One night, after I’d just gotten home from an all-day meeting and was putting my daughter to bed, she looked up at me with sad eyes. “I didn’t like you being gone today,†she said.
Usually, I’m the one who picks her and her brother up from school, but since I wasn’t home, my husband did it. He also did their homework with them and made them dinner. It wasn’t the “normal†routine, and my daughter was a little out-of-sorts.
I explained to her why I had to be gone, and I told her that her dad loves to be able to pick her up from school and help her with her homework, but that didn’t seem to make her feel any better.
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I love object lessons. One of my favorite illustrations involves toothpaste. Each participant is given a travel-sized tube of toothpaste, a paper plate and one ooey-gooey mission: squeeze the tube dry. After the tubes are flattened, participants receive a tooth pick and are given the daunting task of putting the tooth paste back into the tube. It’s an impossible feat. The lesson? Words are like toothpaste. Once they’re piped out, they cannot return.
I was reminded of the power of words last year when my husband, a professor, read through student evaluations. While most students expressed positive feelings about the classes and astuteness of their instructor, a few malevolent comments were among the mix.
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It’s no secret that us gals are relational. Get a group of women together and we will talk and talk and talk and talk. We can’t help it, it is how God has wired us. When I have something big happen in my life, after talking to my husband, my next impulse is to call my girlfriend Celia, my Elizabeth.
When Jesus’ mother Mary, was given the biggest news of her life, she had no husband to confide in. Her first instinct after her visit from the angel of the Lord, was to immediately go out and seek Godly counsel from her cousin Elizabeth.
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Have you ever been to a special event or on a trip and you just couldn’t decide what to wear? I know I always over pack when I’m traveling because I wonder if the weather will change or what is more likely my mood will change.
As a matter of fact, I did it this week. I’m at a conference and I brought two large suitcases. One morning, I was trying to decide what to wear. I put on one outfit; I took it off. I put on another outfit; I took it off. I put on a third outfit and… well, you get the picture.
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Do you enjoy waiting in lines at the grocery store or the mall? What about waiting in traffic?
Or, on a more serious note, how do you feel when you’re waiting for test results from the doctor?
Let’s face it: waiting–in big or small circumstances–can be hard. And I’ll be the first to admit, I’ve never been much good at it. I’m not the most patient person in the world. I like to take action and get results. I like to plan, and see the plan carried out. And sometimes, I forget that it’s God’s plan for my life that matters.
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How quickly I forget the blessings of life?
When I think back to my childhood and through the years what comes to mind? The hard times. The hurts and pain. People who wronged me.
Why is that? Why is it so easy to remember the bad times and so hard to conjure up memories of good? Maybe you’re like me, thank God if you’re not. But I know I’m not alone. The Israelites, whom God had chosen and loved, battled the same thing.
“So, as the Holy Spirit says: “Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as you did in the rebellion, during the time of testing in the desert, where your fathers tested and tried me and for forty years saw what I did.
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I ignored the feeling of nausea at first in the shopping centre car park. I carried on with my bargain hunting as my hands started to shake. I even kept shopping through slight waves of dizziness but when I had to sit down and couldn’t walk anymore I knew something was wrong. To the casual observer I might have just been relaxing but in reality I was unable to go on.
It took me a few minutes to realize the cause of my problem was that I had not eaten all day. Although few could fault me on my commitment to getting the perfect sale item, my attention to the real needs of life left something to be desired.
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The song, Praise You in This Storm, by Casting Crowns, always chokes me up…
“I was sure by now
that You would have reached down
and wiped our tears away,
stepped in and saved the day,
but once again,
I say “Amen”,
and it’s still raining…â€
Not too long ago, I wrote a devotion about control and how awesome it is to surrender control to God.
But what if you do that and it feels like nothing gets better? What if, like it says in the song, it’s “still rainingâ?
There have been times I’ve witnessed people going through extreme hardship or tragedy and I’ve thought to myself, “if I was going through that, would I still trust God as much as I do now?â€
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