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10 Prayers for Patience
Patience is hard. In our fast-food, drive-thru, one-day-Amazon-delivery world, it’s a lost art. A muscle we don’t like to exercise often. Yet as Christians, we’re called upon to use that muscle. God desires for us to wait steadfastly upon Him and be longsuffering with each other. “Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience” (Colossians 3:12). Patience hurts. A few years ago, I broke my ankle. After weeks of healing from surgery, it finally got cleared to bear weight. That first second my foot hit the floor, fire burned up my calf and my ankle wobbled. It took weeks of physical therapy…
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Frame Your Scene with Essay Structure
Does the blank page cause you anxiety? Are your readers sometimes confused? Consider using essay structure to plan and write your scenes. Jump over to Writers in the Storm today where I’m guest blogging, and I’ll show you how.
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10 Things a Mom Must Always Remember
Once a mom, always a mom. We may enter motherhood through different avenues, but whether we cradle our bundles of joy the first moment of their lives or hold them tightly to us later, our love only deepens from the day we first meet. I’ve been a mom over twenty-four years. I’ll be a mom the rest of my life. It doesn’t matter how many birthdays my kids have, how far away they move, or how accomplished they become at taking care of themselves, they’re still the babies of my heart. As newcomers to motherhood, we might’ve heard it was a full-time, forever job. But did any of us really…
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Why You’ll Never Be Content Without God
Over the last 13 years, I’ve walked my son through cancer twice. More than a quarter of his 24 years have been spent on one goal—knocking leukemia on its butt. And that’s not counting the years of cleaning up the fallout of all that chemo and radiation. Kyle’s first treatment plan lasted over three and a half years. After I recovered from the shock, I zipped from anxious, to uncertain, to alarmed, to discouraged about 20 times a day. Watching him struggle brought on a sadness so deep my chest constantly ached. But every time I thought I’d tumble over the edge, a sense of calm caught me and held…
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10 Things Every Husband Should Be Doing for His Wife
“Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her…” (Ephesians 5:25 NIV). Falling in love is easy. Staying in love is work. It takes deliberate effort to follow through on the vows we make on our wedding day. No matter how well prepared we think we are for marriage, we aren’t—not until we begin to walk those vows out. Whether you’ve said, “I do,” recently or you’ve been together for decades, you can count on one thing—your lives will be full of for better or for worse. So how can you keep your marriage strong in the better and build it back up in…
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10 Things Every Wife Should Be Doing for Her Husband
“Then the LORD God said, ‘It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him” (Genesis 2:18 NIV). Navigating a successful marriage can be challenging. Whether you’ve been together thirty days or thirty years, you’ve probably figured this out. As wives, we had expectations that began way before our man got down on one knee. We had hopes of what our lives as a forever couple would look like. Maybe your dreams became reality. Maybe they didn’t. But I’m guessing, if you’re anything like me, you found what came after you walked down the aisle to be somewhere in between. Here’s something…
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How to Find God’s Purpose in Your Disappointment
A few days after my college-age son relapsed with childhood cancer, I was cooking his favorite dinner and the realization that we were about to go into our second three-year battle for his life slammed me particularly hard. Alek, my middles son, walked into the kitchen, and I asked him to pray for his brother and our family. My then sixteen-year-old’s reply? “Sure, Mom. I’ll do it for you. But I’m not really riding the God train right now.” “Not riding the God train?” I stopped chopping vegetables and looked up at him. READ THE REST ON CROSSWALK.COM Want to read more like this? Be Inspired Life is Messy Surviving…
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15 Surprising Ways to Find Relief from Anxiety
Rush hour slows all four northbound lanes of highway traffic to twenty miles an hour…fifteen… ten…and holds at a five-mile-an-hour crawl. I’m boxed in by cars, SUVs, and a few semis. No off ramp in site. No way to cross to the shoulder. Not two minutes later, even the crawl ceases. The engine idles roughly in my fourteen-year-old ride that’s clearly feeling the aches and pains of its two-hundred-thousand plus miles. In the last year, this van has stalled at a major intersection, blew out two tires in one day, and purged its radiator in the middle of a highway construction zone. And I just know I’m going to get…
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The Two Sides of Pride
Ever feel like you fall short of the mark? Miss your best moments? Never make the cut. Always come in last? Feel free to substitute any other heart-hollowing cliché for the few above. They all mean the same thing—You’re not good enough. And maybe you never will be. I grew up in a time when parents were told to shower children with a stream of self-esteem, pep-talk pat-on-the-backs. Be all you can be. You can do anything you put your mind to. Hard work equals success. If you do the right thing, everything will work out. But what happens when all you can be isn’t enough or your mind reaches…
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3 Words That Can Change Your Marriage
You may be thinking there’s no way so few words can even touch on such a huge topic. My husband disagrees. When I texted him for his three words, he replied he only needed two: Yes, Dear. Maybe it’s not the amount of words you’re worried about. Maybe you’re wondering if words alone can really change anything. Think about your relationships with your parents, children, spouse, or friends. The people you’re close to often, with what they say, carry the power to hurt or heal. To make you hate them or love them. To make you feel good or bad about where you stand in their lives. READ THE REST…
