finding God in the wasteland (Isaiah 35:1)
Laughter regularly splashes over my life, such as when my three-year-old mischievously puts his clean clothes in the fridge, and when my six-year-old exclaims, "Mama look in the mirror! Your eyebrows are bushy." I find joy in new friendships and new opportunities. I am forever grateful for a good family and a cozy nest to …
Continue reading Let us run with patience
When Will and I got married, we bought a dear little three-acre patch of overgrown property in the country. A crumbling-down house stood in one corner of the lot, and most of the rest of the area was covered with trees--a luxury for Kansas. We cleared out a space in the trees and moved in …
When I first read this paragraph from God's Country: Faith, Hope, and the Future of the Rural Church by Brad Roth, my mind leaped to a scenario exactly like Roth described: a community losing its missional bearings and directing its energy into constructing a recreational building. In the church, we so often favor the concrete …
I try not to engage in unhealthy introspection, especially when it comes to writing. A night when I read through most of the year's worth of posts at once cured me of that. I thought most everything I wrote was petty and silly. Okay, so this was very late at night when I was feeling …
Some years ago, I sat in a workshop at the Association of Christian Schools International (ACSI) convention in Kansas City. The workshop was about integrating both grace and truth in our communities and schools. At one point, the instructor used a Venn diagram to illustrate what she thought was a healthy balance. On one side …
Continue reading Denominational Superiority and Achieving Balance
I didn't know what to do with the mess of attempted reconciliation going horribly awry. This time, I had cared too much about the relationship to indulge in my usual self-protection. I will run into the roar, I had thought, instead of hiding under my bush and withering away. I might get mauled, but then …
Picking up the small green notecard, my friend read her assigned question on the subject of hospitality. "Do you have an intentional banner for your table? For example, do you want it to be a place of laughter? Of compassion? Of rest?" The women around the table paused a bit to digest the question, then …
There's this thing called contentment, and I still have a series in the back of my mind that includes this subject, but sometimes "contentment" is taken too far. People cry from hearts bursting with emptiness, "What am I supposed to be doing?" and others say, "You can always pray!" "Do the best with what you …
