It Gives Me Pause

On this first day of spring break, my children are staying an extra day with their dad. I’ve been meandering my way through work I need to do and restfulness I need to have. In the middle of doing some cleaning, there was a holler at my front door, “Mailman”. Hooray, my package from Amazon [...]

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Boundaries, Part Three

OR: Will Power
I was thinking that the more boundaries we put down around something, the more of a magnetic pull the thing we are trying to avoid has. The boundaries keep us thinking about this thing and how badly we want it as well as how satisfying we think it would be.
My favorite story [...]

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Boundaries, Part 2

OR: The If… Then…. Worry Trail as a motivator for boundaries
If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, by Laura Numeroff.
Are you familiar with this children’s story? The general idea is how something as simple as giving a mouse a cookie can spin off into many other complicated and thoroughly unanticipated happenings. It’s an adorable and [...]

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Boundaries

Boundaries. I have a real love/hate relationship with this word. I know many people who have found freedom, relief and hope in their relationships by learning about and implementing boundaries. And, I know boundaries are good. Boundaries put a line in the sand, where this is okay, but that is not. I have four children. [...]

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Joy to the World,

The Lord has come!
Yesterday I got up while everything was still very dark and got ready for the community sunrise service. After my week of pondering the darkness and heaviness of life and what it meant for Jesus to have stepped down into the darkness, I was already filled with anticipation as I looked forward [...]

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Light of the World…

…You stepped down into darkness.
That is the song that has been running through my mind this whole Easter week. Last Sunday, some people in my church performed a dance skit to this song (by Tim Hughes), which moved me powerfully and left me in tears for much of the day. The dancers lay collapsed, weeping [...]

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Green and Green

I am sort of interested in environmentalism. Meaning, I care about the environment, but I’m not very good at making that concern a top priority in the midst of all the other things I care about. To a true environmentalist, I probably look totally uncaring and unconcerned.
At the same time, some of [...]

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The Poor and Needy, Part II

I’ve had a lot of second thoughts since that last post. I knew I would, as I was exploring questions, so my own uncertainty was built into the fiber of the words I was trying to express.
I’m afraid, though, when I challenge or question the whole idea of helping the poor or fighting poverty as [...]

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The Poor and Needy

An express invitation is extended to the needy to share in the Passover, in accordance with the original command ׳which emphasizes that no family unit, no matter how destitute, should be excluded from its observance (Ex 12:4, 47). In another sense, everyone is needy, and awaits redemption, and prays that it soon will come.
Because my [...]

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You’re Not Dead Yet

I’m going to share part of a poem. And I’d better warn you ahead of time, it’s morbid. Like the Great Word from my previous post, I heard about this poem in the book When a Crocodile Eats the Sun: A Memoir of Africa, by Peter Godwin, a journalist who grew up in Zimbabwe.  (I [...]

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