The Great American Road Trip—Not

Great Expectations Meet Mundane Fails I took an unplanned road trip a short time ago. It wasn’t at all what I expected or felt I needed. My husband scored a job 1500 miles away from home. He expected to be staying in a motel and took the absolute minimum. But after getting there, he found …

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I Am Empowered

A Peek into My Process to Conquer Insecurity and Self-criticism People who know me often describe me as strong. I’m calm in a crisis, champion the underdog, and have been strong-willed since childhood — just ask my sisters! What most don’t know is that I have a deep-seated fear of both failure and success. As …

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Priorities

Priorities are something we have to work at; you can’t just assume you have them in place. But often we ignore priorities as if the word itself is somehow dirty. I was brought up short this last week by an incident that reminded me of this reality. My husband decided that he wanted to buy …

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Old Dogs Can Learn New Tricks

But it might not be the “old dog” you expected. In this case, I’m the old dog. Like most people, I don’t like failure or admitting I was wrong, but there it was, and there I was. Here’s what happened. I shared a few weeks ago about Star, the new four-legged addition to our family. …

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Transformation

A dream interpreted Unlike many people during the last several months, I haven’t been keen on deep cleaning, or reorganizing, or new hobbies, or cooking, or much of anything constructive. I’ve spent a great deal of my time reading fiction — my historical escape mechanism. Last week, that suddenly changed, and I found myself deep …

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Is Positive Realism an Oxymoron?

No, Positive Realism is living in reality with joy as the foundation. As in so many arenas of modern life, people seem to be polarized between Positive thinking and Realistic thinking, as if the two can’t coexist. One group is said to be woo-woo Pollyannas and the other is said to be mired in the …

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Grace and Routine in Daily Life

A reader asked how Grace fit into daily life after reading my post What is Grace? Part 1. “I am just so hard on myself if I miss a day of reading the Bible and would love to understand how His grace is sufficient for me!” Then she followed up with:  “I would love to …

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Faith and Foxholes

The adage says there are no atheists in foxholes. I don’t know about that, but I do know that when we are at the end of what we can do, that is when we seek something more. According to history and archaeology, humans have sought favor from gods since long before monotheism came to be. …

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Can Forgiveness and Justice Coexist?

Many people think forgiveness and justice are opposites, unable to coexist with each other. They are neither opposites, nor two different sides of the same coin. They are of two different worlds. To explain this, I will refer to two stories from two different tumultuous times and places. The first is the story of Brandt …

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