A friend posted these on Facebook for when you need encouragement for adulting. 🙂 It was from a parenting thread based in Australia, so I don’t know if they have them here. I did just a bit of searching and found others, but not these.
I’m So Glad Our Vows Kept Us, HT to Challies. “God has not given you your love to protect your vows, but he’s given you your vows to protect your love.”
Don’t Squander the Little Years, HT to Story Warren. “The endless demands of parenting little ones can feel heightened by the fact that this is often the very season of life—late 20s through the 30s—when budding careers are most demanding and precarious. The need to be tirelessly devoted outside the home can tempt young parents to be less devoted inside the home.”
How Parenting Exposes Our Need for Faith. “Like nothing else in my following life, mothering has taken me to the edge of what I know for sure about God and how to follow him well.”
What Is the Aim of Christian Writing? HT to Challies. If you are at all into writing as a Christian, I encourage you to read this. “Writing is an attempt to take the truth of God’s Word and apply it to the crevices of life.”
Elderly Couples’ Photos. A professional photographer asked several older couple to pose for engagement-style photos. So sweet and beautiful.
“It Is What It Is”…but God IS Bigger.” I’ve followed Carol at Blessed But Stressed for many years now. A few years ago, her son fought leukemia, and God graciously healed him. Now he’s facing serious surgery on his eye. Would you join in prayer for as much healing as possible in God’s perfect will?
Here are some of the thought-provoking reads I’ve discovered in the last couple of weeks:
How Can a Survivor Thrive After Sexual Abuse? HT to Challies. “Jenn Greenberg is one of those stories. She was abused by her church-going father. Yet she has retained her faith. She has recently written a courageous, compelling book that reflects on how God brought life and hope in the darkest of situations. Greenberg shows how the gospel enables survivors to navigate issues of guilt, forgiveness, love, and value. And she challenges church leaders to protect the vulnerable among their congregations.”
Seek the Giver, Not the Gift? HT to Challies. “The idea that we should seek the giver, not the gift, has truth behind it, but it can be misleading.”
Without Apology, HT to Challies. “When my children see me admit wrong and ask forgiveness, it is a powerful example. When my children see me struggle, yet choose right, it is even better. It teaches them victory over sin is possible with Jesus’ strength.”
Love Through the Awkward, HT to Challies. “It shouldn’t surprise us that the key to surviving awkward moments is really the key to the rest of Christian living: forgetting personal comfort and choosing selfless service.”
For My Angry Friends. Thoughts about a biblical perspective on governmental authorities.
In Defense of Owning Too Many Books. “The volumes of books I continue to bring home are not reminders of guilt or inadequacy, but rather invitations to the vast world of ideas and stories worth exploring.”
8 Ways to Take Care of You. Self care is a hot topic these days, but this is the most rightly focused and balanced list I have seen.
The Life-Changing Magic of Making Do, HT to The Story Warren. “Making do is a deeply pragmatic philosophy. It means asking of our things the only question we should ever ask of them: ‘Can you fulfill your intended use for me?’ The answer – if we can be honest, and resist a moment of discomfort, inconvenience or boredom – is, extraordinarily often, yes. Making do is about taming the reflex to discard, replace or upgrade; it’s about using things well, and using them until they are used up.”
I’ve been debating with myself about whether to post these now or wait. It’s later in the day than I usually post, because we had an outing earlier today. But this is a nice-sized list: if I wait til next Saturday, it might be twice as long. So I think I’ll go ahead and share them. Hopefully you’ll find something that interests you among them.
Are You Pointing Your Suffering Friend to Earthly Things. “The ‘at least’ and ‘look on the bright side’ statements that jump from our mouths originate from a desire to fix a hard circumstance, but in saying them, we run from the reality that we simply can’t. We can’t take our fellow Christians’ suffering away. Unfortunately, in our efforts to help take their minds off their pain, we often point them to the wrong place.”
The Quiet Miracle of Roots and Leaves. Lots of good stuff in this one. “It turns out that a believing teen’s struggle with apathy and hypocrisy requires the same grace from the same Savior who longs to deliver less-catechized teens from drug addiction and immorality.” True for us adults, too.
