Every little girl who has ever read, watched, or listened to a love story or song has imagined the surreal feeling of experiencing the ideal romance and being considered a young man’s favorite. It’s been acted out with their Barbie dolls (sometimes with Star Wars figurines too), it’s the source of diary entries, and the …
Category: Spiritual Life
Hygge
It’s pronounced hoo-gah. See, reading does make you smarter, even if it’s just a weird educator’s blog post! Being introduced to this Danish term in The Flourishing Teacher, I was intrigued enough to search for more as I felt it captured an important component of a flourishing life. Lake launches this concept as she describes …
How Do You Worship?
Have you ever been the recipient of an unexpected revelation from a surprising source? This experience seems to be occurring rather frequently for me in the last few months. Whether the resource was recommended or just stumbled upon, concepts are being exposed in a new light. It’s not uncommon these days to be reading about …
Daddy, I Need You
Imagine the scene described by Vance Pitman in his book entitled Unburdened (and I highly recommend reading the entire story instead of my pitiful abbreviation here) where he describes a moment during an independent stage with his three-year old daughter. One morning as they were leaving the house, his daughter was walking with shoelaces untied …
Surprise, Surprise, Surprise
If you didn’t read the title with a Gomer Pyle voice and if you are unaware of who he is, your life has been deprived. Please stop reading now, go to a search engine, and solve the mystery before you read any further. nytimes.com Continuing the theme from the last post entitled Surprise and Delight, …
Audacious Imaginations
On a quest to navigate what constitutes a flourishing life, one should expect to find numerous resources related to success stories from the athletic world to the business realm; however, one surprise on this journey has been the number of authors who recommend not only considering a strategic plan for how to accomplish one’s goals, …
Audience of One
When a phrase comes to your attention from three different sources all within a 24-hour period, it might be wise to pay attention! The phrase Audience of One appeared in a sermon podcast in the morning and two separate books on different topics in the afternoon. Discussing the Sermon on the Mount, Ortberg discusses how …
Dust of Your Rabbi
One of the characteristics I associate with accomplished writers is the ability to paint in my mind a picture of the scene they are describing, or it could be the turn of an unusual phrase that grabs my attention which is what occurred during the reading of John Ortberg’s God Is Closer Than You Think. …
Building the Wrong House
Have you ever been guilty of attempting to Build the Wrong House? Sometimes in my eagerness to serve or help, I start trying to help everyone and instead of following the blueprints God designed just for me, I let the Enemy distract me into building the house he created for someone else. In Banning Liebscher’s …
Martha, Martha, Martha!
For those of us who grew up in the 1970s watching the television show The Brady Bunch, we can hear Jan, in her frustration of being the middle sister vocalize, “Marsha, Marsha, Marsha!” With Jan’s voice so ingrained in my head, I must admit that every time I read the Biblical story of Mary and …