One night I was in the restroom touching up my makeup before speaking to several hundred women. I was having one of those moments when I looked in the mirror and thoughts began to swirl in my mind. What am I doing here? What do I possibly have to say to these women that could make any difference in their lives? Read more…
I had a devotion over at Proverbs 31 Ministries last week, and I’m thinking you might enjoy it too. Be blessed!
Before I had my first child, my husband, Steve, and I took a six-week class on child care at the local Red Cross. But when my son was born, the minute the nurse placed that little human on my chest, Read more…
One Spring, our family hosted a ten-year-old Russian foreign exchange student. I got to be his mamma for six weeks. He went to school with my son and got a taste of what the American Christian family is all about. Alex’s English was very limited, and we depended on hand signals and facial expressions to get by.
One day, Read more…
Have you ever felt that you were overlooked or ignored…like you were a nobody? Well, take heart sister. You are not alone. Most of us have felt that way at one time or another.
I’ve been the girl not invited to the party, the kid not chosen for the team, the applicant not chosen for the job, the writer not chosen by the publisher, Read more…
She was at it again. Mrs. Barnett was getting out the scorecards and tallying up the points.
I sat with an older woman as she began enumerating her family’s shortcomings. “Callie never comes to see me,” she began to complain about her granddaughter. “And she never calls me either. I saw her sitting on the other side of the church last week and she didn’t even come over and give me a hug.”
“Benjamin is just as bad,” she continued, Read more…
Can I make a confession? Sometimes I quit too soon. I’ve quit when what I really needed to do was press on and press through. Sometimes I’ve gotten tired of trying. Sometimes I’ve gotten tired of the struggle. And you know what? I’ve missed many blessings because I got tired of the battle. I don’t want to do that any longer. Read more…
It was an unusual phone call from my son, Steven. He was in his second week of his second semester, his third year in college.
“Hey mom, this is Steven. I just wanted to call and say ‘hello.’ I haven’t talked to you in a while and wanted to see how you were doing.”
“Hey bud,” I replied. 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…
A sign was posted on a telephone pole by the grocery store: “LOST DOG with three legs, blind in left eye, missing right ear, tail broken, and recently castrated. Answers to the name of Lucky!”
Perhaps you feel just about as “lucky” as that lost dog. Hobbling along. Impaired vision. Broken tail. Well, you get the picture. There was a woman in the Bible who also felt like she was out of luck and had nothing to give. Read more…