“Keep your mouth shut, and you will stay out of trouble” ~ Proverbs 21:23 NLT I was playing a friendly game of pickleball a few weeks ago with a nice lady I’d just met. Our opponents were two overly aggressive cavemen (you know the type – winning is EVERYTHING and there really is no such ...
Tickling the Ivories
Ever do something for so long that it becomes a part of you and you don’t think about it anymore? That’s the way I am about teaching piano – after 40 years it’s just an integral part of my DNA and I don’t even remember to report it when newly met folks ask what I ...
Pebbles
Something amazing happened to me this week. No, that’s not the right word. Incredible? Shocking? Supernatural? How about all of the above? Here’s how it went down. As I sat in a cold, sterile treatment room praying that Papa God would somehow turn bad news into good, the Pulmonologist entered, sat on her little black ...
Lean It And Mean It
For the past decade, each New Year’s Day, I’ve been choosing a special word for the upcoming year. Many folks do this, do you? I like to sticky-note it to my work space just above my computer so I’ll see it every day. I’ve found my word to be very helpful in keeping me motivated ...
Treasure Them in Your Heart
My Christmas wish to you, my dearest BFFs (Blessed Friends Forever), is that your celebration of the birth of our Savior Jesus Christ is filled with awe and wonder. That’s the true “magic” of Christmas, isn’t it? So here’s an excerpt just for you from my 365-day devotional, Too Blessed to be Stressed: 3-Minute Daily ...
Coaching Counts
Like many of you, I’ve spent much of my life learning important skills from coaches – a patient middle school softball coach; my high school tennis coach; the wonderful choir director who attempted to tune me for years; a longsuffering Christian who nurtured my spiritual growth as a pesky adolescent; the therapist who trained me ...
Manna Nails
“If Papa God tells you to build a shed, He’ll provide the nails.” That’s a quote from one of my Too Blessed to be Stressed books from nearly a decade ago. At the time I wrote it, I had no inkling of the awful, interfering, sometimes debilitating stress we would encounter while building our assigned sheds ...
Inside Out
After last week’s post regaling my enormous relief about my miraculous wicked witchy facial mole healing (scroll back if you missed it!), I’ve been thinking a lot about the importance (or lack thereof) of physical beauty. A potentially depressing topic for sure, with my Medicare birthday approaching like a rogue steam roller. That led me ...
Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow
There are so many accounts of miraculous healings in the Bible: The paralytic lowered to Jesus’ feet by his friends through the hole in the roof The woman with an issue of blood A mentally ill (demonized) man in a graveyard Dorcus, the dealer of purple fabric Simon Peter’s feverish MIL The blind man outside ...
Patrick’s Dream
Once in a great while, your path intersects with someone who enters your heart and never leaves again. I got into a conversation on Facebook this week about a young man who did just that when I worked in hand therapy at a hospital two decades ago. Patrick truly impacted my life. I found this ...