rebelling against low expectations
You’ve probably heard the fifth of the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20:12a, “Honor your father and your mother….” It’s repeated throughout scripture in both the Old and New Testaments—see Deut. 5:16, Leviticus 9:3, Matthew 19:19, and Mark 7:10. Obviously, honoring parents is something God is serious about. Yet, it’s something many people struggle with—young and old. I say this because no matter how...
“Run!” my mind screamed as panic sent shock waves up my spine. But I couldn’t run. My heart still couldn’t believe what my eyes were seeing, so I stood still. Paralyzed. My stomach lurched at what I saw just a few yards away. Betrayal. Purposeful deception. “No! Stop! Don’t do it!” I’d known for some time what was going on. Found evidence of it here and there. But this was the first time I’d...
February 14th. Also known as Valentines Day, an occasion many a forlorn single dreads. Each year, while the rest of society posts sticky-sweet, chocolate-coated tributes to their spouses and significant others’ online, all the lonely hearts of the world mourn their singleness like it’s some sort of malignant disease. Surely, you’ve seen the ‘woe-is-me-I’m-so-alone’ posts on social media, too...
“Christmastime is here. Happiness and cheer.” Or so the song from A Charlie Brown Christmas goes. Truth be told, when I look around me—at my family, my inner circle of friends, or at seemingly any headline, happiness and cheer are woefully absent. In their place are strained family relations, chronic pain and suffering, a plethora of doctors’ appointments to attend, the scars and wounds of abuse...
In the past, my Bible reading has been largely unplanned and unscheduled. I would randomly pick a book of the Bible to study because it’s what struck my fancy in the moment, and I wouldn’t set any kind of time frame to complete it. Whenever I finished that book, I’d pick the next one in the same manner, and so on. But this year, I decided to try something different; something...
“I feel like a tornado just ripped through our lives. We all survived, but it still caused devastation. There are still piles of wreckage to be dealt with. Still evidence of the tornado’s presence. And it didn’t just cause new pain, it tore the doors off rooms where old pain lay dormant and scattered it everywhere.” I penned these words a few weeks after my momma came home from the hospital. On...
I have a confession: I don’t think I’d ever studied the book of Revelation in its entirety. That’s why I was so excited when my Sunday school teacher announced we’d be studying it this past Summer. To be clear, I had read Revelation in bits and pieces as I studied other books of the Bible. There are passages I can nearly quote verbatim (Revelation 19:11 has always appealed to my equestrian heart)...
“It’s time.” I swallowed those dreaded words, trying to accept them. Process them. Shifting in a wooden chair across a small metal table from the veterinarian, I nodded, and stroked Darcy’s soft black ear. I’d just spent the last twenty minutes explaining how my sweet Mr. Darcy had rapidly declined in recent days. Kidney disease had stolen his appetite and caused his body to reject what little...
I love studying the Bible. I enjoy taking my time, pulling out multiple translations, and examining every word of every verse. I get excited about looking up the original Greek and Hebrew root words of a passage to gain better understanding of its meaning. I love concordances and commentaries. I love journaling my observations, realizations, and questions. But not all the time. There have been...
rebelling against low expectations
