Spiritual Disciplines
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moreHappy May! How to Make a Better Future
On Wednesday, May 01 st, 2013A better future always simply begins — in a series of prayerful nows. :: :: “If you cannot find time to pray, ask for forgiveness. Ask to be cle...
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moreWhen Lent & Valentines Collide: 40 Days of ThanksLoving
On Wednesday, February 13 th, 2013It wasn’t 2 weeks before those 40 days of Lent that he’d turned 40. I’d kissed the old man in the kitchen and his 4 days growth had rubbed me like a matted burr and he’d laughed like a free man and said he’d never expected 40 to feel so young. I had thought we’d celebrate and loose the farm for the first real time. ...
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moreWhat We All Need to Really Breathe
On Tuesday, November 13 th, 2012Six times my mama lies in ER this past week, waiting news. Good doctors can have degrees and no answers. My sister gives up long days and advocates on knees and in waiting rooms and Mama and her, they sing hymns and drown out clocks and fears. I rub Mama’s feet during the short nights and the late watches. I massage th...
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moreWhen You’ve Been Waiting for an Answer …. and Life seems Silent
On Wednesday, August 22 nd, 2012When Malakai’s afraid, he chews on his bottom lip like his grandmother. And there’s no getting around it: He looks like a caged coon up there in the pew before the piano — biting at his lip, hands fidgeting. He’s eight. How can I really tell him — that catastrophizing is how we make our own soul-cages. That fear’s always the...
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moreHow to Unplug {More}: 10 Things to Do {Pick 1 Before You Click}
On Tuesday, June 19 th, 2012Print out and tape to the side of every screen: Why slow down and unplug {more}: ‘They say time is money, but that’s not true. Time is life. And if you want the fullest life, you need to find fullest time. God gives us time. But who has time for God? This makes no...
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moreWhen You Feel like Everyone is Bigger, Better, Smarter… { or ‘How to be a Star’}
On Thursday, May 03 rd, 2012When the fog meandered in lost on a spring evening in May, she hung her apron up in the back mudroom. She wandered down the back lane too. Down in the woods, she could hear them, the frogs singing, an invisible symphony. She knotted the one side of her skirt up to step over a pothole. She tried to make her way. In a world of reaching, how do you rest? In a cul...
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moreHow to Love Your Enemies?
On Wednesday, April 18 th, 2012N ot all enemies carry arrows. All my life I had liked to think it was only David who had his enemies. Is it easier to say we don’t have any enemies — so we don’t have to figure out how to really love them? And how to forgive enemies from the heart? But who hasn’t been cheated on, talked down, lied about, pierced right through and left heart-broken on...
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moreThe Secret to Fasting in a Lent that is Failing
On Wednesday, February 29 th, 2012Dust cloth in hand, that is what I’m thinking Lent’s all about. Don’t I desperately want to be changed when Easter morning dawns? For something different to have dawned in me. I wash things down. I m...
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moreWhen You Want to Turn Your Life Around
On Monday, February 27 th, 2012It’s after I cut the squash right open. The two halves split and quartered there on the cutting board. After the paint brushes are washed out, after the pawns of chess game are all returned to their squares, afte...
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moreFree Easter Devotional Book to Make a Jesus Easter Tree
On Wednesday, February 22 nd, 2012I can’t seem to follow through in giving up for Lent. Which makes me want to just give up Lent. Which makes me question Who I am following. Which may precisely be the point of Lent. Last week, I’m standing on a table, snapping the shutter on a bouquet of roses, when by brother calls. Levi picks it up, his eyes twinkling, stars risen early. I can only h...
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moreHow to Prepare a Family for Lent {Printable} {Create a Forgiveness & Fresh Start Place}
On Tuesday, February 21 st, 2012Every baby I bore had the same birth defect, inherited of their mother, their father, all who have ever come before… They were all born with the turned-away face. I remember this on a Tuesday before Ash Wednesday, on a grey February afternoon with the snow falling right cold. I watch snow fall and think of our fall away. I think of the ways we have scrap...
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moreThis is Who You Are — Right Where You Are {Sermon on the Mount} {Video} {link-up}
On Friday, February 17 th, 2012{Consider pausing the music by clicking the slider directly under the header? And if reading in a reader or via email – click here to go for a walk in the woods on a foggy day on the farm… Oh, and next time? I’m praying for sun and recording a different view? Kids? Goats? Hens? Sunshine? } And these words I’m trying...
