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Real God in an Artifically Flavored World
Today, (contrary to everything I’ve been trying to do all year) I purposefully gave my child high fructose corn syrup, artificially flavored, red dye #40 (or whatever is causing cancer this week) on a stick. Yep, all the rules of how we’re trying to eat clean – broke ’em. Nobody died. I don’t even think I gave her cancer. I have been learning a lot about our food this past year, and frankly, it’s terrifying. It is hard to find anything the experts can agree on. So today the rubber met the road, and I cried UNCLE. My daughter gets ferociously carsick on her best days. Every trip past 15…
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Previewing
Today isn’t going to be super deep, just celebrating getting something right and seeing the fruits of my preparation blossom, and I wanted to share this skill because I know I’ve seen how this improves our lives time and time again. Something I have seen as a teacher is the importance of previewing activities. As a teacher, we preview to help students understand the objectives in a new lesson, to tie in previous learning to the new skills, and to clarify the purpose and procedure of the activity. Previewing is literally the best tool in my parenting toolbox because it prevents issues. Rather than be reactive to a crisis, previewing…
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Why, yes, we do validate!
Friendship is not for the faint of heart. Real friendship can be messy sometimes if we’re real, honest, and hold each other accountable. Nothing is harder than hearing you’re wrong from someone you really respect and want to be respected by, but if I’m wallowing in pig poop, I need someone to tell me this isn’t the time for a facial! However, I’ve been known to stand in the poop and try to argue that it’s a spa treatment. God has really been teaching me to listen to the correction, searching my heart for any truth in it. Because I’ve learned that even if the entire message doesn’t apply, there…
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Faith Mountain
I am standing in the muck right now, spiritual muck. Life got real hard spiritually during the past week. From the outside, everything looks great or at least no different, but from the inside I’m standing in front of a faith mountain pounding my fists against its craggy surface, screaming, “MOVE!!!” But it doesn’t budge. I’m feeling discouraged, defeated, depressed, wounded, alone. I spent several days last week near tears every second of the day. My heart felt like an albatross around my neck. I had moments of laughter, but the sadness just kind of hung around. The situation grew into a mountain. It was a mountain that I have…
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The Butterfly Effect: Handling Rejection as a Christian
How are you with handling rejection? I’m not very good at it. God has shown me better how to handle it, but it always hurts. When someone I care about rejects me, my first reaction is intense hurt and sorrow. I want answers. What did I do? Am I not a good person? But . . . not every rejection is about me. If it is, if I did something unwittingly unkind, then I need to own it, but I have had to learn that sometimes the conflict is not about me. Sometimes, they are rejecting Christ in me. So what should we do when people reject us because of…
