Gaining a heart of wisdom
Whenever I open the pages of my Bible, I read about real people and their encounters with a compassionate God who welcomes the shifty and the shy, the bombastic and the bumbler, the liar, and the lecher. Grace paves over some pretty rocky personal landscapes in both the Old and the New Testaments. Even so,… Continue reading Are You Preparing Your Son To Be God’s Strong Warrior?
Fresh out of college, I worked for a children’s ministry. I planned and orchestrated kids' events, taught a lot of Bible lessons and memory verses, but my first great love was teacher training. I loved taking the teachers into the cultural ideas that were shaping the worldviews of the kids they were teaching. I loved… Continue reading Does Your Prayer Life Point to the Beauty of Christ?
Tim Keller and the Ministry of Competence My teacher husband is beginning the process of retirement after 33 years in an elementary school classroom. Believe it or not, it's more complicated and requires more thought and paperwork to STOP teaching than it does to accept a new job. Nonetheless, he's encouraged by the realization that… Continue reading Your Work Matters to the World
Whatever your age or stage of life, if you've made it this far without experiencing sorrow or pain, CONGRATULATIONS, you are a rare and wonderful creature! But don't get too comfortable there, because trouble is a certainty. Jesus declared that it's a sure thing, but not a hopeless thing, for he also said that he… Continue reading God Has a Powerful Purpose for Your Pain
Francis Collins, a well-known public scientist and, more importantly, a Christian, insists that the path to wisdom lies along the broken road of our mistakes. On a recent podcast interview, he shared this illustrative parable: A young student, intent on gaining wisdom, asks everyone he can find, "What is the source of wisdom?"His elders reply,… Continue reading Get Wisdom as You Learn from Your Mistakes
Fleming Rutledge wisely labeled the days we're living in as "the time between the times." We're a little bit like our Exodus ancestors, set free from slavery in Egypt, but not yet living in the Promised Land—having already received the benefits of a great salvation, but awaiting full redemption from sin's effects and consequences on… Continue reading Living as Family in the Time Between the Times
How does one live well before God amid life's challenges? Most of our decisions have to be made on the fly—like taking a test we haven't studied for! Sometimes, the wise course of action is hard to discern, and making a call is impossible until the choice and its consequences are already in the rearview… Continue reading 2 Reading Strategies to Get Wisdom from the Word
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
Reading the Proverbs always feels like drinking from a fire hose. Wisdom comes flying at the reader in quick succession, and no matter how hard I try, I can't stop looking for an outline or some connection between the flood of consecutive aphorisms and metaphors. Of course, in the big picture, it's all connected to… Continue reading Watch Your Words: Speak with Wisdom and Live Well
The garden here on the hill has gasped its last, and sunflowers stand guard over the ruins. Rows of canning jars in my basement are solid evidence of summer's fruition. I expect to be enjoying our beautiful butternut squash for Thanksgiving dinner, but, looking for pumpkins among the tangled vines, the gardening season seems to… Continue reading An Autumn Celebration: The Subtle Beauty of Mature Fruitfulness
Living Our Days 