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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…
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How to Wait on God Without Losing Faith
Please, God, open up a decent spot. Tapping the steering wheel, I circled the local Walmart for the twelfth time, the need to hurry cramping my stomach. Couldn’t leave Kyle alone too long. What if something happened to him while I was gone? I muttered the prayer a few more times, took a few more laps, but the only spot God opened in the rain-drenched, puddled parking lot was so far past left field that if the asphalt had been built for baseball the remote corner would never see a player. Wishing I’d made a better choice in footwear, I glanced at my sandaled feet and parked. The wind blew…
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When the World Expects More Than You Can Give
The sun is up. The house is still. The clock ticks off the morning until it’s closer to lunchtime than to breakfast. I’m in bed, covers over my head, curled around my body pillow, my cat asleep against me. Not because I stayed up too late the night before or because it’s my one morning to sleep in or because I haven’t had a do-nothing day in weeks. I had one yesterday, the day before, and the day before that. My month has been packed solid with do-nothing days. I should be doing laundry, cleaning my bathroom, making a much needed grocery run, checking my daughter’s homework, calling about a…
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20 Goals Every Christian Should Set
Whether we’re talking about our personal lives, spiritual lives, relationships, our character, or our future, we need to ask ourselves what kind of people we want to be. Having goals can center us, keep our eyes on Christ, and encourage us to grow. Without goals, we have no reason to press on, and we can flounder, feel lost, or lose track of our purpose. I’m doing something a little different over on Crosswalk.com today–a slideshow. Come check out 20 Goals Every Christian Should Set. What are your spiritual goals? How will you reach them? (added note 1/8/2017) **I’ve gotten quite a few comments about not being able to read all…
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7 Ways to Survive Sending Your Child Off to College
If you hang around church long enough, you’ll hear people say children are a blessing from the Lord. The Lord agrees. “Children are a heritage from the Lord, offspring a reward from him. Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are children born in one’s youth” (Psalm 127:3-4 NIV). While I don’t disagree, the term blessing doesn’t quite cover the emotional wreckage that comes with being a parent. Raising children might be the most difficult, heart-wrenching, joyful, and rewarding journey I’ll ever take. When my kids were small and needy, I fantasized about sleeping past sunrise and taking long showers. As they got a little older, I wished for…
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Are Christians Trying to be too Happy?
I spent my growing-up years in a conservative Midwestern church during the 70’s and 80’s. If I had to pick one word to define my experience, I’d chose legalistic. Between the Sunday morning sermons, Sunday evening service, Wednesday night youth group, and the Christian parenting style of the moment, I was taught there was a simple formula for happiness. And if I followed that formula, my life would be good. Maybe even perfect. At the very least, nothing too bad would happen to me. The formula itself was fairly simple, like a basic set of rules to follow. READ THE REST AT CROSSWALK.COM.
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5 Ways to Know You’re a Good Spouse
We get married for all kinds of reasons. Love. Security. Children. Fear. Loneliness. We might take that walk down the aisle as early as high school graduation or as late as in the fall or winter seasons of our lives. Maybe we chose our high school sweetheart, our best friend, a coworker, someone we met in Sunday School, or even a person from our past who becomes our future. Some us had great examples of solid marriages to look to in our own parents and mentors. Others of us saw what we didn’t want to become and vowed to do marriage differently. But no matter why, when, or with whom…
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Sympathy or Empathy?
Twelve years ago, on a sunny Tuesday morning, I dropped my younger kids with a friend to run my oldest to the pediatrician’s office. I made the appointment early, planning to take him to a special breakfast for just the two of us afterward. Kyle had spent the summer battling headaches (check out Hangover Hammer), fatigue, and various viruses. Expecting a diagnosis similar to Mono, I was stunned when the doctor not only informed me that Kyle and I wouldn’t be going out for bacon and eggs, but that we wouldn’t even be going home. Tears brimming in our doctor’s eyes, he instructed me to drive straight to the…
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Strong Enough
A year into my son’s aggressive chemo regimen, he started to look less like a college boy and more like a nursing home candidate. His hips didn’t work right. His knees didn’t work right. His feet didn’t work right. He was falling apart faster than a hundred-year-old man. After he fell three times in a week, his physical therapist suggested better shoes. Really good shoes. The kind that require an actual fitting and a store that doesn’t start with “Wal” and end with “Mart.” We drove to the closest specialty shoe store, hoping new shoes would be an easy fix for yet another debilitating side-effect of constant chemo…READ THE REST…
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The Best from the Broken
If you have children–grandchildren, godchildren, nieces or nephews, or a special child in your life–you understand how hard it is to watch them struggle and hurt. When our kids are little, we have some ability to protect them. But as they grow older, they sometimes make decisions out of our control. Decisions that come with consequences. And whether they want to take those choices back or not, it’s often too late. Other times, our kids are walking steady on the right path, but life just happens. Through no fault of their own, they get knocked off track and have to deal with the consequences that follow as well. It doesn’t…
