life. faithful.

For those who really know me (or those who have been reading this blog for a while), this will come as no surprise: I like to be in control of things, to know just how everything is going to work out. I like to have a plan. If you ask my mom, she'll probably tell you that my mantra has always been, " I can do it myself ." I have always been an incredibly independent person. I can usually figure my way through a difficult situation, and I've always taken pride in that. I don't like to ask for help--I'm perfectly capable of working things out for myself, thank you. Only, sometimes I'm not. That's something that has taken me a long time to be able to admit (and something I'm still working on, to be honest). I've always tried to be strong, to stand on my own two feet and face whatever life throws at me. The thing is, that's not what God wants from me. God doesn't want my strength, because He has more than enough of His o...

This life is hard--sometimes unbearably so. Just yesterday, an amazing couple with a strong faith lost their son to a mysterious, aggressive illness. A sister lost her brother, her kids lost their uncle, some sweet friends lost their cousin, and a whole host of people lost a friend. Life hits hard sometimes, hard enough to knock us flat. In those times, the times when we need God the most, it's incredibly hard to see Him. It's like when the disciples were in the boat and a storm came up without warning. They were facing the wind and the waves, fighting desperately to keep the boat from sinking--struggling to just keep from drowning. All the while, Jesus was sleeping. (Matthew 8:23-27) We cry out like David, "Save me, O God, for the waters have come up to my neck. I sink in the miry depths, where there is no foothold. I have come into the deep waters; the floods engulf me. I am worn out calling for help; my throat is parched. My eyes fail, looking for my God . ...

Veterans Day. Today is one of those days that are a bit hard for me. Today, we honor all those who have served. Today, we say thank you... ~to all those who have given of themselves for the sake of freedom. ~to all who give up their own precious time to serve and protect. ~to those who believe freedom is worth fighting for. ~to the strong. ~to the brave. ~to the courageous. ~to those who stand on the front lines to protect those they love--and those they've never met. ~to those who are scared, but who do the job anyways. ~to the faithful. ~to those who are tired, but know they'll rest when the job is done. ~to all those who choose to take a stand. ~to those who unselfishly take on an often thankless job. ~to the wounded, some with wounds that everyone notices and others with wounds the rest of us will never see. ~to the Army, Navy, Coast Guard, Air Force, and Marines.   We say thank you, but the words don't seem like enough to honor the sacrifices made b...

I have a love-hate relationship with social media. On one hand, I love that I'm able to keep in touch with-- or, let's be honest here, act like a creepy stalker and look at all their pictures without actually ever being in contact with -- a bunch of people from my past who I would never know anything about otherwise. I love getting to see baby pictures and wedding pictures and school pictures and albums of beautiful places I'll most likely never get to see in person. I love reading status updates that show excitement for new jobs, new houses, and new loves. I smile regularly when I get online, which is wonderful. I like to smile. On the other hand, though, I hate social media. It becomes an easy place for people to post personal things they would never share with other people under other circumstances, things I would really rather not hear about--or worse yet, see pictures of! I don't like the animosity that pours out of people online. For some reason, the ...

In recent years, "religious freedom" has taken on new meaning in the United States. People twist the phrase, even going so far as to form a group called "Freedom from Religion" whose unspoken yet evident purpose is to attack Christianity. There are even those who try to argue that our Founding Fathers were not intending to establish a Christian nation. The thing is, no matter how people try to twist it, the Truth never changes . The signers of the Declaration of Independence knew what it would take for a new nation to survive and thrive. As the authors of Under God stated, " In declaring their independence from earthly power and authority, out Founding Fathers declared their dependence upon the Almighty God: 'with firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence.' " Samuel Adams said, " We have this day restored the Sovereign, to Whom alone men ought to be obedient. He reigns in heaven and... from the rising to the setting sun, may...

We've lost ourselves. Somehow, in all the chaos and the noise around us, we have lost sight of everything that is truly important, everything that once set us apart. We have stopped taking a stand, and as a result we have let others walk all over us in the name of "progress." We have become a country ~which would rather protect a chicken than a baby ~in which people barely bat an eye when a woman publishes a video of herself having an abortion ~in which a woman writes a selfish letter to the unborn child she is planning on killing (one she calls Thing), and gets praised for making a choice "for her" ~in which a boy was given detention for sharing his lunch with a classmate who had less ~with people so afraid of offending others that they hide their own beliefs ~where people are attacked for supporting the Biblical definition--God's definition--of marriage ~where it is accepted and expected for people to sleep together before they are married in...

