“I just don’t feel like I can hear God right now.” I was talking with a young mom whose husband had left her and her child, who was now juggling a two-year-old, trying to maintain an older house with many necessary repairs, and had suddenly and unexpectedly become the sole breadwinner of her household. This […]
“The Lord was with Joseph.” (Gen. 39:2) Those five words are the hallmark of the Biblical character Joseph’s life. Aren’t they so comforting? Any of us would want our lives to be punctuated by the fact that the Lord is with us, wouldn’t we? Remarkably, those words were first written about Joseph after his brothers […]
Has God given you a dream? Maybe you’ve felt the call to foster care or pastoring a church or setting up a program to serve the homeless in your hometown. Whatever it is, you have a dream. Genesis 37 records Joseph’s dreams. In his dreams, God told him that he was called to leadership. In […]
There’s an interesting side story in the book of Genesis where Abraham and Sarah really dodged a bullet, so to speak. And the thing is, at the time they probably had no idea. When Abraham and Sarah set out from their home in Ur to follow God, they took their nephew Lot with them. Particularly […]
Welcome to 2021! What a welcome sight the turning of the calendar page was this year, wasn’t it? Every year when I open my Bible once again to the first chapter of the first book of the Bible to read it all over again, a tingle goes up my spine because I know that I […]
Have you ever been disappointed in God? Over the past few days I have found myself fighting this feeling because something that I prayed really hard for (and wasn’t even for me) didn’t happen. It was big, it was important, it was in line with scripture and the ramifications for it not happening the way […]
While teaching a history lesson to my kids recently, I was trying to explain something that happened in the 1600’s and they were having a hard time grasping how long ago 400 years was. Was it before the Revolutionary War, one asked? What kind of clothes did they wear back then? My son wanted to […]
Have you ever had a bridge burning moment? You know, the kind that you know will radically alter your life forever? Amy Carmichael, a young missionary woman in India, had just one of those moments. She had been very busy doing her regular missionary work when a frantic knock came at her front door in […]
Perspective is everything, isn’t it? For example, my siblings and I were raised in Oregon, but my sisters and I have all been moved to other states because of our husband’s jobs. I moved to Alabama and my four children are as Southern as fried chicken. My next sister moved to Alaska and her kids […]
Have you ever felt that no matter how hard you tried, nothing that you did worked? I sure have! There can be a lot of reasons that this is the case, sometimes it’s just a season, sometimes we need to make a life adjustment. But as I was reading through the book of Haggai recently […]