Category: Devotions

There is a trail in Yosemite my family recently hiked for the first time. It was quite ambitious for a family with young children, but we hitched up our resolve and leaned into the hard climb. When our kids grew tired, we encouraged them. My husband eventually lifted our youngest onto his shoulders to carry…

What do you do when life pushes in from every side, when pressure and pain do their best to choke out perspective and for a moment you’re sure a little piece of sky just landed on your head? As I was reading through this week’s Life Journal readings in Deuteronomy, I discovered a remarkable gift God has given…

We were playing at the park one afternoon, throwing the ball and making new friends, when I looked around to check on my 5 year old daughter.  She had been running about since we got there, gulping in the sweet fresh air of late winter as she ran and climbed and slid. There is just something about a wonderfully rainy…

Shocked, dazed, heartbroken, questioning… These are some of the desperate feelings we experience when life goes flying off the tracks. Many years ago almost everything in my life seemed to crumble. Health, home, employment, church family: all were dearly shaken. My heart felt broken. Panic attacks began to grip me. The days were painful, and difficult.  Very, very difficult.…

I have these snappy little voices in my head that are my worst critics. Do you have those too? They whisper and they shout, “You are not enough”, “You don’t have what it takes.” And all too often I simply believe them. Truthfully, sometimes it’s just easier to. Because if I don’t measure up than I have every excuse to hang back, to play…

Sometimes praying can feel like standing on the shore of a great lake holding a very heavy rock. “Can I toss this heaviness in there?” we wonder. Looking out across the surface, painted with the reflection of the heavens above, we cast our stones of cares deep into it’s depths. These stones that hold our heart’s cries are so heavy in our hands. We…

Perhaps we were born to dream; to lift our eyes up to the painted clouds and imagine what could be. Sacred moments of stillness and wonder can stir something deep inside, calling us to reach up to the heavens where the seeds of God-sized promises are waiting. The Patriarchs of old discovered this long ago. Over the last week of Life…

In the swirly midnight celebrations of New Year’s Eve one simple idea pierced through the confetti and settled into my thoughts: the beginning and the end are so close together. They’re  just a heartbeat, a breath, a blink away from each other.  Last night we waved goodbye to the end of 2015 and turned to welcome the beginning…

In our image-rich world of #hashtags and sound bytes, does God use a marketing strategy to spread the gospel? Lately I’ve been learning about marketing techniques to get a message across in today’s hyper-marketed culture and it has led me to wonder if maybe John 1:14 whispers God’s Divine marketing strategy to us: “The Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us.” If God…