ENCOURAGE - EQUIP - EMPOWER
IT STARTS HERE.
My focus during Lent this year has been to seek more of Jesus in my daily life. In my moving around the house, driving in my car, in my conversations, as I discipline my children, as I listen to my friends. I felt a need not to give something up but to make more room for why we even recognize this time of year.
I’m in a season of waiting. I’ve been here for a while. And I’m getting impatient.
Actually, I think I’ve passed impatience. Impatience was a spreadsheet with over one hundred job applications. Impatience was attending my twenty-third wedding without a plus one. Impatience was sobbing to my mom over the phone while sitting in my car in the dark because I was just so tired of the word no.
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Over the past few years I have strived to explore a great majority of the White Clay Creek Preserve. The trails are vast and branch farther than I ever realized. I am thankful for this space that is so close to where we live; not only for the amazing trails, beauty, and peace it provides, but the lessons it has taught me as I have explored the winding water in the creek. It never ceases to amaze me. Each visit there is something different and new. Take for instance a lesson I learned from these pictures.
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I have never considered myself as a person who is prideful. I come from humble beginnings. My parents struggled to keep ahead of the bills. I am grateful for the childhood I had and the training ground it provided. I had to learn a lot of skills in order to make do.
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Are you the person who prepares for an upcoming event or are you the person that just lets it happen? When it comes to vacations, once I have made a reservation, I forget about it until it's time to show up. I am not the person who plans all the things to do and see in the new place until I get there.
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This is a hard blog post for me to write. The hardest, probably.
The words aren’t hard to find. They’ve been locked up inside of me for about twenty years, waiting patiently for this day to come. They’ve made their way out here and there, in one-on-one conversations or with small groups of trusted friends.
But still there are days when it feels much safer to keep those words quiet, stashed under my bed or in the corner of a dark closet where they belong. At least, that’s where he told me they belonged.
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Friendships haven’t always been easy for me. In high school I really struggled with not fitting in and not having close friends. I had low self-esteem and was so self-conscious. The harder I tried to get others to like me, the more I pushed them away. It was painful and there were many tearful drives to school as I contemplated another day of feeling insecure amidst my peers, wanting nothing more than to belong. I wondered if I would ever make friends or be accepted for who I was.
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Several years ago, I walked into Willowdale Chapel on a Wednesday morning for my first experience with women’s Bible study. At the time, I was not yet a believer in Jesus Christ and not sure what I was getting into. As I aimlessly walked around looking for the woman who had invited me to Bible study…
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I keep expecting to wake up a different person. As if by some instant divine transference I’ll be a better woman: I won’t be too forceful. I will no longer be impatient with people when they don’t understand what I’m trying to say. I’d no longer be angry when they make stupid decisions, especially after I gave them sound advice. I would no longer feel like I need to justify everything to everyone all the time! What a beautiful fantasy!
In the musical Les Miserables a prayer is sung by the main character Jean Valjean who prays for the life of young Marius. The song is “Bring Him Home,” and it begins with the words, “God on high, hear my prayer, in my need, You have always been there.” The words capture perfectly the position we are all in when we come to God in prayer. It is a place of need.
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Auld Lang Syne - If you’ve been awake until midnight on New Year’s Eve, you’ve heard this song. Many of us try to sing along but very few of us actually know the words. In fact, it has been estimated that only 3% of people know the words…
I’m not going to lie, writing the blog for the week before Christmas seems like a lot of pressure. I feel the need to come up with something memorable; something that ignites your holiday spirit and leaves you with warm fuzzies, a renewed sense of peace and goodwill, and a deeper understanding of Jesus’s love for you. Something that makes you laugh out loud and blink back tears at the same time. Something you’ll want to share with all your friends and family members and that stranger at the grocery store who looks like they could use some cheering up.
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Coming home at Christmas is often momentous in our house as for many years it has meant someone returning after being far from home. In 2020, Covid separated us from one of our daughters who was in Canada. Last year when she pulled in after driving cross-country to be home for Christmas, we raced to the door singing, “She’s here, she’s here, she’s here!”
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The other day I had one of those moments where I dwelled a bit on the whole idea of Jesus, Son of God, coming to Earth as a human. I’d been reading about the solar system with my five-year-old, and Christmas season was rapidly approaching. NASA had a rocket launch and a lunar eclipse was happening, so I had set an alarm to make sure I got up in time to see the orange-red moon. All of those things were swirling inside my head – our smallness, the vastness of the universe and what we claim is true about Christmas.
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If you are reading this on Thanksgiving Day, I’m guessing you just took a breather before the hustle of the day. If it’s after Thanksgiving, I’d say you didn’t have a moment prior…
So right now, I challenge you. I challenge you to STOP. Pause. BE.
Look around. What do you see?
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“So what do you do?”
“Nnnothing…well…lots of volunteer work.”
Or if I’m prepared, I respond with an affected air, “Domestic Goddess.” That usually works.
I left my career nine years ago. I didn’t really want to, but the circumstances seemed beyond my control at the time.
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Often, I can easily become wrapped up in the stressors and hardships of things of this world. Psalm 103 reminds me that my struggles are temporary and my time on earth is fleeting… The psalms are full of great examples of praise and lament. There are many I go to often, but Psalm 103 is probably my favorite. Let’s dive in for a closer look.
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