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One spring morning before breakfast, I asked my mom if I could go out and look at the trees that were starting to bud in the woods.  “Okay,” she said, “but make it quick. Breakfast is almost ready. And don’t go too close to the creek.  It’s been raining a lot.”  I was seven years […]

Knowing how and when to talk to your children about sensitive issues is not an exact science, but we better figure it out quickly. While we contemplate the best way to do it, our little ones are being taught by someone else. The internet, social media, and public education have changed the rules of the game.

“He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.” (Eccl. 3:11). Majestic mountain vistas, trickling waterfalls, meandering trails lined with mossy stumps, stones and towering trees all move me in a way that

As a young, newlywed woman, relatively fresh out of the collegiate slammer, I have thoroughly enjoyed my role as Aunt (or more affectionately, “Auntie Em”). My husband and I are grateful for this special time to build the foundation for our marriage before we shift gears to nurturing children of our own. But if we

Have you ever left an interaction with a friend and been disappointed because it felt like all you did was talk about nothing? It is often easy to let moments ebb and flow without intentionally stewarding them for eternity. But with a little preparation and practice, we can consistently have deeper, more meaningful interactions. Whether

One recent morning, in the dream state between sleep and awakening, I was 12 years old again. It was late July, right at the point when summer becomes late summer and a new school year looms in the not-too-distant future. I ran out of the breezeway screen door of my grandparents’ “house on the knoll,”

As I was reading Galatians chapter one this morning, I was struck by the phrase “who raised him from the dead.” Could you imagine writing that down in the first century with the conviction that it really happened and then sending it to someone? It can be easy for the shocking claims of Christianity to

“The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing–to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from–my country, the place where I ought to have been born. Do you think it all meant nothing, all the longing? The longing for home? For indeed it now feels not like