Hayley Novak 12 Minute Read I’ve always admired families who stay close after their children are grown. A boy who wants to bring his girlfriend home, girls who go shopping with their mom even after mom’s style is. . . mom-ish. Happy camaraderie and a freedom to be unique while coming back to the fold to be loved unconditionally are…
Jenni Marie 6 Minute Read In a room of 45 ladies, we counted off 1 through 5 nine times and every fifth person stood up. I stood up. I stood up and looked around the room, marveling at the statistic that 20% of the women in that room have battled mental illness or are battling mental illness. I am that…
Jeannie Pederson 2 Minute Read Earlier this year I was struggling with guilt. I mean, really struggling. Nearly every day there was some sort of failure in my life, something I wished I’d done better, some area I didn’t measure up to my own standard. I got impatient with my toddler. I didn’t keep the toys picked up. I let…
Elisabeth Adams 11 Minute Read In August 2014, Thomas Umstattd, Jr. published his blog post, “Why Courtship is Fundamentally Flawed.” It sparked a firestorm, racking up more than 1,500 comments, provoking numerous rebuttals from other bloggers, and inspiring a Kickstarter campaign that led (just one year later) to a book entitled Courtship in Crisis: The Case for Traditional Dating. I…
Caroline Rose Sanders 6 Minute Read I was born in 1992. I wasn’t a teenager until 2005, which means I narrowly missed the biggest “purity” era. I never attended a conference surrounding the topic of abstinence, made a vow in front of my youth group or was awarded a piece of jewelry symbolic of my commitment. My parents did things the…
Natasha Metzler 5 Minute Read I don’t remember when homeschooling became known as the “cure-all” for children gone astray, but I do know the idea of making rules to keep ourselves on the straight and narrow is as old as the church itself. The Apostle Paul wrote an entire book on the subject. Well, actually, it was a letter. One…
Gretchen Louise 8 Minute Read I first caught the vision when I heard someone share during a funeral at our church. The man’s grandson reflected on many memories, but said that the one impression that would never fade was what he saw each morning during visits to their home. He’d awake to find his grandparents sitting at the kitchen table reading the Bible…
Natasha Metzler 4 Minute Read (Don’t miss hearing about the men I {almost} married!) A Rhema: the Greek word for “the word of God”; a revelation. I was praying for “a rhema” last summer and God spoke this to me: “Do not doubt My power and do not question My timing.” (my journals, 2005) I didn’t recognize him the first few times…
Natasha Metzler 4 Minute Read You are the most precious asset I have. And I want the very, very best for you. But the best for you isn’t someone who is perfect because like it or not, you’re not perfect. I didn’t raise you to be perfect. I raised you to be Redeemed.
Elisabeth Adams 7 Minute Read How many different emotions do you have every day? Dozens, scores, maybe even hundreds? Let’s just say that if the average woman was an air-traffic controller and her emotions were incoming planes, she’d have a full-time job telling them where (and where not) to land. Some of the most persistent and challenging of all my…
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…
Elisabeth Adams 6 Minute Read It was lunch break, and I was sitting down for a quick “Bible snack” when my eyes fell on Proverbs 31:26: “The law of kindness is on her tongue.” Though I’ve read it a thousand times, this time it went right to the quick. Uh-oh. You mean, kindness to the classmate who is doing his…
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The End.