Inscribed By God
DON’T TAKE THE BAIT! In the last post, I invited you to join my mind meanderings on encouragement vs flattery. But not all messages, spoken or unspoken, are uplifting or even carry the appearance of being positive. Sometimes they’re harsh and accusatory. What happens when false accusations start to fly? Do we fly off the […]
THE FLATTERY COUNTERFEIT Wow, you look so nice today! Sounds like a compliment, right? Compliments are nice, I mean, who doesn’t like a little confidence booster here and there? But what if… It’s actually not a compliment? What if there was a different—hidden—agenda behind those sweet-sounding strings of words? What if they were instead— flattery? […]
HONOR VS. PEOPLE PLEASING In my book, I made a proclamation. It was true at the time, but looking back, I realize it was something I never should have owned for myself. People-pleasing. In Gentleness: It’s Not What You Think I called myself a pathological people-pleaser. Now, years later, look back on those words […]
HONOR: A VERY WEIGHTY WORD Honor. Sometimes just saying the word makes my mouth feel heavy. But it’s not because the letters H-O-N-O-R weigh any more than S-I-L-L-Y. I mean, that would be just…silly! (Sorry, I couldn’t help myself.) It’s not the ink in the black letters printed on a piece of paper or the […]
But, God, This Isn’t a Garden! Victory Wilderness and victory? Maybe these two words don’t naturally connect in our minds, but then again neither do wilderness and garden. The last several months, I’ve welcomed you into my mind wanderings on the wilderness and the invaluable lessons that become woven into our souls there. Dependency, […]
But, God, This Isn’t a Garden! Identity How many times have we asked ourselves Who am I? And how many times have we been asked What do you do for a living? Or conversely, What are you studying or planning to be? From the introspective wanderings of our souls, searching for answers to some of […]
BUT, GOD, THIS ISN’T A GARDEN! INTIMACY Intimacy. It’s something we crave—no, we need—as human beings. We crave it because we need it. That’s perhaps a better way of putting it. God created the first human, we call that person Adam, and then decided it wasn’t good for that person to be alone. Cue Eve […]
Dependent. Some of us may shudder when we read that word. As someone born in the United States, independence is something we literally celebrate every year and is something that seems to leak into so many parts of our society in big ways and small ways. Indulge me in a small, personal example. He was […]
BUT, GOD, THIS ISN’T A GARDEN! Wilderness. As a person raised in a home of faith, this is a loaded term. Being a child in the 1980’s in the United States adds a little bit more load to the term. My mind fills with cartoon scenes that always end badly for that poor coyote and […]
When Reality Barges in Anyway It’s just not going to happen. The dreaded thought finally formed in my mind. I had been trying to shut it out and silence it for a couple of weeks, but reality has a way of barging in anyway. It was Christmastime. The time I look forward to seeing family […]