Lanier Ivester 3 Minute Read My day just isn’t complete without a cup of tea. Okay—several cups of tea. Well, let’s just go ahead and make it several pots of tea. I pretty much drink it all day long. There’s the morning charge of Yorkshire Tea in my darling brown betty pot. Then the mid-morning elevenses of white or green,…
Lanier Ivester 4 Minute Read For over five years it has been my privilege and my joy to serve on the YLCF team. I have loved getting to know so many of you and seeing how God has refined and matured this community while maintaining the unique identity that makes YLCF what it is…
Lanier Ivester 4 Minute Read It’s been nearly a decade since anything has topped out on my list of ‘favorite albums’ that wasn’t whatever the innocence mission had just released. I don’t think I even paused to realize this until Andrew Peterson broke into the winner’s circle a few months ago with his 2005 recording, The Far Country, and spun…
Lanier Ivester 3 Minute Read Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens is one of those books that was just meant to be read aloud. Literally. Dickens considered himself the novelist of the common man and his works were originally published in the relatively inexpensive serialized form. I heard that in nineteenth century England, whole neighborhoods would go in together to…
Lanier Ivester 4 Minute Read “Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house.”-Henry Ward Beecher They are piled artfully on the desk. They mount to the lampshade on the bedside table. They wobble in stacks as precarious as a loose boulder jutting over a snowy mountainscape. Oh, yes. And they fill…
Lanier Ivester 6 Minute Read Last fall I had the privilege and joy of giving a devotional at my 12 year-old niece’s birthday party, a joint celebration with another friend whose birthday was near. They had invited their very nearest and dearest chums, many of which they had known since kindergarten, and it was a very special affair, held at…
Lanier Ivester 4 Minute Read It’s the day before Thanksgiving. One of my very favorite days in the whole year. My kitchen, like so many others across the country (and around the world—I have friends in England, France and Sarajevo celebrating this year) is a scene of happy industry, the loved and familiar scents of sweet potatoes and simmering cranberry…
Lanier Ivester 5 Minute Read There are some books that you just can’t read in the summer. Last winter, Philip and I whiled away the better part of the January and February evenings with Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend, settling in by the fireside at the end of a long day and losing ourselves amid the intrigues and adventures of a…
Lanier Ivester 1 minute In a patriotic theme, we’ll wrap up our ‘Bride’ series with a gem from the Love Stories archive: Gretchen’s grandparents’ love story, now 50 years and counting! ~Lanier Instead of a wedding ceremony on a sunny Saturday in June, ours was on a rainy Wednesday night in January; but it was not lacking in love…
Lanier Ivester 9 Minute Read My parents celebrated their 40th wedding anniversary this year, and in honor of the occasion my brother and sister and I threw them a party. My sister and I sought to re-create some of the special details of their wedding day, from the yellow roses and Queen Anne’s lace to the sugared flowers on the…
Lanier Ivester 8 Minute Read But the June Bride hears the song of a spring that lasts all summer long… As Ashleigh and I were both celebrating such milestone anniversaries this year, and as our weddings were exactly five years and one day apart, we thought it would be special to post a series on our wedding days and the…
Lanier Ivester 8 Minute Read It’s no secret how much I love my sheep. Needless to say, we have sturdy fences in place, which we inspect regularly, as vital to keep intruders out as to keep the sheep in. And I would never—not in a million years, not for love or money—ever consider letting them so much as out of…
The End.
The End.