It's been a while since I wrote here. To be honest, it's been a while since I did any kind of writing. I would like to say that's just because I've been so busy with school, with all the articles I'm reading and everything I'm writing for my education classes. I would like to say that, but it wouldn't be the truth. I haven't written because I don't want to write what I feel like I should write. I've been feeling lost lately, in so many different ways. I've started a different career path again with the change over to education and physics. I've ripped out page ofter page in multiple notebooks, with nothing I write coming out the way I want it to. I've started over on at least 3 different stories, but none of them have worked. I've cried out in my prayers, begging to hear from God, but He's seemed silent. My heart and soul feel like they're tied up in knots, and no matter what I try to do I can't seem to undo the k...

I told Pop one time that my favorite sermon of his was, "Liar, Lunatic, or Lord?" and was a bit surprised by his response. "Thanks," he said, "but I can't take credit for that. If I remember right, I borrowed that from C.S. Lewis." Not a bad guy to borrow a sermon topic from, if you ask me. I was trying to decide what to write on here a while back and Nathan told me I should write about that sermon. He hadn't heard it and I can't remember anything more than the main points, so I put it off. For one thing, I haven't been real anxious to tackle a topic C.S. Lewis wrote about--or one Pop spoke about. Both sets of those shoes are pretty big to try to fill, to be honest. The other day, though, I gave in. I decided I would look into it and make an attempt to write something. I looked up the sermon and found something interesting:          It looks like C.S. Lewis borrowed the idea, too. From what I can tell, the "trilemma" can b...

I'm a bit overwhelmed by the number of letters I've seen lately, letters full of pain and bitterness aimed at "preacher dads." They are letters from PKs who write about never seeing the love of Christ in their home while listening to their dad preach it from the pulpit. They are letters of legalism, punishment, and neglect. The words pour out of wounded hearts, and the damage done to such tender spirits is evident. Yes, sometimes being a preacher's kid is hard. For all those who were wounded, though, there are others of us who were blessed. Our hearts haven't been hurt, though, so as is often the case you don't hear from us. I don't write to take away from one side, but to perhaps lend my voice to the other. So here's my letter, from one preacher's kid to her father... *** Dear Pop, I know it worried you at times, the question of how your job affected your kids. I'm sure that's common to a lot of dads, but it somehow seems differ...

I don't post twice in one day. Pretty sure I've never done it before, and there's a pretty good chance I'll never do it again. Today, though, I had to make an exception. There is evil in this world. Most of the time here in the U.S. we see it from a distance, a faceless terror affecting the lives of other people. It seldom affects us, so though we know it is there we don't feel it's effects. This morning, evil reached out and touched my family. I sent Nathan off to school this morning, because he's going to be spending the next year dividing his weekdays between the college campus and a high school campus while he works towards a Master's in education. After fixing breakfast for the kids at around 7 a.m., I saw multiple missed calls from Nathan. When I got him on the phone, he told me that a wheel had come off of the Bronco as he drove into Toledo. A little while later, after being towed to a service station, he told me that the mechanics were e...

There's a story about a man who went in view of the call at a church. He gave a sermon that everyone thought was amazing, and they all voted to have him as their new pastor. Much to their surprise, he preached the same sermon his first Sunday there. When he stood up the next week and did the same thing again, the church leaders confronted him about it. The new pastor listened calmly to their complaints then smiled. "Don't worry," he said, "I'll move on to the next sermon when you figure out how to start living out this one." *** Have you ever been there? I know I have. There are times when I feel like God is harping on one topic with me, grounding the same lesson into my head over and over again. It's as if He's preaching the same sermon day after day, week after week-- sometimes even year after year. Most of the time, the words are the same. If you look back through the posts in this blog, you'll see a common theme in what I...

