How can God ask us to seek Him when He knows we won’t naturally do it? It is because He pursues us first. He reveals Himself to us, then we respond to Him.

I noticed that no other dog responded to me. No other dog recognized my voice. It was Lacey who knew me. She was the one that came when I called her.

Thomas, like I have done, doubted Jesus. He doubted that Jesus had the power to make Himself rise from the dead. No one had ever done that before. Thomas wanted proof. He wanted tangible evidence of Jesus’s resurrection. Until Thomas had that confirmation, he refused to believe.

I couldn’t fall asleep. My mind raced with anxiety. Uneasiness and nervousness over what might happen in a few challenging situations held me captive. The concern came from valid fear. Sometimes God, in His perfect sovereignty, allows terrible events to occur. The old fear of impending doom reared its ugly head again.

As harvest neared, driving through Kansas mesmerized me. Everywhere you turned you saw wheat. As a child, I thought it looked like miles and miles of tall soft brown grass with seeds at the top. The seeds were the grains of wheat. The wind blew and the fields undulated like the ocean. It was sheer beauty.

My dear friend, Susie, prayed for decades that her father would come to know Jesus. Her dad was an intellectual and expressed no need for a Savior. He wasn’t interested in church. Susie carefully, lovingly, and intelligently shared the hope of Jesus with her dad. He remained aloof.

One of the joys of Christmas is that I hear worship music playing while I shop at the grocery store. It’s piped in Christmas music on tape, but as I move among the boxes of cereal and jars of mayonnaise, I am in awe of the experience of worshiping my Savior in public.

We did not, however, celebrate Advent. Friends at school used that term when speaking of what happened at their church at Christmastime. I had no idea what they meant. They spoke of it with reverence, which piqued my interest as a follower of Jesus.

Karlene invited me to share some of my story with the women at the event. What a joy to share what God has done in me! The women responded with tears, hugs, words of thanks, and encouragement. A number of them trusted me with their stories.

Brother Matthias couldn’t have dreamed that this young incorrigible would one day be one of the greatest baseball players who ever lived.

I watched the video of Billy Graham’s memorial service at the library and wondered what it was like for USA presidents and other dignitaries as they entered the building. I wanted to be at that sacred place and soak it all in.

Since I no longer lived with a hypervigilant fear of making a mistake, I made a mistake. I didn’t notice a change in the speed limit as I moved from one highway to another.

One night we cousins begged my aunt and uncle to allow us to sleep overnight in a small farm building they converted into a playhouse. Our aunt left a warehouse-sized box of Swiss Miss–an instant hot chocolate drink mix–on the counter in the kitchen for us. With no portion control given, we drank it late into the night.

What I noticed about my husband is that when we sacrificially gave to others, he had no fear of us going without. He knew something about God that I did not yet know. He trusted God in a way I didn’t.

What I soon began to understand is that being teachable isn’t about academic strength. It is about having a humble heart that is willing to let others speak into your life.

I found that I spent the entire year counting down. In the summer I counted down the days until mid-September when temperatures cool down at night. In the winter, I counted down until mid-April when I knew I’d have to face the high temperatures again during the day.

The destruction for Norma and I of our childhood reached far and wide into our lives. It affected how we saw situations and relationships, and how we responded or reacted in life, even with each other. Unresolved sin doesn’t go away if you simply don’t think about it.

Out of the corner of my eye I noticed a light blue vehicle ready to exit into traffic. Since he was on the phone, he was distracted and didn’t look in my direction. He pulled out. As he did, he smashed into the passenger side of my car

My neighbors seemed to have forgotten about the pandemic that night. They were having fun. They were together.

As my daughter processed this experience with me of her grief over the hair that would take years to regrow, I was reminded of how powerless we are over the wrongs done against us. Though the manager didn’t charge my daughter for the appointment, she couldn’t glue my daughter’s hair back in place.