About a month ago, my husband and I were enjoying lunch at a Japanese restaurant when the thought occurred to us, “What if we switched roles?” We had really been dancing around the issue for some time. I have been staying at home with our boy since shortly after he was born, but have dreams of further academic study and continuing my church ministry work with kids. He had realized that he was craving more...
I’m new here. New to this blog, new to the church I’m attending, and fairly new to motherhood. To some, “new” means change and change is frightening. There’s just so much unknown in change, and that can be deeply unsettling. Being both an optimist and a bit of an idealist, I am choosing to approach all of this new with an open mind and, God help me, an open heart. I am seeking an open heart...
Being a father of boys is difficult. Sure there are the annoying things: having to listen to the song “What Does a Fox Say?” over and over, constantly reminding them the living room is not the place to perfect their football Brazilian Flick, having to explain why it is inappropriate to have their hands down their shorts while sitting around the living room, finding out that they have been practicing headers with a dog poo...
I celebrated my 26th birthday this last Saturday. And, though I am a little freaked out by the fact that I am now officially closer to 30 than to 20, on the whole I can only feel a deep sense of thankfulness: I am thankful to be 26, to have lived another year in the beautiful sunshine of California, to be constantly learning and (hopefully) growing, to deepen relationships with my friends and family, to...
Allow me to introduce myself. First and foremost, I’m a sinner saved by grace. I’m a husband and a father. I’ve been a youth leader, Sunday school teacher, deacon and elder. I served in the Air Force for thirty years. I was a three-sport letterman in high school, played college football, and played seven years of football overseas while in the Air Force. I like sports, action movies, being in control, and I would never...
My name is Donna, and I’d like to tell you about my son. Bryan is my second child, coming four years after his big brother, Jayson, and on his dad’s 31st birthday. He didn’t have a swollen and scrunched up face like some newborns, but was beautiful from the very beginning. His paternal grandfather was from Mexico and his maternal grandmother was from Ireland, and he has the features and temperaments of both cultures. As...
After only a month in Scotland, word came for my wife that her grandmother had died. Once I found out, I knew it meant that she would be returning home for the service. It would be a painful process for her. Death is, to our senses, utterly irreversible. People that we love dearly pass across an invisible, indiscriminate divide and we have no way of reaching across and speaking to them again. For as long...
Whatever family friendly sit-com you grow up watching- whether the I Love Lucy, Full House, or Home Improvement, the source of the laughs and the heart-tugs are the same- family can be rough sometimes. We can all see the elements of dysfunction, and fortunately, all share a laugh of emphathy when we see it acted out before us. Family- can’t live with ’em, can’t live without them. Jesus had some rough run ins with his family. In...
This year on the 24th of April, Armenia remembers the 97th anniversary of the displacing of 250 influential Armenian citizens from the Ottoman capital city in 1915. This event was the pivotal beginnings of what would be later called the Armenian Genocide. During the Genocide, which took place from 1915 to 1923, Turks massacred two thirds of the Armenian population. That was nearly one and a half million Armenians. These murders were implemented through the...
There has seeped into the church culture a “new normal” with regard to children “growing up Christian.” I say “new normal” because I can only imagine it has not been this way in past generations of believers. Nothing in Scripture seems to support the idea that children growing up in a Christian home will “graduate from God when the graduate from high school” and return after they are married with children of their own. That...
Recent Comments