life. faithful.

I've written before about how different songs have had an impact on different phases on my life. Music has always been a huge part of my life, starting with the songs my mom and her mom taught me when I was little— The B-I-B-L-E, He's Still Working on Me, Mares-e-dotes, Sunbeam, Jesus Loves Me... the list could go on for a while. In school, my first heartbreak came when I didn't make the elementary choir in 5 th grade and one of my proudest moments came when my high school choir teacher looked at me in shock during my audition one year and asked, “Where did that come from?” Music has a way of reaching all the way to my heart. I've fallen to my knees listening to a worship song that broke me, I've been lifted high by another that made my heart soar. I've had songs of all genres made a difference in my life. My now husband but then boyfriend told me how he felt about me with Coldplay's Yellow. I've sung along with songs that said what I couldn...

I'm so tired of all this mess. from wonderopolis.org I'm tired of hatred being spewed in the name of “progress.” I've tried to simply ignore it, taking the ostrich approach of sticking your head in the sand and hoping it will all just blow over. Surely, we're better than this—smarter than this. Surely, people will get tired of the fear-mongering and race baiting and police blaming. Surely we'll look at those who stand up and rant about how we can't "discredit one person's experience" (though it is perfectly fine to discredit the experiences of millions of others) and see them for what they are—pitiful, insecure, lost people. The thing is, that's not happening. While I'm trying to ignore the chaos and hatred, it's tearing everything down around me. It's taking this country that I have always loved, the country that my brother fought and died to defend, and it is twisting it into something dark and scary that I don't...

From the very beginning, Satan's best trick and favorite method seems to be to tell us, "Sure, God said this, but you're smart enough to know that what He really meant was..." We get ourselves into the most trouble when we start thinking that we are somehow smarter than God, that we know better than He does. We chase after our own plans as if somehow what we have in mind for ourselves is better than what God has had planned since before time began. We take what God has said, and we twist His words to fit our own purposes. We take what He has spoken out against--greed, envy, lies, sexual immorality, hatred, anger--and we try to say that He isn't really against those things. We say that His words were meant for a different time, and that they don't apply today. What makes us think we're smarter than God? Why do we think we need to interpret His words, that somehow we've "evolved" to be above what the Scriptures tell us? Jeremiah 10:...

I've got a treat for you today—instead of my words, I've asked my dad to share his thoughts on Independence Day. So without any other introduction (because his words speak pretty clearly for themselves), here are Pop's thoughts. *** picture from history.com “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.” Someone has called this sentence the most consequential statement in the history of human politics. As we celebrate the signing of the Declaration of Independence—the declaration that we are free from the king of England and the beginning of our national history—a careful reading reveals a clear implication that the Founding Fathers included in the document another declaration: a Declaration of Dependence upon the Sovereign God that, as Benjamin Franklin said, “guides the course of human affair...