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Guided By an Unseen Hand
It was a year to remember—but not for the reasons I hoped. Just two weeks after finding out we were expecting our third child, my husband came home with news we always feared. He’d be moving on from the coaching job where he’d served for thirteen years. Our family would be moving on from the community where we’d raised our children. We walked forward into an unseen, unknown, and unexpected future. Where would our soon-to-be kindergartener go to school? Where would we live? How would we make ends meet? The uncertainty continued for months. My husband jumped on a seemingly endless carousel of job interviews before ending up at a…
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Some Lessons from a Forty-Year-Old Marriage
This spring my husband and I celebrated our 40th wedding anniversary. We are grateful to God for bringing us together and for His grace in our marriage. To celebrate, we wanted to find some trails in Colorado to hike. However, after looking for several weeks, we were unable to find any trails that would work. Unbeknownst to us, God had something else planned. A missionary agency contacted my husband to inform him Albania had requested some medical training in his specialty. The planning trip would need to take place during the time we had set aside to celebrate our 40th wedding anniversary. We felt God would have us postpone (or…
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Walking in the Wilderness
This post was originally published in 2012. But it fits as much today as it did then. I once had a mentor tell me that the lessons of our lives often go in circles, just like Israel wandered a circular path in the wilderness. The older I grow, the more I see the cycles—the same lessons are learned more deeply as we step into new but different places. If you find yourself walking through a wilderness season, take heart. God is using the deeply worn pathways to teach you and take you somewhere good. Forty years—it sounds like an eternity. I’m sure it felt that way for the Israelites too.…
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Loving and Giving
“For this is the way God loved the world: He gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.” John 3:16
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Living in Limbo
Normal. Where has it gone? A few months ago my boys romped on playgrounds daily and bounced into their church classrooms on Sundays. Today we watch church online and debate whether it’s safe to start pre-k this fall. The routine we once enjoyed feels years removed. In its place we navigate endlessly changing regulations, mask mandates, and shifting data. As much as I want to believe this will be over soon, I know the end isn’t quite in site. So I’m learning to live in limbo. It’s a hard lesson, isn’t it? Letting go of the past and embracing the present—however messy and uncertain it feels. Here are a few…
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Better Than Before
The past few week have changed us. No person, community, or country remains untouched. We’ve stayed inside our home day after day. We’ve grieved over loss—personally and corporately. We’ve feared for our livelihood and wondered how long we can make ends meet. Life won’t be the same following COVID-19. But as we slowly emerge from national and international shutdown, I want to leave better than before, lessons learned, life lived differently. Here are a few things I’m trying to take hold of in this season: Life’s fragility. If there’s anything COVID-19 has confronted and disbanded within us, it’s our sense of invincibility. As we stare at daily rising death…
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WAITING WELL
Have you set some New Year Resolutions? How long will you persevere before giving up and returning to the old habits? If you are like me, you have a life time of unfulfilled resolutions and only a few that you actually accomplished. I think often that life is a journey. And when you set out on a journey the one thing that you know for sure is that there will be a period of waiting. There is no, “Beam me up Scotty!” We are all slowly traveling toward our Heavenly destination. And no matter how impatient we are to get there. Even as we progress toward our destination we have…
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GOD’S KINGDOM OBJECT LESSON
God has a kingdom. Jesus came to herald the coming of that kingdom, “I must proclaim the good news of the kingdom of God to the other towns too, for that is what I was sent to do.” Luke 4:43 Net Bible. When Jesus sends out the seventy, He tells them to say, “The kingdom of God has come upon you!” Luke 10:9b Net Bible. Interestingly in that same passage Jesus makes this comment as well, “The one who listens to you listens to me, and the one who rejects you rejects me, and the one who rejects me rejects the one who sent me.” Luke 10:16 Net Bible. Do you…
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Walking in Circles
A wiser woman once told me that, much like the children of Israel, God sometimes leads us in circles. We learn and relearn life’s lessons as we walk through similar circumstances again and again. If you look at the geography, there wasn’t much room for the children of Israel to wander in the wilderness. Instead they trod the same paths over and over again for forty years. And amidst those circular trails, they learned dependence, obedience, and trust. I’m not suggesting that the circular seasons of life are punishment. Israel wandered in the wilderness because of their disobedience and unbelief. But I also know that God disciplines those he loves…
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Suffering and All Its Glory
There are several ways to approach teaching God’s Word. There are those who focus on teaching the principles, others on the doctrine, and still others put the focus on the words or the content of the passages. They tell the stories, they highlight the words and they emphasize the historical facts. They carefully teach the who, what, when, where, why, and even the how of the story. I have tended to use this method. Through this form of teaching I learned a lot of the characters, places, and events in the Bible. I have seen how God works and how people respond to His person, power, and promises. After over…
