Faithful friends and loved ones have been checking in on my family and me to see how we are doing since Mom’s passing a month ago today. My standard answer is typically one of two replies – “I’m doing fine until someone asks me how I’m doing,” or “My grief ebbs and flows but God’s grace sustains.” You may know how that is. One moment I look at a picture of Mom and I smile with warm memories, and then another moment I look…
“Do not grieve, for the joy of the Lord is your strength.”
– Nehemiah 8:10b
If you have been following my blog for the past several weeks, you know I have been picking a Scripture card at random from my stash of encouraging Bible verses. Before I send that card to someone, I blog on it. This week’s card was picked at random a couple of weeks ago and I decided to hold onto…
“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness…I keep on swallowing.” (A Grief Observed, C.S. Lewis)
While I would never aspire to fully understand and interpret exactly what C.S. Lewis meant by this quote, I can say that for many years I feared a specific kind of grief. Grief and fear, in my mind, walked hand in hand,…
Christmas Eve has always been my favorite day of the year, for many reasons, but most of all because of the anticipation associated with it! As a child I can remember going to church on the Eve of Christmas, but not really paying attention because I was wondering if Santa was loading presents under our tree while we were worshipping. Anticipation! Turns out he never was, for reasons I came to understand as I matured.
As a non-Santa believing person, I still liked Christmas Eve the best because of our many family traditions. We would decorate…
You better get movin’….well at least you better if you haven’t kept pace with the 2011 Census which reports the average American will move 11.7 times in the span of their life. I’m not sure what the .7 means? An “almost move” gone bad? Whatever it means, moving is a pretty common occurrence until it hits close to home.
In our last few blogs, we have been writing about the book, “The Land Between: Finding God in Difficult Transitions”. The book contains 15 sermons exploring the difficult losses the Israelites experienced…
