I want everything in my life to have purpose and meaning. Waste makes me squirm. I’d rather not face those times and places in my life that feel pointless. But we’ve all felt this ache, maybe even shame, over things that didn’t gel. We sense the “more” that could be, but it’s too murky to […]
The Circular Path to the Hidden Side Door
“Didn’t he say ‘Sempre dritta.’? This doesn’t seem very straight to me.” My husband and I were lost in the Italian heartland, headed for a meeting with a client (this was several years ago, when our jobs involved overseas travel). Our GPS led us into someone’s driveway, and when I asked an elderly gentleman for […]
Escaping the Snare of Faithfulness
The word faithfulness keeps coming up when I tell our family’s story, but I didn’t realize until today what a trap it had become. I’m not suggesting that being faithful is bad. But when I actually caught myself thinking, “We’ll just keep faithfully putting one foot in front of the other as long as we […]
God’s Glory is for Quitters
Over the last several weeks I’ve shared how you can minimize distractions and make room for more of God’s glory in your life. Many of you have shared how hard it is, especially as moms. No matter how much we do, we feel torn between the things we still haven’t done. And we live in […]
Most of Us Don’t Like to Think about this Side of God’s Glory
Have you ever noticed that some psalms don’t get much airtime? Here’s an example: “I have calmed and quieted my soul, I am like a weaned child with its mother…” Most people prefer not to think about weaning, or they think of it as an awkward, unpleasant time. But in the ancient world, weaning was […]
Free to Feast
A month thick with celebration is about to culminate in the most joyful eight days of the year. And every time I share my excitement about the Feast of Sukkot, people ask me how long we’ve been celebrating the Jewish Feasts. It’s a legitimate question. I admit when we started, I thought that’s what […]
I Could Have So Easily Missed This
This week we’re preparing for the Feast of Tabernacles (in Hebrew “Sukkot”). A “Sukkah” (Sukkot is plural) is a temporary dwelling constructed to remind of the 40 years God’s people spent living in the wilderness, sleeping in tents. My kids call it the Feast of Tents. Aside from remembering the time in the wilderness, why […]
The More I Fought this, the More I Needed It
Sometimes we fight the thing we need most. Since we’ve been talking about increasing our capacity for God’s glory, I need to be honest with you about how God made room for more glory in my life, and how I resisted it. When we first talked about observing the Biblical Sabbath (Shabbat in Hebrew), I […]
Is “Fast Glory” an Oxymoron?
What’s the fastest path to experiencing more of God’s glory, and becoming one with Him and like Him? Wait a second. Do “fast” and “glory” even belong in the same sentence? Actually, yes. When it comes to God’s glory, fasting is the most reliable way to experience more of it. Fasting is not about […]
God Needed to Repeat Himself Several Times so I’d Get this Message:
There are people who love you unconditionally. Then there are people who nudge you past your edge. My friend Christy is one of the rare few who does both. She is what grace looks like. Here’s her description of how listening prayer is changing her life: How do you experience God’s voice in your […]