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The Crisis of Fatherhood & Healing the Wounds
Can we talk about fatherhood for a minute? When I think of the word “father”, I think of the unsung heroes in our midst.👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻 The men who do the good, even when it’s inconvenient or at great personal sacrifice. I think of men who discipline out of love, but are also quick to recognize the good in others and to offer encouragement. When I think of “father”, I think of men who use their strength to love and protect — never to harm. I think of men determined to be more than just “one of the boys” — and strive to be men of God, first and foremost. I think…
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We All Need Healing
We all need healing. Every one of us. Can I get an Amen!🙌🏻 We’ve all inherited a fallen nature (shout out Adam and Eve 🙁 ), have grown up in a broken world, and have sometimes suffered greatly at the hands of the broken people around us. There’s no denying it, we have all been a bit battered and worn from the battle to do the right thing, to forgive the wrongs done to us, and to love the people around us, even when it’s difficult. Which is why we need healing — spiritual, physical and emotional healing — and it’s also why God stepped in and gave us a…
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Celebrating John
Today we celebrate John. It’s his birthday! Woot Woot! I figured this was the perfect time to share a little bit about the guy I have loved through thick and thin, till death do us part. Hooray! He’s been my right hand man (a.k.a. husband) for almost 20 years now😘. He still makes me laugh after all these years, but if I’m being absolutely honest, he has also been known — on the rare occasion — to make me want to break a slate over his head. (Anne Shirley, I get you!😂). Don’t worry I have never indulged in the urge to do violence to the man I love dearly,…
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Embracing Your Abundant Life
“I came that they might have life, and have it abundantly” John 10:10 You know, contrary to popular opinion, Jesus didn’t come to earth to ruin all of our fun. Nope. He didn’t come to earth to simply deliver a bunch of “no’s” so that we would miss out on the amazing life we could otherwise have lived if we didn’t listen to Him. In fact, what I have discovered in my own life is that every single “no” He asks of us is a “yes” to something greater. It really is. After all, He came so that we might have an abundant life. Have you ever taken the time…
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The Nobility of Being a Homemaker in a Career-Obsessed World.
In recent weeks, there erupted a bit of a storm around the question of married women working outside of the home. There was one man in particular, who shall remain nameless — well known in the Catholic Youtube world — who claimed Church teaching makes it clear that it is sinful for a women who is married (with or without children) to work outside of the home. You can imagine the barage of fighting that ensued after such a statement — with so many Catholic women working in different capacities, in and outside of their home, paid or unpaid. Honestly, I find statements like that to be highly inflammatory (and…
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The Big, Fat Baby’s Guide to Fasting
“And (Jesus) said to them, ‘This kind (of demon) cannot be driven out by anything but prayer and fasting.‘ “ Mark 9:29 Intermittent fasting is all the rage right now, but it is rare to find the people touting its praises on the internet to be approaching fasting from a religious perspective Fasting, in the public sphere, is often boiled down to a great way to lose weight, regain energy and increase focus — and though those things might be nice side effects of fasting, they are truly the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the powerful benefits of fasting, from a faith perspective. True, intermittent fasting has…
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Staring at the Serpent
Through an unfortunate series of events, already enumerated in the update I shared this morning, today’s original post was irretrievably lost. The thought has occurred to me that maybe the devil didn’t want me to finish that post — which, I know, sounds strange, but I feel like this little conversation we had with a man named Stewart is crucial in taking back what has been lost in recent years. It’s hard to even describe what has been lost, but maybe you have felt it, too. It’s as if we (and by “we”, I mean “Christians”) have given up the good fight and gone into defensive mode, just trying to…
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Staring at the Serpent (a post in the making).
Through an unfortunate series of events — including children running off with computer mouses so as to make clicking on “save draft” while writing my post impossible (aren’t kids the best?), as well as finally locating said “mouse” and getting it back to my desk just as the power happened to go out, I lost my entire post! I was determined to not give up and to begin again in the wee hours of the morning, but alas, the keyboard hitting me in the face as my head slumped over in unexpected sleep proved I was done for. So I resolved to get up early and finish this post because…
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When Life Punches You In the Face
“Everybody has a plan, until they get punched in the face”. Muhammad Ali Hello Everybody! How are you doing? Me? I had plans this week: plans to get my carpets done and my bathroom wallpapered and to finally get my schoolroom in good order, amongst other things….so many plans. To be honest, I actually managed to get a lot accomplished this week. I cleaned my carpets (my, they needed it!) and began my wallpapering project (something I have never done before) — but life just started happening (as it tends to do) and somewhere in the middle of my week, it all kind of went sideways. Does that ever happen…
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Finding Your Bedrock
A funny thing happens when you are about to drop your daughter off at college for the first time: you begin to evaluate how well you have prepared your child for this moment. You may even find yourself taking advantage of lulls in conversation or long drives to dive deep into serious conversations that you feel must be had before you can consider your child “ready” to leave the nest. You have, to this point, been the first line of defense, and that likely afforded your child the opportunity to grow up without full knowledge of the dangers and ugliness of humanity. You took on the role of protecting your…
