Love and encouragement from an imperfect mom and her fun teen daughters. We welcome you to live life with us.
articles on making and keeping friends
Denying our strengths and weaknesses causes us to believe the lie that we are being humble. Yet God wants us to celebrate our strengths and confess our weaknesses (and sins) to him. Our denial can drive us to feel shameful or prideful, because we will miss God’s delight with us in our strengths and his … Read more Pride in Our Denial
Many gals do not believe they are profoundly significant, because they think this sounds arrogant. We think we sound prideful if we acknowledge our strengths and achievements, but instead we miss God’s delight in giving us these strengths to positively impact others. We underestimate our profound significance to God and to other people. We are … Read more You are Profoundly Significant
People-Pleasing and Idolizing People Do you get tripped up by people-pleasing (fearing them or putting all your trust in them)? Jeremiah 17:5-6 warns against this people pleasing. Look at verse 5b, “Cursed are those who put their trust in mere humans, who rely on human strength and turn their hearts away from the Lord.” Relying … Read more Curse of Fearing People:
God is showing me I can have compassion for those who hurt me without surrendering my heart to further attacks. I don’t want to fall into two different but equally wrong responses to those who hurt me. I don’t want to run away, fearing or hating those who hurt me with no regard for their … Read more Comfort my Enemies?
Ripping rotten roots out of my heart, God was a master gardener, with his pruning discipline after I refused to listen to his wise counsel. Some of the bad choices, like weeds, looked so innocent at first, but they were deadly, and I needed God to yank them out of my life. Even “good” aspects … Read more God’s Discipline: Weeds come when we disobey God
As I grow in my Christian faith, God showers me with his love and disciplines my sins, often through Bible verses I read. The love is a wonderful, easy gift. The discipline is also a blessing, albeit a painful gift. God is gentle, so he does not show me every sin at the same time. … Read more Seeing Myself in Proverbs: Ouch!
I discussed the trouble I had forgiving difficult people in my two last posts “Struggling to Forgive” and “Struggling to Forgive, part two.” I explained my ongoing forgiveness for a person who is now dead. I needed to get past her faults and understand her hidden pain. Outwardly she lived a charmed life, but because … Read more Continuing to Forgive (part 3)
I am expanding last week’s post “Struggling to Forgive.” I talked about misconceptions (lies or myths about forgiveness) and explained that even when we truly want to forgive, we pay a huge price for the wrongs others did to us. Those wrongs hurt badly and make forgiving much harder, since it comes at such a … Read more Struggling to Forgive, part two
In last week’s post “Deceived by False Doctrine” I discussed some specific false doctrines, about God, that have deceived me and other people. Whether a church directly teaches errors or people misunderstand the truth and come up with wrong ideas, the false doctrine pulls them away from the true heart of God. This week I … Read more Fighting False Doctrine, part two
We may have learned false doctrine in church, as it was taught, or by misunderstanding the truth and coming up with wrong ideas on our own. Either way, false doctrine harms our Christian walk, until we re-learn the truth. In posts I have written earlier, I mentioned some wrong ideas I developed about God, due … Read more Deceived by False Doctrine