The Opposite of a Bucket List. “Even if I did come up with the perfect list–challenging enough to be exciting, but not so challenging as to be impossible–and I managed to actually accomplish every item on it, what then of the end game? What would be left to life once everything on the list had been checked off?” I like her alternative much better.
I have just a short list of noteworthy reads today, but thought I’d go ahead and share them. If I don’t, I’ll likely have an extra-long list next time.
Messy Church History. HT to Challies. I’ve been thinking about writing a post concerning our profound disappointment when someone we revere is found to have a fatal flaw as well as our tendency to write people off after finding skeletons in their closets. This says much that I would have. Church history, Biblical history, is messy because it involves sinners who aren’t totally perfect yet. Only God is perfect. It’s only by His grace that He uses any of us.
I’m Not a Mary or a Martha! Mary and Martha’s story wasn’t told in order to become fodder for social media personality quizzes. Julia points out ways that we infer more from the story that’s there and do Martha a disservice.
When You Are Refined by Family Conflict. “Conflict is simply two people viewing the same situation in two different ways.” If we take time to view things from the other person’s perspective, even though we might not agree, we’ll understand better, lose our defensiveness, and be able to look for bridges across the divide.
I shared this yesterday, and I think I may have even referenced it before, but I was so blessed by this post about Jim Elliot’s brother Bert, who was a missionary to Ecuador for over 50 years. Burt commented that “Jim and I both served Christ, but differently. Jim was a great meteor, streaking through the sky.” Randy Alcorn said yes, he was, but Burt was the faithful start that rose every night for years.
Finally, this baby copying the workout from the movie Rocky is SO cute! HT to Adam Blumer.
Understanding Narrative Passages of the Bible. Sometimes it’s easy to breeze through Biblical narratives, especially familiar ones (David and Goliath). This post has an excellent worksheet for getting more out of those passages.
Here are some good reads I’ve discovered recently:
The Oh So Human Dad’s Club. A look at some biblical fathers commemorated in the “Hall of Faith” despite serious flaws – encouragement that God can use any of us who are “only human.”
A Guide to Same Page Summer. This introduces a summer Bible reading plan, but it has some great principles for Bible reading in general.
Distinguishing Marks of a Quarrelsome Person, HT to Challies. “Of course, there are honest disagreements and agree-to-disagree propositions, but that’s not what the Bible means by quarreling. Quarrels, at least in Proverbs, are unnecessary arguments, the kind that honorable men stay away from (Prov. 17:14; 20:3). And elders too (1 Tim. 3). These fights aren’t the product of a loving rebuke or a principled conviction. These quarrels arise because people are quarrelsome.”
Losing a Foster Child. Some people don’t want to foster because of how painful it would be to let a child go after caring for it. But some children need just that kind of love and care during an unsettling time in their lives. This has some good help for the pain of giving back a foster child.
The True Woman blog, an arm of the Revive Our Hearts ministry, is holding a summer book club reading through Elisabeth Elliot’s just-published book, Suffering Is Never For Nothing. This book comes from a series of messages Elisabeth shared at a conference and is different from her earlier book, A Path Through Suffering (though I would guess they probably overlap). The book club starts this Tuesday, June 18, and continues for 6 weeks.
Someone set up a “bird photo booth” and caught some great close-up photos of birds.
Here are some good reads I’ve discovered recently:
Why Study the Old Testament? “Since the NT speaks directly to believers today and since the OT speaks directly to Jewish people many years ago, is the OT now irrelevant and obsolete? The answer to this question is a resounding ‘no.’ But why?”
How Cancer Healed My Dad, HT to Challies. “He endured months of aggressive treatment that made him feel horrendous, only to be told after each scan that he hadn’t responded to it and the cancer had spread further. He developed infections and bowel obstructions which hospitalised him at times, and when he was at home he spent most of his days on the sofa. But curiously, he described it all as the best year of his life.”
