Giving Like a Child

“She handed me a Plastic Donut from her kitchen play set.

I looked at the Donut and back at my daughter. She stood waiting for a response. So I put the Donut up to my mouth and said with great animation, “Yummm, yummm… Thank you, Autumn! This is soooo goood.”

Then something beautiful happened. Her big brown eyes widened, and her lips pushed a giant smile against her puffy cheeks. She stood up on her toes, shrugged her shoulders up to her ears, and let out a high-pitched squeal…

For Autumn, this exercise in giving gifts kept bringing her back to Daddy. For me, it kept me looking for my child to return to my side. I was moved by the exchange. I loved the interaction and connection. I was so pleased…

I didn’t see it coming, but at that [ … ]

Carrying Others’ Burdens

Special Video Devotional:

Please enjoy this special video from Joanna Weaver:

Original Video Devotional from Joanna Weaver author of Having a Mary Heart in a Martha World

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Daily Reflection: Has carrying others’ burdens held you back from fulfilling God’s calling?

Dannah Gresh Talks “Get Lost” on FamilyLife Today

 Dannah Gresh, author of Get Lost: Your Guide to Finding True Love, is a guest January 1-3, 2014, on the “FamilyLife Today” radio broadcast with Dennis Rainey and Bob Lepine.  Dannah helps young women understand how to put God before guys. It’s easy to get so wrapped up in relationships that we forget about our first love, Jesus. Dannah discusses her personal experience with this and offers advice on returning to your first love.

To listen to all three broadcasts, click here.

Ignite the Ordinary

Today’s Bible reading: Exodus 3:1–10

When you strip the biblical miracles of their spectacular special effects, a common plot point emerges: extraordinary moves of God begin with ordinary acts of obedience.

Consider Moses’s first encounter with God.

Moses is tending the family sheep out in the nondescript countryside.

He happens to notice a bush that’s caught fire.

He walks over to take a look…

Up to this point, it’s not exactly a riveting scene, is it?

In reality, the illustrious burning-bush encounter that seemed so captivating in Sunday school is…really…quite…ordinary. Moses is performing menial manual labor, working for his father-in-law. It’s dusty. The sheep stink. Does it get any more mundane?

Almost all encounters with God begin that way. You may be living under the illusion that when God ignites great things in your life, He’ll announce it with a [ … ]

New Soil

"I will never leave you."  Hebrews 13:5

National Book Award winner Barry Lopez wrote in Arctic Dreams that some people are not "finished at the skin. They send luminous fibers into the soil around them." Leaving those soils that we have become a part of, Mr. Lopez notes, is like "an amputation."  In this Twenty-first Century, many of us have to leave landscapes we’ve come to love. We follow our spouses to new job locales – or take them with us. We move to help out family or because the new landscape offers benefits we find we now need with a child with a disability or our own aging bones. We move after a disaster – fire and floods – or tragedy. Leaving home and making a new home can be painful even if it’s our choice. It’s said that [ … ]

Walking the Talk

“Our peers judge us not by what we say but by what we do. If you claim to be a good wife and mother, then you sometimes will have to put your family’s interests above your own. If you believe your purpose is to share your artistic talents with the world, then you will be judged on the works you produce, not on those you merely propose. You have to walk the talk; otherwise you have no credibility with others—or with yourself—because you, too, should demand that your actions match your words. If they don’t, you will never live in harmony and fulfillment.”

Excerpted from Unstoppable by Nick Vujicic

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Daily Reflection: How can your actions match your words this new year?

Wake Up!

“So how do we continually experience newness in a world where everything ages? How do we experience freshness where everything quickly becomes stale? We have to wake up!

Awakening to the presence and power of God is both a one-time event and a recurring newness we experience throughout our lives. Some would say that this state of newness is a mountaintop experience, one that is nice to have every once in a while, but unsustainable in real life. But…not only is it possible to live a life fully awakened to God at all times, but it is the desire and will of God that you do so.”

Excerpted from Awakening by Stovall Weems

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Daily Reflection: As a new year approaches, how can you keep your relationship with God new each day?

The Adventure of a Lifetime

“The award-winning animated movie Up contains some profound truths about relationships. In a breathtaking sequence early in the film, we see the entire arc of the life of Carl, a balloon salesman, as he meets Ellie, falls in love, and gets married. They share a dream to travel to South America and save every penny for their big trip. But there’s something familiar about the way their savings are constantly being used for the urgencies and emergencies of daily life. Before Carl and Ellie know it, they’re in their seventies, and although they have a beautiful marriage, they never realized their dream adventure…

You begin to realize as the movie progresses that this dream trip they were saving for, this object of their future plan together, wasn’t really that important after all. The real adventure was the life they shared [ … ]

We Are All Different

“They say variety is the spice of life. Perhaps that’s why God so often puts people of such different personalities in the same family. (Either that, or he’s trying to prepare us for marriage!) Mary was the sunlight to Martha’s thunder. She was the caboose to Martha’s locomotive. Mary’s bent was to meander through life, pausing to smell the roses. Martha was more likely to pick the roses, quickly cut the stems at an angle, and arrange them in a vase with baby’s breath and ferns.

That is not to say one is right and one is wrong. We are all different, and that is just as God made us to be. Each gifting and personality has its own strengths and weaknesses, its glories and temptations.

I find it interesting that when Jesus corrected Martha, he didn’t say, ‘Why can’t [ … ]