“But the one who endures to the end, he will be saved.” Matthew 24:13
Don’t you just love it when a theme keeps popping up in your life, in every conversation, everything you read or listen to? I have never heard an audible voice from the Lord, but when I start hearing the same words from a dozen different directions, I believe that the Lord is using those sources to get my attention.
Everywhere I look on the internet I see memes about the “Quarantine Fifteen.” My neighbor (who never appears to gain an ounce) and I were each joking about our newly acquired guts–at a safe social distance, of course. And I’ve been in at least a half dozen Zoom meeting conversations chuckling about everyone’s weight gain during our confinement.
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A little over four weeks into staying at home for the greater good of stemming the spread of COVID-19, some of us may find ourselves wondering if this is one of those times that the world irreversibly changes. The wisdom of Solomon tells us there is nothing new under the sun… and that is certainly true. In fact, the older I get and the more I learn about many of the horrors of history, that truth is continually reinforced. History does periodically repeat itself, so in that sense, what’s new to us is not something new “under the sun.”
Continue readingWondering what to do with the unexpected gift of time AFTER you’ve done all the really important stuff?
You can dance, you can jive… as long as you remain six feet apart. (I actually spotted some neighbors doing this on their lawn on my Sunday evening walk. True story. I think there may have even been a tambourine…) But you can also do something productive that will benefit you even after the days of confinement are over.
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This past weekend, we took what was likely the last road trip we’ll take for a while. Just two days with an overnight at a hotel in between. COVID-19 information was changing hourly while we were there. So if we had scheduled the trip just forty-eight hours later, we definitely wouldn’t have gone.
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My daughters are nearing adulthood, and even though they have been homeschooled, which by design allows us to cover life-skills, character lessons, and spiritual training simultaneously with academic subjects, deficiencies happen, seemingly particularly in life skills: the stuff that is necessary, but often gets brushed aside as unimportant.
Continue readingBut for parents of teens, maybe not so much.
Adolescence is full of paradox, not the least of which is the phenomenon of great swaths of silence, punctuated by rare and unpredictable outbursts of sometimes lengthy conversation.
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Almost every year around this time I make some resolutions or at least informally try to lean in to new good habits–or old ones I’ve forsaken. Some sort of strategy for reading the Bible is usually top priority for me because 1) I want to know what it says and 2) without a plan I don’t usually succeed in finding out what it says effectively. Even though my faith is built on a relationship and not a series of checklists, discipline and systematic approaches are still important to keep the likes of me focused and on a spiritual growth track.
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Let’s face it: you hardly ever hear anybody bragging about being a “walker.” By “walker” I mean someone who walks for recreation and fitness–not the nickname for the post-apocalyptic zombies on TV, just to be clear.
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