Can We Finally Break the Silence Around Tamar? “When we tell Tamar’s story aloud, we dignify her grief. And we begin to become for our sisters the advocates Tamar should have had.”
You Never Know, HT to Maree. Speaking of misjudgment – this is one mom’s scenario of what was going on behind a situation where she could easily have been misjudged.
Karen Swallow Prior, author of Fierce Convictions about Hannah Moore, Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me (both linked to my reviews), and On Reading Well (on my To be Read stack) was hit by a bus a little over a year ago. She has shared some enlightening reflections on the accident and her recovery in a couple of places:
The Role of the Body in Healing After Trauma. This was especially helpful to me, as some of her experiences paralleled mine after Transverse Myelitis. Though TM was traumatic in itself at the time, I hadn’t considered that I needed to recover from the trauma as well as the illness.
Bad News Comes, But Good News Wins. “Every time I open my Bible, every time I recall a promise from these pages, good news wins. So let the bad news come—it will soon be buried with my bones anyway (whether in one year or fifty). But good news gains momentum.”
A Tree Between Two Mountains, HT to Challies. “We must not fall into the trap of only seeing God on the mountain tops of life; falsely believing that if we soak enough of Him in in those moments it will sustain us until the next peak. God is in the valley also. God is in the dry and barren places. God meets us in the shadow of the Broom tree. There, as he does in all places, God sustains us with what is needed for the journey ahead.”
On Being the Church for the Weak, HT to Out of the Ordinary. “We have met some incredibly empathetic, high-capacity people, dedicated to serving the weakest. We have also been in organizations that are tone deaf to voices of lament, where the strong are honored and the weak are told to trust God.”
Most Abortion-minded Woman Aren’t Calculating Killers. They’re Afraid. HT to Challies. Compassion and consideration for the woman considering an abortion is too often forgotten in our rightful rhetoric against it. I’m so thankful for our local crisis pregnancy center, which goes beyond just trying to avoid abortions and seeks ways to counsel and support women who do choose to keep their pregnancies.
Don’t Forget the Good Book. “These stories that we love, about rabbits with swords and lizard-slaying siblings and worlds that a lion sings into existence, they are the sign-posts. They have a glorious purpose. But God forbid we get so absorbed with studying them alone that we never arrive at the destination toward which they point.”
The View from ‘Doralzuela’, HT to Challies. “When will those who hear socialism’s siren song ever learn? Maybe listening to Venezuelans recently arrived in Doral will help.”
To Be Found, HT to Challies. “‘I know you don’t know where you are, Grandma, but Jesus knows where you are – He’s found you; you’re found in Him.’ ‘Yes,’ she said. Her anxiousness was still there, but there was assurance mixed with it now.”
This video is a bit longer than I usually post here, but I found it fascinating. I was going to watch only a minute or so, but before I knew it, the video was nearly over. This is about a man who makes all kinds of paper props for TV and films, HT to Steve Laube. I didn’t realize just how many paper props there were until now!
Here’s my latest roundup of good reads on the Web:
Gospel Hope for a Weary Mom, HT to The Story Warren. “The good news is, it’s not our perfect love and perfect parenting that will reflect Jesus to our children; it’s admitting our dependence on Christ’s perfect love and perfect life that points them to their own need for a Savior.”
What Do We Do When Our Stories Collide? “Yes, at first, the timing for the two stories could seem awkward at best, even insensitive. But it was also an honest view of real life. How we can be dealing with one thing – a joy-filled occasion – and be unaware that the person next to us can be grieving.”
Individual and Community Discipleship. Discipleship isn’t always about two people working through a curriculum. “I have a received a lot of discipleship from Christians who were just doing what God made them to do.” Me, too.
A “God Is Faithful” party. When friends didn’t want the attention of a going-away party, Sue turned it into a “God is faithful” party. Love this idea!
This video was shared at Appointment Etiquette at a Writing Conference. It’s all about the wrong ways to get your manuscript to an agent or publisher, but I think you’ll find it funny even if you’re not interested in publication:
