"Oh, Mama," said my then four-year-old son joyfully, "I love Jesus, and you love Jesus, and ... oh, everyone loves Jesus!" Ever have a similarly sweet-yet-challenging parenting moment? "Well, Jed," I explained, "Umm ... not everyone loves Jesus." Eyes wide and hands on hips, Jed demanded, "Who doesn't love Jesus?" I figured my preschooler needed a simple, concrete example. "You know Mikey across the street? I don't think his parents have ever told him about ... hold on, Jed, wait! Come back!" I'm not sure how Jed planned to set Mikey straight, but I thought we'd better have Continue Reading
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3 Effective Ways to Show Kindness to a Grieving Friend
Fidgeting with her hair, the nervous teen told me her parents would “kill her” if they found out she was pregnant. Her boyfriend didn’t want a baby. They’d broken up the night before. I expressed sympathy. The girl burst into tears. Then she said what most people say when they cry in front of others. “I’m sorry!” We’re not very good at grief and sorrow in our culture. We’re embarrassed at our tears. We apologize for allowing our feelings to show. Somehow, we’ve adopted a strange paradigm: it’s not okay to hurt --it’s only okay to be okay. So we hide our feelings and except Continue Reading
The Most Powerful, Doable Way to Pray for Your Children
If I asked, "Do you think you pray enough for your kids?", my guess is you'd say no. Or maybe you'd say you don't feel very good at praying for them. Maybe your best shot is, "Thank you, Jesus, that I didn't kill them today. Again." When it comes to prayer, a little structure can be super helpful. One of my favorite ways to pray for my children, and now my grandchildren, is to pray the Scriptures over them. Here's one idea: the book of Proverbs has 31 chapters, one for each day of the month. Read a chapter a day, and then choose one or more verses and personalize them as a prayer Continue Reading
How the Valley of the Shadow Points to a Hopeful New Year
On December 30th, I got the phone call. That phone call. It was my mother, letting me know my father had passed. I sank onto the couch, wind knocked out of me, seismic shift wrenching my soul. Dealing with death is a strange way to enter the New Year. No matter how elderly a loved one is, no matter how many physical challenges they have, no matter how much we realize they are close to the end… death is still a shock. My son Sam described his feelings this way: “It’s like going to a movie with lots of plot twists that never resolve, and then all of a sudden the credits are Continue Reading