Gaining a heart of wisdom
Prayer is hard. Let's just be honest about it. For me, prayer continues to be the most difficult of all the spiritual disciplines. Maybe it's hard for you, too, and you're thinking, “I don’t like to talk about this, but prayer is awkward, and I don’t know what to say. I don’t know how to… Continue reading Prayer Doesn’t Need to Be Awkward
In declaring war against evil, it's the thoughts, the ordinary workings of our mind, that send us veering off course. These are the thoughts of one ordinary Christian woman in the twenty-minute drive home from church on an ordinary Sunday: She stews over a comment made during the meet-and-greet and plans a subtle stab for… Continue reading How Can the Church Understand and Resist Evil?
Elijah the prophet hung out under a broom tree. Paul, John the Baptist, and even Jesus took to the wilderness when they needed to rest. My favorite restful practice is curling up with a good story, so over the Christmas holidays, I took a break from reviewing new books and simply followed my heart into… Continue reading What Do YOU Read When You Need to Rest?
Last year, I started reading through the Old Testament book of Ezekiel with a friend. Initially, I dreaded the project, my only other exposure to the eccentric prophet having been my annual flyovers, gulping down three or four chapters at a time in a hurry to get to the end. This slow read has been… Continue reading Even After Everything, Will You Make The Choice To Trust?
2024 Best Reads! I'm flinching just a bit over the word "best" here, because what would be a blissful read to me might be torturous for you—or for my good husband who has yet to comprehend my devotion to Wendell Berry's and Marilynne Robinson's fiction. ("Nothing happens!") The four superlatives I've chosen have distinguished themselves… Continue reading My Favorite Books from a Year of Good Reading
We propped the lopsided flannel board against the back of the couch, and my grandkids organized the slightly dogeared images, arguing for a minute about who would get to "do the snake." Apparently, Moses wore a bright pink striped robe in his encounter with the burning bush and didn't have time to change before his… Continue reading Bring the Kids You Love Heart to Heart with the Bible
For a family with four sons, close in age like little stairsteps, it seems impossible to fly under the radar. In restaurants, other customers would approach our table with compliments about boys who ate salad or boys who managed themselves politely. We may have heard more than our share of admonitions to "enjoy this stage… Continue reading How Your Imperfect Family Can Make an Eternal Impact
A beat-up black three-ring binder holds the record of 35 gardening years. I turn to it every spring because it remembers where the tomatoes grew last summer. It reminds me of the serendipitous genius of planting the peas next to the fence—a ready-made trellis! It helps me to foil the ravenous beetles by keeping me… Continue reading Life in the Garden on Your Bit of Earth
(...and a new Christmas fiction book just for fun!) The first Sunday of Advent is less than a month away! What will you do this year to celebrate, reflect, and renew your sense of awe that God the Son would hunker down and wizen up and enter the darkness of this world? The incarnation is… Continue reading Four New Resources for Your Advent Reflection
In his iconic poem "How to Be a Poet," Wendell Berry sums up all of creation in one lovely sentence: There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places." He cuts directly to the chase of our persistently false categories and my own personal tendency to desecrate the sacred by forgetting… Continue reading The Importance of Prayer in a Sacred Life
Living Our Days 