-
Lessons Learned on Horseback | Stay Close on the Trail of Life
Last summer Hawk and I took a trip out west for our anniversary. We hadn’t ventured far enough away to justify purchasing airline tickets since our honeymoon, so we saved and splurged a bit on a trip to Colorado Springs. As soon as I booked the trip, I started plotting our itinerary. When I discovered we could ride horses through the Garden of the Gods park, I knew it was a “must do.” Horseback riding was a first for us – other than birthday-party pony rides that didn’t really count. When we got to the stable and the instructors did a quick safety briefing, I almost chickened out. There were…
-
Where Are Your Feet Taking You?
I get discouraged when I don’t feel like I’m being transformed, even though I’m trying to diligently study God’s word and desire fellowship with him. When I don’t feel different in the sense of experiencing this grand overarching mad-love for Jesus or when I don’t seem to feel him near, I slowly slide into the what-am-I-doing-wrong and why-do-I-feel-this-way mindset. After some time feeling this way, I picked up my pen and wrote in my journal to process my thoughts: I’ve been counting my experiences with God as successful and worth it when I get the supernatural feeling of closeness with him. I’ve been relying on a feeling to dictate whether…
-
In My Bag & On My Table | My Favorite Journaling & Study Tools
My husband and I fondly refer to our first date as The Inquisition. Neither of us were casual daters, he had only one prior girlfriend before me and I had zero before him. We were friends for almost a year before he asked me out – so we had a good idea about each other but we still didn’t know each other in that are we compatible for marriage way. Since we were friends, I remember telling my mom that if I was home by 9ish, it probably didn’t go so well. I didn’t get home until well after mid-night. From the get-go we started asking the hard questions. As…
-
Slime Slinging and a Woman Named Damaris
My son recently discovered the joy of building blocks. He painstakingly gathers both pieces in his chubby baby-not-quite-toddler hands and angles them together to connect. Sometimes the ends don’t fit and he grumbles in frustration, but when they do, he looks up with his big blue eyes to see if anyone noticed. He’ll hold up his stack of blocks and smile, full of self pride. We cheer like any good parents…but then our hoorays turn into muffled giggles when the blocks inevitably fall apart and he wrings his hands in the most dramatic fashion to express his supreme dissatisfaction. Through the multi-colored building blocks, my sixteen-month-old has already learned a…
-
Tithing Your Time | A Free Bible Reading Log
I’m a wordy. I fell in love with books in middle school. I’d check out a stack from the public library and a stack from our church library and have them read in a week. I’d return them only to leave with more stacked tall. There’s a running joke in my family when my teacher mom literally said “You aren’t allowed to read anymore books” in an effort to discipline me. It was the only suitable punishment she could think of because my nose was always in a book. This love for reading eventually led me to majoring in English at college, where I discovered I would much rather write…
-
The Thing About New Year Resolutions, Word for 2019, and the Book that Revolutionized My Year
I once had a boss who would write reminders on her hands. We’d be in the middle of a meeting when something said would trigger a thought and she’d grab a pen and write a word on her palm. Toy – to reminder her to bring a toy to a birthday party for her friend’s son. Milk – remembering her toddler drank all of it that morning and she needed to go to the store to get more. It became somewhat of a joke between us – all those black and blue and red words on her hands. Whatever it was, if she didn’t write it down where she’d have…
-
This Is Advent | The Stretched Out Threads of Grace
The tree is in the corner of our living room. Its lights are bright and the ornaments are high so a certain little boy doesn’t mess with them. I splurged on embroidered stockings last year and they hang off the blanket ladder to the right of the tree. All gifts have been ordered and wrapped and are piled under and around the broad artificial branches. During this time of Advent, a spirit of uneasiness has lingered and I just can’t quite shake it. One morning I sat by the tree with the twinkling lights and asked myself the hard questions. I saw all the gifts and the unease rose to…
-
My Great-Grandfather’s Well | A Legacy of Faith
The Bible sits on one of my mom’s bookshelves. It’s red, normal looking. Doesn’t have an interesting design on the cover. Doesn’t even have a name imprinted on the lower corner. I was ten when he died. My great-grandpa on my mom’s side. She asked to have this particular Bible after his death. Inside the cover is a pamphlet from when he and my great-grandma drove her to college for the first time. It may be non-special to look at, this red book, but it’s very special to her. Blue pen marks mar the otherwise pristine thin pages. They tell a story, that shaky script, of demons fought, of spiritual…
-
Why Journaling Matters
It was my sixth Christmas when I got my first journal. It was green and had a praying angel on the cover. Even though the pages would be penned in my very large learning-to-write characters and the greatest climax it ever saw was the frustration to be getting a second brother instead of a long-awaited sister; it would spark in me a passion. I wouldn’t become part of God’s family for another year and I wouldn’t fully follow him for years after that – but that angel covered book, and the countless ones I filled after, would be a tool. A tool God gave me to harness the words within.…
-
Back Porch Fellowship
A couple months ago I took a day off of work to spend with Hawk. Our calendars have been full the past year and a half of our marriage. Honestly, many times I’ve resented Hawk’s busy schedule and the commitments that take him away from our home and me – every time I got a calendar notification alert, I’d sigh. I felt like those notifications, those commitments that we had no control over were controlling our lives, our plans, our marriage. And I was lonely. One night it just became too much. I felt bitter and I felt distanced from my husband. So I took a day off of work to spend time…
-
A Rendered Heart
Every now and then a theme of a particular Truth appears, and reappears, and reappears again in different ways and in different avenues. In this particular case, the Truth was loving God wholeheartedly – the avenues, a Bible study, a book by a completely different author, and a sermon by the pastor of my church. Nothing is coincidence and nothing is left up to chance – so let’s just identify what, or rather who, the Avenue of Truth really is. The Avenue of Truth is the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is our Holy Reminder that we desperately need God. And He aligns certain messages to speak to us in…
-
The Wanderer’s Returning
It’s not that I meant to wander. It’s not that I purposefully determined in my heart to stray from My First Love. It was the sinking revelation that I had made the Lord familiar – commonplace. When had His name stopped being so very precious to me? When had things that used to move me, suddenly not move me any more? When had that passion for Him become an unrecognizable flicker? Over time. Slowly, without purposed intention and devotion and priority to fuel the once passionate heart of mine, my soul slowly withered and Jesus became a familiar aspect of my life. Commonplace and taken for granted, when He is…
