Let me tell you about a girl named Margaret. For almost forty years, she lived with word-inflicted wounds that nearly destroyed her life. From the first day she attended her one room schoolhouse, she and her teacher, Ms. Garner, didn’t get along. Ms. Garner was harsh, bitter, and cruel, and could not tolerate Margaret’s childish idiosyncrasies.
Margaret was nine years old when she frantically raced into class, Read more…
It was the incompetent and the inexperienced being led by the inept, the day our Sunday School Class worked on the habitat for humanity house for an unsuspecting, extremely grateful family. Among the crew were two dentists, an investment banker, a lawyer, an engineer, two pastors, a receptionist, several homemakers, and a marriage counselor. It’s always good to have a marriage counselor on hand when a home improvement project is taking place. Read more…
When I was eight years old, my prized possession was a collie dog named, what else, Lassie. Lassie was my shadow. She ran alongside me as I pedaled around the neighborhood on my pink-glittered banana bike. She slept outside the door of my one-room playhouse when my best friend, Wanda, and I “camped out.” She protected me from dangerous strangers, Read more…
Allan was a tough man. Raised by a single mom with five siblings, he learned how to scrape his way through life and climb to the top of humanity’s heap through sheer determination and grit. He married at nineteen, had his first son at twenty, then a baby girl at twenty-five. Over the next two decades he advanced from driving a delivery truck at a lumberyard to becoming part owner of a building supply company. Read more…
If there’s one thing I know it’s this: The measuring stick will get you stuck! Comparison is the devil’s tool that has stopped many of us gals from stepping into our God-given destinies…and it’s time to stop!
I camped out with Moses by the burning bush for more than a year when I was writing the book, Take Hold of the Faith You Long For. Read more…
I’m writing over at Proverbs 31 Ministries today and thought you might enjoy the post as well.
You might be very surprised at what I’m getting ready to tell you, but here goes. For most of my life I felt like I was in second place, an alternate, an also ran, not quite as good as everybody else. Read more…
Have you ever let words fly out of your mouth and then thought…I can’t believe I just said that!!! I call those verbal reflexes. Here’s why
One day I was driving home from the beach in July Fourth holiday traffic. It was Southern muggy hot, and cars were a throng of metal on wheels. Everyone was going faster than the posted speed limit and I was trying to keep up. Read more…
Have you ever been so discouraged that you just wanted to stay in bed and pull the covers up over your head? Maybe that’s where you are right now.
I’ve hidden under the covers a time or two myself. OK, well maybe more than two. I felt that way this past Christmas when my son and his wife couldn’t make it from Chicago to North Carolina because of the snow storm. Read more…
Do you remember the first Rocky movie? (I just looked it up and there have been eight.) In the very first film about the Italian Stallion, Rocky Balboa falls madly in love with the very demure Adrian who works at a Tropical Fish pet store. Adrian is very intelligent, shy, and cautious. Rocky is, well, none of those things. In one scene, Read more…
Steve and I were headed to the coast and stopped for our usual lunch break—Chick-fil-A—Just twenty minutes from our destination, it was one last time to fill up on sweet tea. While Steve purchased our nuggets, I took our Bernedoodle, Molly, for a walk in the grassy area between Chick-fil-A and Dunkin’.
Molly sniffed, stretched, and well, you know. Read more…