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Building Unity in a Broken World
My guest blogger today is Mary Coleman, a teacher from Plainview, Texas. She serves on teams at church including youth, prayer, and nursery. Wife to Jay and mom to three rambunctious boys, Mary brings a perspective to the challenge of racial reconciliation that is both experiential and biblical. When my boys, who are five and seven, argue with each other, they wear a “get-along” shirt. The shirt is Daddy’s, so they both fit inside with one arm sticking out and one around each other. The first time I had them do this, I challenged them to move from one side of the room to the other without touching the…
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Fighting the Empathy Famine: Listening and Learning
A little honestly here: I’m overdosed on listening to partisan pundits. I try to wrap my head around their perspectives and spot the strengths and flaws of their thinking, but I’ve retreated for a while. Instead, I focus my energy on four things: Listening to and comforting those I know whose spirits are crushed, without minimizing their experiences (Prov. 18:13-14). By listening, I have learned of the constant stress my black friend and co-worker feels as she raises her son and daughters. She shared that in the last two weeks she got lost in an upscale neighborhood in my suburb north of Dallas. Late for an appointment, she asked a…
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To Tell the Truth: Integrity and Social Media
COVID-19 mania grips the world right now. And I have noticed a great many posts on social media during this season that include unkind words, poorly documented “facts” or just plain false information. I wrote the bulk of this post several years ago, but its message seems more necessary than ever today: Are you like me? Controlling my words is an area where I must exercise vigilance. Lately negative social media posts are on the upswing. Lies and exaggerations are not uncommon. The “share” button is another potential pitfall. I am convinced that words matter—whether spoken or written. Psalm 34:12-14 challenges me: “Do you want to really live? Would you…
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Covid-19: In the Flood with David
How are you doing, ladies? Whether in Albania, or Jordan, France, the United States, India or elsewhere, we face a common enemy. Not Satan, the biggest enemy, no. This time I write of COVID-19. Unlike the onset of the tornado that slashed through my community several months ago, no warning sirens scream, except an occasional ambulance. We cannot hunker down in a basement or bathroom and wait for the storm to pass. Instead, most of us live in worlds shrunken to the size of our houses, apartments and gardens, and possibly our workplaces, isolated from family and friends. And still, like rising water, the enemy slowly floods community after community,…
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Trusting God or Toilet Paper
Business Insider commented today about people’s response to COVID-19. In a series of tweets they described the panic buying of toilet paper and other household goods. In Hong Kong, panic-buying of toilet paper began last month. A fight broke out in Australia over toilet paper and in California a crowd grew unruly in Costco when they learned the store was out of toilet paper and other basic items. The BBC speculated that perhaps the most horrible thing we can imagine is being stranded with only one square left on the “loo roll.” Why in the world has Charmin become so important to us? It doesn’t cure any viruses. But when…
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More Than We Can Handle
My guest blogger today is Susan Breeding. She shares her hard-won wisdom about suffering. A quote that has been making the rounds for years says, “God will not give you more than you can handle.” However, nothing could be further from the truth. God gives us more than we can handle all the time. Ask anyone who has experienced an excruciating loss. Ask anyone going through unfathomable pain–physical or mental. God gives more than we can handle. My husband, Bruce, had a stroke on June 1, 2019. I found him lying on our bedroom floor, a few breaths away from death. Even though he had been so close to death,…
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Time Management and Wise Living
As you head into 2020, how’s your schedule? Are you looking for things to do? Are your days full? Or are you feeling buried by the demands of home, work, and church commitments? Commitments in my life sometimes tumble on top of each. In fact, when an event occasionally gets cancelled by weather or sickness, I’m sometimes secretly thrilled at the empty space in my schedule. Once, when a planned lunch outing was cancelled, I breathed a sigh of relief. Even without the lunch, activity filled the day as I prepared for a dinner. I shopped, chopped mountains of vegetables, put casseroles in the oven and scrubbed dishes. As guests…
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Refugee Story
My husband breathed heavily as he lifted me and our toddler onto the donkey. My husband’s brown skin, already white with dust, now reflected the moonlight. Our boy started to stir, and I glanced both ways, hoping the boy wouldn’t cry out and waken our curious neighbors. No one could know where we headed, which way we went. I didn’t understand the reasons for our furtive journey, but my husband said that our once safe situation had suddenly become dangerous. There was nothing to be done but flee over the border. Once we reached the more uninhabited areas of desert, I felt a sense of relief. My husband looked back…
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Thanksgiving: Not Only for Giving Thanks
Canadians recently celebrated Thanksgiving, while Americans will be celebrating it later this month. Does your country have a specific day for giving thanks? While many Americans associate Thanksgiving with Pilgrims and Native Americans, it was Abraham Lincoln who made Thanksgiving a national holiday in the midst of the Civil War. In his October 3, 1863 proclamation, Lincoln spoke to a fractured nation and proclaimed a national day of thanksgiving. Not only that, he asked for prayers for “the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation and to restore it as soon as may be consistent with the Divine purposes to the full enjoyment of peace, harmony, tranquility and…
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Unfinished Tasks
Today my guest blogger is Eva Burkholder. She writes about the weight of unfinished tasks. Eva (MACE, Columbia International University) is a missionary kid, wife, mother of two sons and a daughter-in-law, former cross-cultural worker, and missionary member care provider. Eva and her husband of thirty-one years live in Richardson, Texas. She blogs regularly at www.evaburkholder.com. Look for Eva's devotional on the life of Mary, available later this year. I like to cross things off my to-do list. I use tear-off notepads and make lists and lists of what needs to get done today and in the coming days. My lists include unwanted tasks as well as life-giving ones. Then I…
