As we prepare to celebrate Thanksgiving and look ahead to the holiday celebrations throughout the month of December and the beginning of January, I find that I frequently need to recalibrate my expectations and perspective. I originally wrote these thoughts a few years ago in the midst of broken and strained relationships that drastically altered…
Category: Life
Planning
“Planning is just guessing.” So begins a recent post from a homeschool mom, author, and podcaster I follow. How encouraging, right? Your best-laid plans – the ones that took you hours to create and notate and refine and rewrite and think through, yes, those plans – are just guesses. Educated guesses, to be sure. But…
His Bountiful Care
One of the most oft-repeated songs in our house over the last year has been “O Worship the King”, thanks to my 7-year-old and our long-standing bedtime routine of a song of choice for each of the girls and a final from the hymnal. (If you don’t know this hymn, it’s worth a few minutes…
Hope in the Midst of Grief
This seems to have been a summer full of loss. There are 5 families close to me – including my own, actually – who have lost loved ones since that’s the beginning of the summer, and whether that’s a coincidence or more a symptom of growing older, I’m not sure. But one of the outworkings…
One Generation to Another
I’ve been meditating on Psalm 145 for several weeks, and particularly verse 4 comes to mind often: “One generation shall commend Your works to another, and shall declare Your mighty acts.” This is one aspect of our small group Bible study that I greatly cherish – the cross-generational demographic of each group. There, one generation…
Why I’m a Steadfast Supporter of Small Groups
Late summer, before the true beginning of fall, is a treasured time for me. Summers are long and generally uneventful, but for many, the busyness of vacations and breaks in routine and day-trips and general chaos means that connections with friends can be haphazard at best. But early September is a sweet time when our…
Better Than Silence
Last week I wrote a little bit about 2 Samuel 13 (it can be found here if you missed it or need a refresher), and one of the major things we learned from the account of Amnon and Tamar is that silence cannot be our response. So today, I wanted to highlight three organizations that…
Abbots & Popes: Lessons from Benedictine Monks
To be frank, I really never thought there would be much practical crossover between the lives of a medieval monk and a 21-st century working mom. There is nothing about daily routines on either side that screams “Similarity!” However, I was mistaken about the crossover; it’s there, but the similarity is revealed in a whisper…
In Due Season
One of our hobbies (or mine, anyway; Z indulges me by constructing whatever I need and putting it in place, but the daily labor is mostly mine) is growing as much of our own food as possible on our little plot of land. We have more property than a typical house “in town”, but far…