Natasha Metzler 4 Minute Read Our son came home on a rainy November day. Instead of a hospital room, we gathered him to us from an airport waiting area. We knelt and talked to him by the luggage carousel and bonded over dinner at Cracker Barrel. My heart cracked with the glory of the Lord’s redemption in my life. While…
Caroline Rose Kraft 6 Minute Read “That is a good book it seems to me, which is opened with expectation and closed with profit.” (Louisa May Alcott) Did you ever sit on a phone book as a kid? Maybe you were too short to reach the table at grandma’s house and the latest, hefty edition of The Yellow Pages was commissioned as a…
Jenni Marie 4 Minute Read Despite doing everything right and following best practice, even thrown in some extra precautions for good measure, our day turned sour. Fast. In a foreign country, halfway through our long anticipated vacation-for-the-memory-books, the bliss turned bad. Our practically perfect day of waterfall-swimming and wave-jumping ended with a jolt. A jarring sense of violation. The locked…
Jeannie Pederson 5 Minute Read “Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it.” (1 Corinthians 9:24) I’m no stranger to hard work. As the oldest, Type-A child growing up on a farm with seven siblings, I learned early that self-discipline and diligence are…
Caroline Rose Kraft 6 Minute Read A friend and mentor once told me that when you’re trying to get going again with Bible reading, you can always start by just reading the Proverb that coincides with the day of the month. That is precisely how I wound up reading Proverbs 30 one dreary morning before work. My breath caught in my throat,…
Natasha Metzler 4 Minute Read Right before Christmas my husband was injured. We were just upstairs in the barn, cleaning up a few building scraps from when we built the house last year. It wasn’t hard work, nor was it particularly dangerous work. When my husband took a deep breath and told me his finger had just been cut off,…
Elisabeth 6 Minute Read Your vocation: what is it? It isn’t exactly the same as your career or job, says Jeff Goins, though it may include them. Its scope is life-long: it is the theme you will return to again and again, however many times your specific job description might change. The fact that I’ve gone from teaching English abroad…
Hayley Novak 5 Minute Read I am watching my husband play basketball, sitting on metal bleachers in the YMCA gymnasium when I hear her calling my name; old enough in body to be my mother, young enough in mind to be my child. She looks up at me earnestly and we half-shout at each other to be heard above the…
Gretchen Louise 11 Minute Read “‘You are loved with an everlasting love,’ that’s what the Bible says, ‘and underneath are the everlasting arms.’” If you, like me, grew up listening to “Gateway to Joy” on the radio every morning, you knew the next line was going to be, “This is your friend Elisabeth Elliot.” That soft, deep voice would proceed…
Elisabeth 4 Minute Read When I was an awkward, anxious twenty-something who felt hopelessly crippled by shyness, it dawned on me one day that even a stick-in-the-mud might actually be transformed into the kind of person who joyfully welcomes new people, new adventures, and new growth in my heart. It might be possible to be born “old” and steadily…
Emily C. Gardner 3 Minute Read She was basically invisible. And, when people did notice, she was looked at with disdain. Society shunned her. They only saw her mistakes and it was their own constructs that kept her ostracized and unwanted. She was imprisoned by shame and guilt and fear and old habits that followed her around like a five o’clock shadow. She…
Jenni Marie 3 Minute Read I looked at blue skies and knew the clouds were coming soon. I marveled at a shadow cast across my floor and wondered how long it would last. I saw an autumn scene and saw only gray, ignoring the greens and browns and reds of the trees. I saw the world half empty, the glass…
The End.
The End.