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Follow Your Master
Growing up, we always had two dogs, a couple of cats, and we went through a spell where we kept Mallard ducks. My family lived out in the country, and when you live out in the country that is what you do – have animals. So after Wade and I built a house out in the country several years ago, I decided we needed a dog. (The cat quota was filled at the time.) All kids need to experience the love of a dog growing up, right? Because we had beef cattle, Wade said if we were really going to get a dog (Yes, we were, I had already decided…),…
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Holy Confidence
Recently, I read a book by Mark Batterson called Praying Circles Around Your Children. His Biblical ideas and methods for praying for your children were thought-provoking. I took several notes and have ideas I want to mull over again. I do not necessarily agree with everything he asserts, but I do know how to take a bite, chew, and spit out the bones. 😉 One concept Batterson introduced which I had never heard of was “holy confidence.” This is how he introduced it: “I’m not talking about self-confidence. I’m praying for holy confidence that comes from doing the will of God for the glory of God. It’s a confidence that…
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Removing Inhibitions
When we got our steers this spring, one arrived sick. It continued to get worse. Bad enough it had gone off on its own in a shady area, I figured, to spend its last days, maybe hours. My husband, Wade, had done everything he could to help it continuing to carry buckets of water to a small water trough he laid by it to ensure it was hydrated and to give it a chance to pull through. This steer had only been with us just a few days which means they are still skittish of the new humans, yet at one point while Wade was refilling its personal water trough,…
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Carbon Copy of Christ
Today’s post takes us back to the mid 1990s so I thought the title went along well since if you were born after 1995, you probably have no clue what carbon paper is… Almost twenty-three years ago (May 25, 1996), my new husband, Wade, and I left for our honeymoon. Our first night was in Nashville before heading the next morning toward Branson, Missouri. See, I had searched and found a bed and breakfast online…in 1996. For those of you who are old enough to know, the “world wide web” was still in its baby stages. Basically newborn stages. Statistics report there were only 100,000 websites in January 1996, yet…
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Learning from the Israelites
This year I am reading chronologically through the Bible and finished Deuteronomy a while back. Admittedly, some of those books of the law (Genesis through Deuteronomy) can be hard to get through, but then along the way in an area where I may be struggling to get *something* from God’s word and BOOM! I find a gold nugget. A lot of times, we don’t get anything out of our Bible reading because we don’t understand the culture of the people, what was going on in that time in history, or the context of the scriptures. How I have improved my Bible reading is I allow myself time to look up…
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Well-Worn Paths
For the last six years come spring we have bought a small herd of Angus steers to have up until the late fall. My husband grew up raising beef cattle, and this is a “hobby” for him. The interesting thing is that every year when we get a brand new herd, they tend to walk the very same paths through our fields. The well-worn paths never grow grass to cover where they walk day in and day out while living on our farm. Their well-worn paths made me think about the well-worn paths in my life. The same things I do day in and day out. My habits. Habits. They…
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Known By Name
Our names are often one of the first things we give when we meet someone. In the English grammar world, names are a proper noun, but in essence they can be thought of as an adjective or descriptive word because they represent to us who that person is. Pretend with me a personality dictionary of everyone existed (and one may exist in our minds). It would give a detailed characterization of what we think of and know about a person. For example: Leslie: forty-something years old, wife to Wade, mother to Elizabeth and Andrew, likes to cook, likes to keep a clean house, likes to craft, etc. If you personally…
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Fallen Away
Part of my Bible reading this past week was reading through 1 Kings when Elijah challenges the prophets of Baal, a pagan god (1 Kings 18:21-24). He wanted the children of Israel to turn back to God wholeheartedly. Much like people do today, the Israelites had not completely rejected God, but they had made Him a very small part of their lives (1 Kings 18:21). Our Baal may be our careers, children, hobbies, spouses, popularity…whatever takes first place in our day-to-day. While reading this chapter, it was so sad to me to read about the prophets of Baal cutting themselves “till the blood gushed out upon them” (1 Kings 18:28).…
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How Happy is Your Easter?
As a young adult, I will admit Easter was not a favorite holiday. The truth is, I was not even acknowledging it as a Holy Day. As a Christian, I was completely missing the scriptural importance of this holiday. Once our children were born, we celebrated with the usual Easter basket and dying of eggs, but I knew I needed to introduce more of the doctrinal reasons for Easter. We would make resurrection rolls and talk about their meaning, and then we added resurrection eggs to our traditions. They loved the resurrection eggs, and it was a meaningful way to teach the essential details of Holy Week. However, this year…