Valentine’s Day has come and gone. The day we celebrate love and candy and flowers and candy and romantic dinners and candy and cards and chocolate. Has the day left you feeling glad or sad? Like relationships, Valentine’s Day sometimes has its melancholy moments or full-on frustrations. Maybe like Charlie Brown, no one remembered you…
Having a heart as soft as a “Jesus cookie” or as hard as an ice-covered sidewalk
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Love ’em or hate ’em, we’ve got goals
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It’s been more than eight weeks since my last blog post, so I’m cringing as I review my goals for 2016. One of my primary goals was to blog weekly. By that standard, epic fail. But I don’t want to focus on failure, I’d rather look at progress. In 2016, I published 22 posts. One…
Evicting the rebel
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I live with a little rebel. She complains when she doesn’t get her way. She finds loopholes around the rules. She’s a poster child for asking forgiveness instead of asking permission. One of my daughters spent LOTS of time in time out. Yes, she’s the one who said, “I’ll mess with Texas if I want…
Learning to let go
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God knows I am pretty dense sometimes, so He helps me out by hitting me up side the head with stuff. Three times in three days from three different sources, I heard the same message: surrender. In a couples’ Bible study, we are reading Chuck Swindoll’s book, “So You Want to be Like Christ.” The…
On procrastination, purpose and the miraculous healing of a printer
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Friday was Sandra’s “Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day” and I wanted to run away to Australia. I won’t give you all the gory details because even if I changed the names to protect the innocent, most of the trouble was caused by that person I see every day in the mirror. A large…
An end is also a beginning
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Two weeks ago today Shawn and I dropped the last kid off at college, and I’m still in shock. Where did those 18 years go, or the nearly two and a half decades of having kids under foot? The days crawled but the years raced. We followed Anna’s battered blue Dakota up Highway 377 to…
Playing possum or playing “with” possum
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Yesterday at our house here in suburban DFW we had our own version of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. A half-grown possum decided he wanted to stroll around our backyard, wander in and out of the doghouse and check out my garden. The ever-energetic Elektra barked and jumped at the window and wanted to go…
Goals, terry cloth robes and grace. Lots of grace.
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Here we are almost at the end of June. That means we are half way through 2016. Yes. Really. I know it takes us all a few months just getting used to writing 2016 before it sinks in. I decided it would be a good chance for me to review all those goals I set…
The optimistic, inconsistent, oblivious gardener
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Every spring hope pokes up in the fertile loam of my optimistic (Shawn would substitute delusional) heart and I plant. This year I bribed and badgered two of my daughters into joining me in my overgrown backyard bed. We cleared away the dead plants from last year and a bumper crop of weeds aided by…
Turning in my “active duty mom card”
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Last weekend this mom survived two big milestones. Anna, my youngest, graduated from high school on Saturday. Two days later, she turned 18. In just the space of 48 hours, I had no more K-12 kiddos and no more minor children. It’s enough to make a mama swoon. I’d been simultaneously anticipating and dreading those…