Search: label/Gift List
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moreLetters to the Wounded {#1}
On Friday, March 08 th, 2013And after sharing Letters to the Wound {#2} this week? …. I went back in the archives and pulled out Letters to the Wounded {#1}. D ear Wounded, You were bleeding quiet in my inbox. I read your letter slow, line by line, the way one follows the trail of smearing salty red back to find the gash, to the place where the skin weeps blood. I read your words, the ones about do...
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moreBecause Saying Thank-You Can Change the World
On Monday, January 09 th, 2012Sometimes the best way to receive a gift is to give it away. Because the only things we really have — are the things we hand over. On a Monday morning in January, I get up and have a glass of clean water and think about a man I met who lives outside a dump. How could either one of us have known what would happen? His name is Saul — “but not the crazy king,&#...
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moreWrap them in Love {free printable: Verse Sandwich Wrapper}
On Friday, September 02 nd, 2011(Wrap their sandwiches up in one of the verse wrappers — download all 8 below — and wrap them up in love — wherever they go!) 10 Point Manifesto for Joyful Parenting (any text in turquoise links to posts for more explanation & encouragement):: 1. Today, I will make our home a house of prayer. I will pray at set times. And I will invite our children...
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moreWhen You’re Waiting for a Message from God
On Tuesday, August 02 nd, 2011remembering this… as I’m out in our fields yesterday & today, helping with wheat harvest 2011 My mama said she heard voices. Said she had heard voices all the years since the dark and the unwanted shadows moving across the walls, across her and the innocence. Strange, me, her daughter, uttering prayers to hear and after her trying to shut out the voices all he...
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moreWhat God’s Really Keeping Track of …{The Real Game Changer}
On Friday, January 14 th, 2011In a morning in winter, my chronic illness wakes fierce and its lunging roar devours, and I fall out of remission and into the hot pain tears. And a child glares icy, slams a door hard, and the walls shake my heart sad. Brothers bicker. The dog eats the roast I had cooked for lunch. I laugh! I can’t believe it. And I can. I glug down more water, more pain medication, more...
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more10 Points of Joyful Parenting {Printable}
On Saturday, January 08 th, 201110 Point Manifesto for Joyful Parenting (any text in turquoise links to posts for more explanation & encouragement):: 1. Today, I will make our home a house of prayer. I will pray at set times. And I will invite our children to come move into an interior space that lives with God. 2. Today, I will transfigure all things into beauty, and I will refuse to see anythin...
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10 Point Manifesto of Joyful Parenting (free printable)
On Friday, November 12 th, 201010 Point Manifesto for Joyful Parenting (any text in turquoise links to posts for more explanation & encouragement):: 1. Today, I will make our home a house of prayer. I will pray at set times. And I will invite our children to come move into an interior space that lives with God. 2.Today, I will transfigure all things into beauty, and I will refuse to see anything...
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why we need to sing the hard hallelujah
On Monday, September 20 th, 2010In a fallen world, we trip and break our hearts. And isn’t this when our hard shells shatter and when the bells peal and isn’t this when everything cracked must break into the broken-hearted hallelujah? All these days bookending summer, prefacing fall, these gold, glory-heavy days, I watch light fall in the the orchard soundless. The light, the air, it’s right satura...
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morethe one word that fixes a broken heart, this broken world
On Tuesday, September 14 th, 2010Water runs down the middle of the alley, a silver tear in the shadows, and I can hear a baby crying. I’m walking a narrow Guatemalan City street, a street without house numbers, mailboxes, doorbells — more like a path through tin dominoes rusted right through. Brown eyes lurk in doorways, peer out between barred gates. A girl in a grimy pink t-shirt keeps clanking at an...
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what to do in case of a heavenslide of blessings
On Monday, September 06 th, 2010With little less than twenty-four hours before boarding a plane for Guatemala with Compassion Bloggers, I crawl in between Hope and Shalom to whisper prayers, feel us all breathe close together. Shalom whispers, “One more night and you go. I think I might cry.” By the hall light, I can see her chin silhouetted. See her tremble. We cling. I can feel it too, the heart...
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what God wants to surprise you with today
On Monday, August 23 rd, 2010When love slips in from behind unannounced, it arrests, and who can do anything but just surrender to the happy grace? Yet what could have prepared me, really? Prepared me for what I find out the back kitchen window on an August afternoon all tired and greying with clouds… I mean, some kid did yell it as he rocked the front porch swing like a bronco, “Grandpa Morton’...
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what to look for when endings come…
On Monday, August 16 th, 2010August always hurts a bit, I tell him, August with its endings. Lying in the dark, me on his chest and him stroking my hair and us to the window, watching all to the east, all the sky flashing in white sheets of lightening like fireworks at the end of the party, I tell him this in a whisper. “August always feels this way to me. I always want the now to go on….”...
