“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…
What makes a home cluttered and untidy? Assuming there is a place for everything and that it can look neat and tidy when everything is in its place… As the mother of seven, I would say it is a case of everything overflowing its spot and encroaching upon other areas of the house. It’s a lot simpler to keep my home tidy now that my children have grown and moved away. But it was a real challenge when they were…
Social distancing, hand washing, face masks, and the pressure to get the vaccine, have become a way of life that none of us could have imagined less than two years ago. With so many contradicting “facts” coming at us from all directions, it is hard to know who to believe. Whoever and whatever you believe all that is said about it or not, you feel it, even now, after all this time. Remember what it was like in March 2020?…
Years ago, when my husband, Ian, was pastor of a small rural church, we visited a lady who didn’t like being in a room full of people. When asked why, she said she found it hard to hear when there was lots of background noise. We were young, and she was in her 70s. We thought she was being “selectively” deaf, because she had no problem hearing us speaking to her in her own living room. As we got older,…
My stepfather was the town garbage man. That didn’t bother me. He was a good man, and it was an honest occupation. He did the rounds in the residential areas as well as the grocery stores and pretty much everywhere else in our small town. In those days, the town garbage man was allowed to bring home things tossed out in the residential areas he served. Every once in a while my dad would even bring home a box of…