Regimen

leaf peeping

Bright colors are richer through tinted eye wear.  So when you go leaf peeping this season, wear brown sunglasses. Choose a narrow winding forest road and drive toward the sun.  When the breeze picks up, slow down and gaze up through the underbellies of sunlit leaves shimmying in the cool gusts. The leaves literally sparkle- like…

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Barnyard Book

Charlottes Web

Since our toddler follows our improvised bedtime stories so well, I was curious to see how he’d receive a chapter book. A barnyard book like Charlotte’s Web fit September well. So we plunged one chapter a day with warm milk and pillows into E.B. White’s beautiful descriptions of seasons, country-living, and farm animals. Linus knew every character well and immediately wanted them added to…

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Discerning God’s Will Is Not the Nerve-Racking Puzzle I Once Thought It Was

Have you ever dreamed up a mission but wondered whether the idea came from God or from your own head? Obviously, discerning God’s voice correctly is essential to the Christian life. The task used to intimidate me, but through the years I have learned that discernment is not the stress-inducing puzzle I once thought it was. I have…

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A Matter of Life and Death

There’s something about gentle nourishing rain in a graveyard on a summer day.  Especially this lush hillside 19th century cemetery.  Ancient hemlock trees, mossy gravestones- many broken, deer wondering slow quiet and nibbling, crickets loud.  I smell the earth and sense the life in this place, where I have spent and hour thinking, breathing, journaling about death…

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3 Thousand Different Kinds of Beautiful

1) Sunlight on water can be a thousand different kinds of beautiful.  Even over the same body of water, this East Texas lake for instance, every morning sky reflects uniquely and changes by the minute.  Every evening, I peer from this mezzanine-like porch through drooping cathedral limbs at the water and sky unable to look…

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No son, we are not gypsies.

This summer resembles last summer in that we move nearly weekly, but this season we are not family member hopping- we are church member hopping.  Christopher’s 10-week internship just happens to be 30 miles from our last military duty station where we have many friends. After spending 3 weeks alone with a toddler and a…

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Buttricks, Buttresses and Back Roads: Entering Prayer Quiet & Confident

Kings College Chapel

Does King’s College Chapel’s ceiling remind you of winter treetops on an unbending back road? Around here, where winter is long and tree-vaulted roads are common, I am reminded of cathedrals often. Lately, when I think of cathedrals I think of George Butrrick’s advice of prayer (1942). So every time I turn down a winter back road, naturally I feel an urge to pray… and drive…

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Vengeance Is Not Mine

I often apply God’s encouraging words for Judah to His encouragement for victims of sex trafficking.  Today, I read in Jeremiah 50:34, All their captors hold them fast, refusing to let them go.  Yet their Redeemer is strong… He will vigorously defend their cause.  Jeremiah wrote about the Babylonian oppression of the Hebrews. Trafficking victims’ “captors” are…

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