Love your ENEMIES? I’ve often heard Luke 6:27-38 and brushed it off like, “Sure, sure Jesus, I’ve got you! I’ll love my enemies!” I have found it relatively easy to pray for and “love” those that I have deemed as enemies for years; tyrant leaders, the rude coffee barista, the loved one that betrayed, the colleague that ruled with harshness and fury, the relative that turned their back on us, or the CEO of a well known abortion provider. I was satisfied with my effort to pick up my cross, lift them in prayer, and stand with a posture of love. But what if I haven’t taken the time to…

There are some words we use on a daily basis and toss around freely and carelessly in conversation without giving them any real intentional consideration. We frequently converse with such a cruising speed that we don’t put much thought into the 16,000 words that we speak on an average day.  According to Wikipedia, some of the most commonly used words (other than the obvious small words such as “the”, “a”, and “is”)  are “problem”, “have”, “want”, and “time”. Yet, there is one highly dangerous word that does not make the top 100 list, yet I have found myself not only hearing it but also saying it more and more over…

Alright friends, I’m going to get pretty raw and real here.  I had a soul stamping experience a few weeks ago that may be hard to articulate, explain or even resonate with. Yet I can feel the Lord literally pushing my fingers to type away, so here goes nothing: I was crumpled up in a ball on the kitchen floor. I felt like I had been run over by a big plow truck, which proceeded to throw itself in reverse and run right back over my pitiful little heart. My anxiety was high and my knees were weak. As I lay there feeling completely beaten down to my core, I…

Okay folks, here we are, it is 2021. I’m not sure about you but I was pretty confident that we weren’t going to make it out of 2020 unscathed. Sadly, it has been a hard year. People fell ill, financial struggles came roaring in, isolation became burdensome and we lost loved ones to that “darn Corona,” as my four year old daughter so frequently says. It has only been about a year, but it feels like a lifetime, as my almost two year old doesn’t know a world without face masks and buckets of hand sanitizer.  When the enormity of this started last year, my heart found itself in a…

I listen to her ceaseless tears and I watch her cry, twist and yank the heavy covers over her dark, shiny and tossed hair. She aches for the children she doesn’t nourish with her motherly milk, the babies she never wraps up tightly in a swaddling cloth, and the hearts she doesn’t get a chance to encourage, comfort and help mold.  She mourns. She weeps. She laments. Everyone understands it when the tragedy first lays down it’s heavy wooden cross; another pregnancy lost, another heartbeat stopped. The people come rushing in with flowers, meals and downward turned faces that quietly reveal their sympathetic souls.  But as the days, the weeks…

Okay, before you panic after reading the title, you have got to hear me out on this one. Although I do love the outdoors and exploring with my kids, please don’t stress – this is not some fluffy advice on “Being one with the trees.” Don’t worry, I’m not asking you to abandon or forget your God given human dignity and worth! This all started when I was on my usual morning run weeks back. All seemed right and well that particular day (at least for those 36 minutes I was running), yet I felt restless. As I was turning a bend on a quiet crisp morning, suddenly something so…