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Merry Christmas!
Merry Christmas! I hope your celebrations have been beautiful! Even if it hasn’t been everything you hoped for, Christmas keeps going for 12 days, and then some — so there is plenty of time to experience all that this Season of Grace has to offer. I’ve been making a conscious effort to try to live these days in a celebratory manner — despite the challenges of being part of a family business and having to take care of many practical things at year end. Many years ago, a rousing game of “paper, scissors, rock” granted me the position of CFO for our family business. Clearly I lost. It’s almost a…
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Let’s Talk About Christmas Feasting and Why It Matters
Did you know that there was a heresy in the early centuries of the Church, known as gnosticism? The Gnostics thought the human spirit was naturally good, but it was imprisoned in the body, which was naturally evil or simply an illusion. Their goal was to free the spirit from its embodied prison. Why this matters is because many of us struggle with this same heresy today. We find ourselves seeing the body as bad or evil — and spiritual things as good and in conflict with the body. It’s understandable, considering the sex-saturated, botox injected world in which we live — but the proper response to all the craziness…
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Let’s Talk About: Getting Ready for Christmas
I am not trying to freak anybody out, but Christmas is less than two weeks away. Now how did that happen?! It is coming fast! On Sunday, we will finally get our tree up and decorated — because Gaudete Sunday, people. Gaudete is Latin for “Rejoice” and it is the perfect time to raise the tree and decorate the house and to be reminded why we have been trying to sacrifice in the first place. Advent is a gift to people like you and me — people who live in a world that is always trying to frantically push the next thing we MUST.BE.DOING and NOW! It’s a way to…
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The Art of Influencing Your Kids
After watching some parents who seem particularly good at it, it seems to me that there is most definitely an art to parenting well. I am not one of those “artful” parents — but I have learned a lot from observing them and asking lots of questions. I still don’t have all the answers, but what I do have is wisdom that has been shared with me along the way, and I am going to share that wisdom with you today. You’re welcome. 🙂 Right up front, we should address the objection, “Why did God give us free will in the first place, knowing the royal mess we can make…
