Jessica Telian 2 Minute Read I’ve always struggled with fear. When I was a little girl, it was the thought that E.T. might come bursting through our roof and take me away. As a young teen, I was terrified that the Bubonic Plague would come again and we would all die a horrible death from it. (Can you tell I…
Jessica Telian 4 Minute Read What imaginative girl has not been captivated by the works of Lucy Maud Montgomery? With a loving eye and a ready pen she gave to the world a tiny island off the coast of New Brunswick and a little band of girl heroines that have delighted the souls of ‘kindred spirits’ the world over. How…
Jessica Telian 3 Minute Read It all started with re-reading old chats and e-mails from Aaron’s and my courtship and engagement days… It was fun and brought back many lovely memories from that hard but beautiful time.
But then the next day, between the into-everything toddler and the fussy baby
Jessica Telian 6 Minute Read From the moment we found out we were pregnant with our first little one, we knew we wanted to have a homebirth. Many of of our close friends had had their babies at home and since there weren’t any factors prohibiting it (high-risk pregnancy, etc.), it was almost a given.
But then…the unforeseen happened.
Jessica Telian 4 Minute Read For us, thus far, this month has been full of weddings. In the past two weekends, we’ve had as many weddings, and while the two weddings couldn’t have been more different from each other, they’ve been filling my mind with thoughts of weddings and marriage and honeymoons and other such lovely things. And very early this morning, when I was up nursing my little guy, I randomly started thinking of the wedding cards that we gave these two couples.
Jessica Telian 4 Minute Read After personal experience and much thought about some of the things the Lord has been teaching me lately, I’ve come to a conclusion: politeness is a great destroyer of true fellowship and close friendships.
That may seem like a ridiculous thing to say…I mean, aren’t we supposed to be polite to each other?! Well, actually, according to the Bible, we are supposed to love each other. Jesus tells us that by this the world will know that we follow Him…”By this all will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.” (John 13:35). And before anyone argues that being polite to each other is loving each other…it’s not. According to my trusty Oxford Desk Dictionary and Thesaurus, “polite” is defined as “having good manners, courteous…cultivated, cultured…refined, elegant”. Those are all nice things, but loving someone goes much deeper than just being courteous to them.
Jessica Telian 2 Minute Read “‘You have a traitor there, Aslan,’ said the Witch. Of course everyone present knew that she meant Edmund. But Edmund had got past thinking of himself after all that he’d been through and after the talk he’d had that morning. He just went on looking at Aslan. It didn’t seem to matter what the Witch said.”
~C.S. Lewis; The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
I’m guessing that many of the readers here have read The Chronicles of Narnia and therefore know the context of this quote. The White Witch comes to demand Edmund’s life from Aslan. As stated, Edmund is a traitor and as such, by rights, his blood belongs to the Witch. The night before the Witch’s audience with Aslan, Edmund had been rescued from almost being murdered by the Witch, and that morning had a conversation with Aslan that “no one ever heard…[but] Edmund never forgot”.
Jessica Telian 2 Minute Read It always amazes me how books can connect people. I know that whenever I meet someone new, a question that is sure to show at least part of our “kindred spirit-ness” is “So, do you like to read?”. If the answer is in the affirmative, and the person starts waxing eloquent about their beloved authors and books, I know we’ll definitely have something to talk about for awhile.
Jessica Telian 3 Minute Read I’m really not one for “inspirational” books. Too many of them seem fluffy, unsubstantial, or fake, written by people who seem to not realize that life is actually really hard sometimes.
When I first heard of One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are by Ann Voskamp, I wasn’t even planning on reading it…
Jessica Telian 4 Minute Read During my teenage years, I read a lot of courtship books. Joshua Harris. Eric and Leslie Ludy. Elisabeth Elliot. You name it. If it was about courtship, I probably read it.
In and of itself, reading those courtship books was not a bad thing. Even though I already knew beforehand that I wasn’t going to “date” casually, and that any relationship I would get into would need to be moving the direction of marriage, reading and knowing that there were others out there who believed the same as I did was encouraging.
However, a steady diet of those type of books during the years when I wasn’t courting–and therefore had nothing to apply what I was reading to–ended up not being a good thing. It essentially caused me to put God in a box in regard to what makes a relationship that is glorifying to Him…
Jessica Telian 5 Minute Read Contrary to what many people think, anorexia (anorexia nervosa) is essentially a mental illness. The person’s mind distorts their body image from what it truly is. I would look at my stick-thin body in the mirror and think that I was fat…I was delusional. But until I read Feeling for Bones, I didn’t realize that was anorexia, I thought I was just concerned about how I looked. But it was more than just concern.
Jessica Telian 3 Minute Read Before I was married, I had all these grand ideas about how I would be such a wonderful wife. The house would always be as clean as possible, I would always make meals from scratch, I would make sure the laundry hamper was never overflowing. I could maybe fudge on some of them if I was deathly ill or something, but other than then, I would work hard to be a good wife and make sure that all that was done.
The End.
The End.