life. faithful.

Every once in a while, I read a verse of Scripture and think, "I wonder when that got put in there..." because it catches me as something I've never noticed before. As we are nearing the remembrance of Easter, one of those verses caught my attention: " When Jesus was on the earth, a man of flesh and blood, He offered up prayers and pleas, groans and tears to the One who could save Him from death. He was heard because He approached God with reverence. Although He was a Son, Jesus learned obedience through the things He suffered   And once He was perfected through that suffering He became the way of eternal salvation for all those who hear and follow Him" (Hebrews 5:7-9) As they prepared to enter Jerusalem, Jesus knew what He was about to face. He even pulled His disciples aside to tell them plainly (because He had already told them a couple different times and the just didn't get it) that He was about to be mocked, tortured, executed, and raised from the d

 My mom once asked her own mom what she thought was the hardest part about raising kids. I'm not sure when their conversation took place, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was after one of the many... spirited disagreements... we had when I was growing up. Part of Memaw's answer was, "If you can love them through junior high, you can love them through anything." Honestly, junior high was one of the reasons I left teaching. The politics were the main reason, sure, but I'm not going to lie to you and say I loved teaching hormonal young teenagers. I've often said that it didn't seem like my students could really connect with my odd sense of humor and bluntness until they hit about sophomore year. That's the year they would start saying I wasn't too bad, then by junior or senior year they actually seemed to like me a little. 7th through 9th grade, though? Yeah, there wasn't a whole lot of love lost between us. I remember telling my mom once tha

 For a long time, I was of the persuasion--as were so many others who consider themselves politically conservative--that the differences between the political right and the political left were ultimately minor. After all, we all want what's best for the country and best for each other, right? Sure, there were differences in how we wanted to go about reaching the end goal: those on the left were for higher taxes and welfare programs while those on the right were for lowering taxes and teaching people to support themselves, but the end goal of both was for the individual to become successful. Both sides wanted to see a furtherance of the beliefs of our founding fathers: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. In recent years, though, I've come to realize that the right and the left don't have the same end go