“For the body is not one member, but many…Now you are Christ’s body, and individually members of it”

I heard a simple yet profound insight into this passage in Corinthians recently…ready?

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Do you watch the Amazing Race?  My husband loves that show, and has recently been catching up on years of missed episodes.  I don’t love it and here’s why:  the bickering.  Listen, if I want to hear people arguing, I’m perfectly capable of picking a fight myself.  It stresses me out.

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Rejection hurts.  No matter how you try to spin it, it leaves a wound.  When it is someone else being rejected, we are quick to share our platitudes, as genuine as they might be.

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My eldest began working out a lot a couple of years ago, and as a birthday gift last year, we told him we’d get him a gym membership.  He talked to a few friends about their experiences with nearby gyms.  One guy told him stories about Planet Fitness that had us rolling on the floor laughing in disbelief.

They serve pizza?  Candy?  Flashing lights and alarms go off to shame people for working out “too hard.”  Does this ‘gym’ even want its members to get healthy?!

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’m minding my own business last week, when an article comes across my desk instructing me (and all evangelical Christians) how to show love to all of these people we supposedly hate.  The conclusion?  Stop being Christians and agree with everything the world says…then they’ll know you really love them.  (my paraphrase)

The unloving Christians.  The media has been telling us for years that Christians are unfeeling and unloving.  But the evidence doesn’t show that.  It’s a deception and it is not true.

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Do you ever feel helpless when a friend is struggling?  You’ve hugged, visited, shared a meal, and encouraged.  But you can’t be there every minute.

The ladies class I’m a part of on Wednesday nights has been trying to actively encourage a friend who is in the hospital.  One of the things we decided to do was to flood her room with the truths of God’s word.  I created these Scripture printables.  We each wrote an encouraging note around the edges, to remind her of our love, and hung them all around her room.

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Summers are the greatest, aren’t they?

It’s all relaxing and eating bon-bons and sipping iced tea. …Yeah, not around here either.  But that doesn’t mean that summer’s not fantastic.

Our summers are filled with fun, but they’re also filled with lots of service opportunities.  If we’re not heading to a camp, we are hosting a team of people.

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I heard a story recently about a young man who was out in his father’s watermelon field working, with strict instructions not to eat any of the fruit.  Giving in to temptation, he attempted to hide the evidence by burying the remains off in another part of the field.  He was sure he’d gotten away with it until his father noticed watermelons growing where they didn’t belong.  The evidence was irrefutable.  Undeniable.  Once the fruit appeared, the son could not hide that he had buried the seeds in just that place.

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You’re reading Scripture but it just feels like empty words.  You can’t see God anywhere you look.  Abandoned.  Defeated.  Alone.  Those are the words going through your head.

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I find words fascinating.  We just watched Dead Poets Society tonight with the boys.  There’s a scene in the movie in which Mr. Keating says, “Avoid using the word ‘very’ because it’s lazy.  A man is not very tired, he is exhausted.”  Say what you really mean.

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If your child’s textbook taught that bloodletting, heroin, and mercury were effective medical treatments, I imagine you’d take issue with that.  After all, those practices were proven falselong ago.  Well, did you know that science textbooks from elementary school through college continue to print “facts” that were patently proven false (by mainstream science) decades ago.

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No one has ever, or will ever, love me as much as my dog.  This is not to demean my husband’s love for me … he totally agrees with this assessment.

Even a word like ‘unconditional’ doesn’t do justice to the complete, every inch of his soul adoration that a dog truly smitten offers.  I’m pretty sure if he could speak, what Scout would say to me is, “My whole life is in you…all I am and do are wrapped up in you…my sun rises and sets on your existence.”

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