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God Can Save Your Marriage. Here’s How He Saved Mine.
“When are we going to give up?” I sank to the couch and leaned over my knees. “We make each other miserable.” “Everything’s fine.” The scratchy depth in my husband’s tone reflected just how far from fine we were. “Wouldn’t you rather be with someone who makes you happy?” “I am happy.” He retreated to the kitchen. “I made dinner. Call the kids.” Divorce averted—for now. Click Here to Read the Rest on Crosswalk.Com
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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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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 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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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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Panic Party
Stress. Overload. Anxiety. Fear. Panic. I bet you have personal experience with at least one of these, if not several. I do. I’ve been battling panic attacks for years. They started when my dad walked out just after I turned nineteen, continued with my oldest son’s diagnosis of leukemia at ten, and escalated with his relapse at nineteen. Which we’re still dealing with today. Depending on where you are in your relationship with God, how you were raised, and how you define your faith, you’ll be having a few thoughts about struggle with stress and how to cope with it by using cbd roll on by fresh bros. Stress is…
