Living the New Life
-
friendships and houseplants: help! the flowers fell off!
Excited for you to meet my friend Keri Lee Robbins this week as she shares a two-part series on tending our “friendship plants” with wisdom from God’s word. Keri Lee and I met a few years ago through Twitter as we were traveling to attend the same conference. My Las Vegas buddy is a gentle…
-
waiting on a storm and preaching to myself
Between Monday’s eclipse and getting kids back to school, it’s already been a strange week. Now, with Hurricane Harvey bearing down on us here in Texas, we’re all throwing our schedules out the window and getting prepared. Storm prep is a bit sobering—last year’s devastating floods are still fresh on people’s minds. However, one good…
-
what house are you building?
This week I posted on Facebook with regards to events in Charlottesville, VA, “I pledge not to look away, not to offer the cop-out of “It’s complicated” as an excuse for doing nothing. This white supremacist garbage is straight out of hell, and we’ve got our work cut out for us as the body of…
-
Keep Waiting and Be Brave
On Saturday I waited in a crowd at the airport International Arrivals gate. Our numbers grew, as did our wait time, but we weren’t unhappy. True, we were all a bit anxious—various members of our group kept popping up onto our toes and craning our necks to see down the corridor—but it was the good…
-
when the battle for “likes” wrecks your child
We are creatures made for community. We have a longing to belong and experiences with rejection that shape decisions, relationships, and our willingness to take risks. This week, I’ve asked a friend to share her life-in-the-trenches parenting story of just how subtly the feelings of rejection and unworthiness can creep in. She and her husband have…
-
longing to belong
I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to belong. About how the feeling of not belonging wounds deeply. About how fear of rejection drives our decisions, relationships, and willingness to take risks. Just ask someone about a time they felt rejected. Heck, just ask them about middle school. People’s faces still get a…
-
love far beyond any weakness
This summer I’ve gotten the chance to know Victoria Adams, a senior religion major at Baylor University who is interning with the youth ministry at our church. She recently shared a message with our middle school group about how God can meet us in our place of weakness and remind us that we are His…
-
like a child
It was unbelievably early one autumn morning, still dark outside, but I was wide awake. I was eight months pregnant with our second child and at that “happy but uncomfortable” stage—probably not sleeping because of my squashed bladder or my aching back. I wasn’t the only one awake, though. Two little feet were padding down…
-
hasta la vista, funeral suits
The last few weeks I’ve been talking to women who are serious about ditching their “funeral suits.” Oh, they looked like they were just drinking coffee and catching up, and I’ve had a blast meeting with them at homes and cafes. But what they’ve really been doing is digging into what God has to say about becoming…
-
It’s Not About the Bread: A 10-minute Devo to Calm Your End-of-School-Year Stress
Yesterday, my daughter and I hunted like mad for her cellphone, so convinced she left it at school (grrrrrrr) that we overlooked it three times in an obscure backpack pocket (oops). This morning, she left her breakfast behind while scrambling to get to an early rehearsal, so right now I’m sitting in the school parking…