumbed to their eventual fiery reds and yellows. This season seems hesitant to drop its lea...
Read Article
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...
Read Article
God Is In the Detour
My friend looked in his rearview mirror and saw the sign to a church, which propelled him to whip his car into an unplanned detour. His life’s trajectory changed that Sunday by his decisi...
Read Article
The Smell Under the Kitchen Sink
One potato, two potatoes, three potatoes, four… The smell started as a vague drift of unpleasantness. But as I cleaned off the counter, a sniff of something not quite right remained. Afte...
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
“Did God Save Us To Let Us Starve?”
“Did God save us to let us starve?” I may not have said it quite like the complaining Old Testament Israelites are recorded after their exodus from Egypt, but I may have had that very sam...
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
What Is Your Calling?
A friend recently phoned me and began our conversation with, “Are you bored now that you are retired?” My four children are in various throes of raising our grandchildren. I watch them an...
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
Is This Too Trivial For God?
Sunshine bright with glory bathed our tiny backyard. Blue sky beckoned. Winter months had been long for our four-year-old son, and he was ready for play. “If you need me, I’ll call you,”...
Read Article
What Does It Mean to be Found?
I’m not good with directions. I never could find where we were on that big paper Rand McNally map, so when the first GPS came out, I considered it to be a marriage saver. Until I realized...
Read Article
To Strengthen And Encourage In The Faith
She sat in front of me, a crumpled mess. Words halted and poured again like the start and go of a sputtering fountain. Lines furrowed her forehead. They drew the portrait of a weary soul....
Read Article
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...
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
Are You Really The Best?
I found the crayon-drawn picture lying on a chair, during my hurry-and-pick-up-the-house-cleaning. Time tightened before guests arrived, and the house reflected the chaos of muddy shoes a...
Read Article
Have You Been Living A Scammed Life?
A message on my phone encouraged me to contact a certain Margaret. It seems she wants to recruit me for a job. I have great potential to earn an amazing amount of money. In fact, my name...
Read Article
How Do I See Others?
I tilted my head a bit to look for myself in his stick figure drawing. I wondered is this truly how he saw me? “Is that me?” I asked. He nodded. He held a felt tip marker in a small hand...
Read Article
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...
Read Article
Does Jesus Always Answer What We Ask For?
“If Jesus wanted to,” my little seven-year-old fellow classmate declared, “He could flatten my thumb and make it big enough to go around the whole world.” He held his thumb inches from my...
Read Article
Set Apart To Be A Blessing
Pacing from streetlight to streetlight, with my phone pressed hard against my ear, I wore a circled path on the asphalt. My head down, my feet entered the illumined cone shaped area on th...
Read Article
What Is God Teaching You?
“What’s God been teaching you through His Word?” I ask as we settle in, past the mundane of life. We’ve left behind kids, jobs, routines, and the cycle of activities that spin our lives....
Read Article
Call Me Sis Again
“Hey Sis,” she said to get my attention in the store. She was more than double my age with white hair. She looked like my grandma. “Mom,” I hissed, “don’t call me Sis,” I always wanted a...
Read Article
Do You Need Faith Supplements?
I’m not sure how old they were, but to me the title “ancient” applied. My parents, had an entire cabinet of dietary supplements. Every morning they’d pull them out and a ritual began. The...
Read Article
Decay Meets Our Bodies, Victory Meets Our Souls
In the budding of a greening spring, bringing life and color to these naked woods, a lot of decay happens. We counted five dead deer on the way to church. Vultures are having a feast. Sur...
Read Article
Who Are You Wearing?
Have you, like me, noticed how very popular the emblem of the cross is in jewelry and clothing? Both men and women wear crosses around their necks, fingers, waists, and wrists. Crosses ad...
Read Article
Certainly There is Uncertainty
“There is certainly a lot of uncertainty,” the television news commentator reported. Well…that pretty much sums up life, doesn’t it? The reporter went on to elaborate on his statement, al...
Read Article
Are you sure you have the right address?
We started married life in an upstairs apartment of a small house in a small town. Below us lived our landlady and her son. I always heard her puttering about in the kitchen. She puttered...
Read Article
God’s Holy Ways Shares Sorrow
There were days, dark and bare. Black and silent. And though those days are mostly past, sometimes even today, when I least expect it, the veil, which holds suffering inside, seems to eva...
Read Article
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...
Read Article
Patterns of Life
I am sitting in a waiting room again. Waiting…’cause, that’s what people do in a waiting room. Wondering…which goes with the territory. Worried…it’s part of the package too. It will be a...
Read Article
A Pivot in Time Marks Eternity
His eyes lighted when he saw me walking toward him in the crowd. My grandson headed straight toward me with a smile, and sidled up against my side. He stretched his arms around me and squ...
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
What Are you Steeping In?
My British friend with her lovely accent once said to me, “Americans have been putting tea into the water since the Boston Tea party, and from then on they’ve kept right on doing it the w...
Read Article
He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not
“Are you being married?" our then four-year-old grandson asked. His whole body shoved forward to fit into a space in-between my husband and myself’s quick hug in the chaos of a kitchen sw...
Read Article
February And Life Snowballs
It’s a snowball of sorts. Little things turn into bigger things, the list of to-do’s explode until there is simply no way to accomplish all of it, and a minor set back becomes a nearly im...
Read Article
Who Wants the China?
We sat in the old farmhouse dining room, around the table where my mom had hosted generations of family. And we divvied up the old pictures, bits and pieces of written history, and trinke...
Read Article
What Do You Do?
Somewhere in the middle of dodge ball tag and baking cookies with three grandsons, my youngest grandson cocked his head to the side and asked, “So Grandma, what do you two do here all day...
Read Article
Are You a Quitter?
When my daughter woke up on the day which changed all of our lives, it started pretty much like every other day. She felt a bit dizzy. She checked her temperature, but she didn’t have a f...
Read Article
A New Year, A New Self
We make promises. We plan, envision, re-calibrate, and define goals. We look ahead and behind. We hope, determine, and anticipate. We look forward to a white page, a whole year ahead, wit...
Read Article