Lanier Ivester 2 Minute Read My sister and I have always held that this is the perfect time of year to be reading a Lucy Maud Montgomery book. No matter how many times they’ve been read and re-read—the condition of my beloved paperbacks is quite appalling!—there is just something about September that seems to evoke a mood sufficiently wistful to…
Lanier Ivester 3 Minute Read When I was fifteen, I decided that I needed more consistency in my devotions. So, I resolved to spend a certain amount of time in God’s word every single day. And I mean every single. Those of you perfectionists out there can appreciate, perhaps as no one else can, just how tenacious I was in…
Lanier Ivester 3 Minute Read I often feel so completely unequal to the dreams and visions that God stirs in my heart. That is, until I remember that my best bet is to continually pray that I would be ‘small enough and weak enough’ that He could actually use me, rather than bumbling around in His way in my own…
Lanier Ivester 2 Minute Read My husband and I are reading The Lord of the Rings trilogy for the first time. I blush to admit it; we’ve had the best of intentions over the past few years since we read–and adored–The Hobbit. We’ve been surrounded by friends who are ardent lovers of all things Middle-earth. We were even stung by…
Lanier Ivester 6 Minute Read “The more I know of the world, the more am I convinced that I shall never see a man whom I can really love. I require so much!” -Marianne Dashwood How many of us sighed at that endearingly-rendered line of Kate Winslet’s in the movie Sense and Sensibility? I know I did, and giggled with…
Lanier Ivester 4 Minute Read I got out my calendar a few days ago and counted how many weeks I have left of my summer. I’m almost half-way there. Having no children in school—and not being in school myself—I’ve had the freedom the past several years to set the arbitrary, if reasonable, borders of June 1st to August 31st. September…
Lanier Ivester 1 minute I love summer! I love the cool, still mornings, the firefly-lit gloamings, and even–most of the time–the long, hot afternoons which give us Southern girls the ‘dewy look’. 😉 Here are two of my favorite ways to cool off that lend an air of celebration to an ordinary summer day: Here’s one that people either…
Lanier Ivester 5 Minute Read Three weeks ago today I was on a ladder in the backyard doing yet another of those absolutely imperative tasks that must be completed before vacation: spraying the peach trees. I had already had that conversation with myself about how stupid it was to get up on a rickety ladder with a heavy, awkward sprayer…
Lanier Ivester 6 Minute Read I had always wanted a vegetable garden. But our first summer of marriage we were too busy getting married, honeymooning and writing thank you notes even to think of it. So I tucked some tomato and pepper plants in among the lantana and verbena in my flower garden and commenced dreaming of the enormous vegetable…
Lanier Ivester 2 Minute Read The Scottish-American preacher Peter Marshall is one of my heroes. Not only for his robust faith and his imagery-laden sermons that read like poetry. Not only for his distinction as one of the most respected chaplains of the United States Senate. And not just because his beloved Westminster Presbyterian was right here in Atlanta.I absolutely…
Lanier Ivester 6 Minute Read In the 1963 Walt Disney film Summer Magic, Hayley Mills sings an adorable little song that would have ended up on the cutting room floor in this day and age—if it had even made it that far, which is doubtful. She and Deborah Walley cheerfully instruct another girl on the wiles of womanly allurement as…
Lanier Ivester 2 Minute Read We have a big flowering cherry in our backyard that dazzles us each spring with its profusion of pink blooms. I’ve been monitoring its progress in recent weeks, from bare twigs to buds to tightly-furled blossoms. It seems now as if the slightest breath of a south wind would cause it to burst into life…
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