10 years. Somehow it seems like it just happened yesterday , yet a lifetime ago at the same time. 10 years where life has gone on all around me while a part of me has been forever frozen in time. A decade in which I have slowly learned to grieve and live at the same time. My hometown will be dedicating a street to Michael at 10 tomorrow morning on the 10th anniversary of his death. The rest of my family will be there, hearts heavy with the pain of both the day's memories and the death of my grandpa in the quiet hours between last night and this morning. This will be one of many memorials I've missed. You see, for years I couldn't --and wouldn't-- deal with my brother's death, so I didn't go to all the services to honor his sacrifice. My logic was simple: if I didn't have to face it, I didn't have to hurt. The thing is, a heart doesn't work that way. Oh, it can for a while. But by avoiding the pain, never letting it show, all I managed to do...

Cows are funny creatures. I was reminded of that this past weekend when I was home to visit and got to help Pop move his herd across the road. Summer in Arkansas means hot and dry most of the time (though the start of this summer hasn't been too bad), and that means the grass can't quite keep up with all the cows snacking on it all day long. Since I was home to help, Pop wanted to run all his cows in, put wormer on them, and move them across the road to where the grass was greener... on the other side of the fence... sorry, I couldn't resist. It went relatively smoothly at first, and most of them came up when he hollered and started up the tractor. We even managed to get them worked relatively uneventfully--Pop only got kicked a couple of times, and the only one to kick at me graciously stopped her foot a good couple of inches in front of my face (yes, my face. Pop's comment was, "She's a bit of a high kicker, huh?"). But then, we had to try to get...

"A good name is better than fine perfume, and the day of death better than the day of birth. It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting, for death is the destiny of every man; the living should take this to heart. Sorrow is better than laughter, because a sad face is good for the heart. The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, but the heart of fools is in the house of pleasure." ~Ecclesiastes 7: 1-4 I'm just a couple days away from making one of the hardest trips of my life, traveling back home to quite possibly say goodbye to both my grandfathers. Papaw has had a hard fight for a long time now, battling COPD and emphysema for every breath. Grandpa's fight has been more recent and less obvious, but he now fights against the cancer in his esophagus just to be able to swallow his liquid diet. They have both always been amazing, strong men, and it makes my heart hurt to see their bodies turning on them. I'm broken ...

This week has been VBS, and to be honest I went into it pretty negatively. It was only 3 days for 2 hours each day; I'm used to 5 days of VBS, all morning each day. Set-up was done in just a couple of hours; I'm used to spending most of the week before VBS at the church building doing set-up and decorations. I was going to be walking around from station to station with a group of kids; I'm used to classroom teaching and time to get to know the kids. Basically, things weren't going to be done the way I expected, and I got negative. Then I was talking about school with Nathan. I was upset about how things are progressing-- or not progressing, to be honest. I was frustrated about being looked down on and judged. I was tired of doing things the right way only to be knocked down-- over and over again. So again, things weren't going the way I expected. And when my own kids started talking back to me and being mean to each other and just plain not listening, I fel...

The last time I wrote , it was about how God sometimes speaks in the quiet, the passage in I Kings 19 where God chose to speak to Elijah in a whisper instead of in the power of the storm or earthquake. Have you read the chapter before that recently? It's the one where Elijah challenged all the prophets of Baal and Ashera to a duel. Really--an old-fashioned duel! Only instead of guns blazing it was a duel of fire. Well, it would have been a duel of fire, only the prophets of Baal and Ashera didn't have any fire to duel with. Elijah, on the other hand, had flames that God sent down, fire hot enough to burn up a bull, the firewood, all the water that had been poured over the altar, the 12 stones used to build the altar, and the soil the altar was built on. Then, Elijah watched as all the people of Israel turned back to God. After that, he killed all 850 false prophets. And even after that, he told the king that rain was coming--even though there had been a drought for 3 ...

"The LORD said, 'Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the LORD, for the LORD is about to pass by.' Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire. And after the fire was a gentle whisper. "  ~I Kings 19 : 11 & 12 "Be still, and know that I am God" ~Psalm 46:10b Life is busy. Sometimes, it's just plain hard to get away from everything--assuming we even want to. These days, the thing people seem to be the most concerned about is being connected. You very rarely see somebody without a cell phone somewhere in sight, and facebook and twitter are even at the center of advertising campaigns. I'm pretty sure I'm not alone when I admit to spending way too much time on facebook, pretty much just...