I’ll admit, I don’t like it when someone tells me no. I especially don’t like it when God tells me no. At the same time, I’m so thankful that He does. What a mess my life would be if God gave me everything I thought I wanted when I wanted it. What a spoiled rotten child I would have become. Read more…
BONUS DEVOTION! I’m writing over at Proverbs 31 Ministries today and thought you might enjoy it too. Enjoy your bonus devotion!
The phone rang. It was my ninth-grade son calling in the middle of the day…never a good sign. “Mom, I’m in the principal’s office. You need to come to school.”
I drove to school and found a stranger sitting in the office wearing my son’s clothes. Read more…
I don’t like to struggle. I don’t like to see my child, my husband, or my friends struggle. I like life to be easy.
I want all my friends to love me all the time, my husband to agree with my every decision, and God to answer every prayer with a checkmark.
But deep down I know a carefree life will never produce a courageous person who trusts in God with all her heart. Read more…
It was time for prayer requests from the five-year-olds in my Sunday School class. They eagerly raised their hands and expressed their greatest concerns for the day.
“Pray for my loose tooth, that it’ll come out.”
“Pray for my tooth, that it’ll come in.”
“Pray for my cat who is sick, that God will make her better.”
“Pray for my daddy. Read more…
You could smell the fried chicken as we walked out of the restaurant, but we pranced out as if nothing was unusual.
When I was in college my friends and I never had enough money to go out to dinner…unless it was all-you-can-eat night at Wilbur’s Barbeque. On those nights, we gathered our pennies and ate until we hurt. Read more…
Have you ever felt rejection? I have. It’s not easy, is it?
I sent my first book proposal off to a publisher several months before that fateful day. It was a step of faith walking to that mailbox and dropping it in the slot. However, I knew this was what God was calling me to do. Then the rejection letter came. Read more…
[Before we begin today’s devotion, I want to say how overjoyed I am that nearly 200 women clicked on comment last week and took my challenge to forgive someone who had hurt them! Forgiveness begins with a decision, but the feelings of forgiveness can take a while to catch up. When negative feelings about that person rise to the surface, and they probably will, …
When my brother was a teenager, my mother used to threaten him when he hunched over at the dinner table. “If you don’t sit up,” she would say, “I’m going to buy you a back brace from Sears.” I don’t even know if Sears made back braces then, but it sounded like a pretty good threat to me.
Then I had a son who seemingly grew to six feet overnight. 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…
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…