I've prayed for a lot of things in my lifetime. I've prayed for the winning lottery numbers - you can see how that turned out; I live in a trailer and drive a fifteen year old car (when I'm not driving my twenty year old truck). I've prayed for patience when I've been at my wits end - and I've been given the opportunity to practice patience. God answers every prayer. Sometimes the answer is, "No." Sometimes the answer is, "Wait." We don't always get the answer we had in mind when we said our prayer. There are times when we have to listen very closely for an answer at all. And then there are the times when our prayers are answered so immediately and so powerfully that there's no mistaking what's going on. There was a time about four years back when we were getting all jammed up, courtesy of a good deed gone horribly wrong. The thing I needed most desperately to save our situation was for someone to be revealed for w...
Just the other day I was going through my closet, looking for something. You know how this goes after you hit the age of 50, right? You start looking for one thing and find something else and get so totally sidetracked that you never even remember what it was you were originally looking for, right? So, I was looking for a shoe. I figured it might be in my closet. I may never know, because every time I go to my closet for something.... Anyway, at the back of my closet is a metal lock-box. I don't have a key for it so I hope it never actually gets locked. I don't even know where the box came from but it seems like I've had it forever. The box is stuffed full of the past. There are a few photographs in there, and I can't figure out why they're in there instead of with the other photos in the house, but there they are. There's a copy of my high school newspaper from my freshman year. I know why that's there - that was the year Marty (now my husband) gr...
Our pastor was talking during Sabbath School about the "casual Christian", and the thought just keeps popping back into my head. Casual Christian. I'm not sure that I've ever been a casual anything in my life. If I'm doing something, I'm doing it. Sometimes that's to my own detriment, of course, because I pick the wrong things to do sometimes. My husband and I started on this journey together shortly after we got together, about nine years ago. To be perfectly frank, neither of us was leading anything close to a Christian lifestyle at that point. I'd been in and out of different churches for about ten years, looking for one that felt right - looking for one that I thought was telling me what the truth was. Marty was what we call a Recovering Catholic; he'd been raised Catholic and the church had scarred him and turned him completely off religion. However, once he got his teeth into it again he was and is like a pit bull with a bone. The more w...
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