My Mother’s Day Highlight: Allie’s Baby Dedication

Yesterday was a particularly meaningful Mother’s Day for me because we held a baby dedication for our daughter Alena. We wanted to share with you our thoughts and reasons for doing this. While there is no scriptural mandate for dedicating a child to God, we see examples of people bringing their babies to Jesus to be blessed (Matt 19:13, Mark 10:13, Luke 18:15a) and Jesus himself was brought to the temple as a young child as part of a Jewish custom (Luke 2:22-24).
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house story

When Grace Shows Up In the Impossible: The Story of Our House

About a year ago, Tim, his sister, her husband, and I hatched a plan to purchase a house together and share the space.  It seemed crazy and a bit far-fetched at the time – and it still does when we tell people we share a house.  But there were also so many reasons why we thought it was a good idea. So we launched into the great unknown armed with a hard-working realtor, some childlike prayers of faith and a “we’ll see how it goes” kind of attitude.  This is the story of how we got our house.

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Parenthood and Prayer

What my Baby is Teaching me about Prayer

A while ago, a friend suggested to me that I might want to write about what I’ve been learning about prayer through my experience of being a parent.  Since prayer and the deepening of my relationship with God are matters that are close to my heart, and parenthood is the bulk of my daily life these days, it made sense to me to give it some thought.

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When God Feels Like a Meany

What do you do when God sets you up for something great, only to pull the rug from underneath you?  This past week has felt like that for me.  Being the recovering perfectionist that I am, I had wanted to wait until this story had a happy ending before I wrote about it.  But as I contemplated what was going on, I felt convicted to be more honest and real; to tell it as it is.

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Does Love grow with Knowledge?

Tim and I had an interesting conversation with a friend last night.  In the course of our conversation, we stumbled upon this question, “Does growing your knowledge of a person enable your love for them to grow?”

For example, when I married Tim, I could wholeheartedly say that I loved him.  But in the last 3 years, I have gotten to know him so much better than the day we got married.  So my love for him now includes all those dimensions of him (positive and negative) that I had previously not known.  Likewise, our friend yesterday shared with us something that we hadn’t known before, so now, when we think of our friendship and the love we have for our friend, it includes that added dimension.

Or perhaps the love itself does not grow.  Perhaps what grows with knowledge is the awareness of what our love encompasses.  After all, love is a choice.

As it relates to God, I can say today that I love God, but each day as I discover more of Him and experience more with Him, that little word takes on richer and fuller meaning.

Any thoughts?

photo credit: Caro Wallis via photo pin cc