New Year’s resolutions – do you make them? Do you keep them? I’m not big on them. I never was good at keeping them for more than a few days. I view the new year rather like a fresh new journal waiting to be written in… a blank canvas waiting for the artist’s brush… a new song to be sung. A fresh start. A time of hope and tremendous potential for doing better than I have done before. It’s a…
There are gifts… and then there are gifts. Our family stopped giving gifts at Christmas more than twenty-five years ago, for reasons I won’t get into here. But there are precious gifts given by friends and loved ones that are not tied to any particular date in the year. A few months ago, I shared with you a gift my husband gave me for no special reason. I refer to the composite picture he made of my father and me,…
James 4:13-14 NKJV Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, spend a year there, buy and sell, and make a profit”; whereas you do not know what will happen tomorrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away. We don’t always have tomorrow. This struck home for our family one unforgettable night; a night that changed our family…
It was the fall of 1960. My father had recently died, and we had moved to an old, decrepit apartment building downtown. Our city cousins were coming to visit, and we were unruly in our excitement. With only an hour before the visit, Mom sent us kids off to Remembrance Park to play. “But don’t go near the bog, or you’ll get stuck in the quicksand!” Mom warned. Remembrance Park was a marvellous little place, with an arched log bridge…
“There is no counterfeit without the reality.” – Oswald Chambers The Counterfeit Last week I talked about autosuggestion, or self-talk. Another word for it is “affirmations.” There’s nothing wrong with looking at the bright side, and refusing to get sucked into the negative that’s so prevalent in our world today. But self-talk as I was taught to do it is like Satan’s counterfeit of God’s truth. The counterfeit may look real, and it may even seem to have value for…
I am no good at sales or self-promotion. I never was a success at network marketing, though I tried off and on for many years. Twelve years ago, I was introduced to a way of inviting people that was nonthreatening, and generic. It didn’t matter if they ever joined my company – in fact, I wasn’t even supposed to tell them what company I was in. It was free training that would help them in any network marketing company, and…
“He will make us broken bread and poured out wine.” I think the first time I heard that was a couple of years ago, in a song in The Salvation Army Songbook, written by General Albert Orsborn – “My Life Must Be Christ’s Broken Bread”. I understood the words well enough, but not the concept. What did it mean? Then it began showing up in my morning reading of “My Utmost for His Highest”, by Oswald Chambers. If you’ve read…
“One thing I do not like about these three people [see Luke 9:57-62] is that none of them appears to have any sense of sin. Nothing is said about repentance or about their deep need of a Saviour. I regret that there should be so many persons outside of my text who have no repentance. They seem to jump into their religion as men do into their morning bath and the jump out again just as quickly, converted by the…
This week is Christian Life Week at Prairie Bible College, and beginning tomorrow, it is also an Alumni Reunion for those of us whose final year there was in 1961, 1971, 1981, 1991, or 2001. I am in the middle – the Class of ’81. When I attended, it was called Fall Conference at Prairie Bible Institute. Pictured above is me, age 25, a freshman, and very recently widowed. My first husband, Bob, had died eight weeks earlier, in July….
We haven’t had many mosquitoes this year, but we’ve seen a lot of hornets! Hornets are quite the little opportunists, as I discovered when we lived out in the country on an acreage. All summer long the hornets monopolized our hummingbird feeders, chasing the tiny birds away. The hummingbirds migrated south at the beginning of September, and we left the feeders out for a while longer. The hornets loved that. We would find their nests everywhere. One year we were…