Faith based living
Insights and anecdotes about living by faith in our role as women, wives, and mothers.
-
Skipping the Scale
Has your news feed been filled with friends making New Year’s Resolutions? Ads for diet pills and gym membership seeming to overtake every commercial break? I feel a bit bombarded. I can’t remember a time I didn’t start the new year wanting to lose weight. I might have been twelve. Some years, it’s been a few pounds. Other years, January first has started a desperate attempt to drop half of a normal human being. This is one of those years. I may not be normal; it’s hard to tell from inside my own head, but being overweight makes me feel like less of a person, not just less valuable, but…
-
Jesus as Clark Kent
My inner geek is going to show for just a second here. I love superhero origin stories. My favorite part of the story is watching them learn who they truly are, struggle with their powers, choose the responsibility of sacrificial heroism. Can you imagine Jesus as Clark Kent? Jesus is the ultimate hero, but we really don’t know what his life was like before he was the teacher we know. I really wish we could see those early moments of Jesus’s life. Talk about the origin of the hero of all heroes! This advent, I’ve been really focusing on Christ’s coming to earth, becoming human, really imagining what that had…
-
A Change in Perspective
Heaven Not Harvard started with my acknowledging that all the world’s pressure on my parenting was creating unnecessary stress, weighing on me, pushing me to be cranky and insistent with an incorrect perspective, trying be a perfect mom based on imperfect standards. Inside my head, I yelled, ‘stop!’ And I shifted my parenting away from a generic “Harvard” goal and prioritized my focus on a “Heaven” goal. Over time, that mantra has shifted my focus in a myriad of ways, including my goals for myself, including my perspective on my marriage, and including events like Thanksgiving. Today, I simply wanted to focus on being thankful, with a peaceful attention on…
-
Fairy Tale Proposal and Happily Ever After
It didn’t start as a fairy tale proposal! It started with a traffic stop. April 6, 2006, I got pulled over by the sheriff. Alarmed, I couldn’t imagine then how this event would change my life. But it did. In 2016, I was so excited to sit in the very spot of this momentous encounter with our sheriff with my daughter and watch this video of her daddy’s surprise return from Iraq which had a bigger twist than I realized. I was stunned. I had no idea what was happening. Until I watched the reply, I wasn’t even sure what I said – on NBC, MSNBC and now YouTube! Now…
-
Haircut Failure
Have you ever known you were making a mistake while you were doing it, and kept at it anyway? I think that pretty much sums up my daughter’s recent, unplanned haircut, for both of us. *SIGH* Being a mother challenges the worrier in all of us. I’ve struggled with worry. I’m learning to take my worry to God and doing better at leaving it with Him. I hate the scary things in this world, but am learning to seek wisdom and understanding what things I can actually control, and to know when to pray and let it just be on my radar instead of blocking my entire path. And I…
