Just when you think kindness is going the way of the dodo bird (becoming extinct), you hear a story like this one. Thank heavens – hope lives! A couple days ago, as soon as the sun came up, my cousin Howard (age 72) spent four hours working in his vegetable garden in north Florida until ...
Rules of Life
I recently ran across an account of a marvelous Frenchwoman named Jeanne Louise Calment (who was born in 1875) and I just have to share some of the wit and wisdom Jeanne wrote about herself at age 120, which she called “The Rules of Life” (she passed away at 122). I would have loved to ...
They’re Everywhere!
I glanced up during my prayer walk on the Smoky Mt. trail and stopped in my tracks. I declare my mouth fell open. The entire mountainside was covered in gorgeous white flowers called trillium (I learned this from my fauna app). Part of the lily family, unimpeded trillium bulbs apparently proliferate like wildfire and spread ...
Splintered
On a prayer walk through the woods, I came across this astounding sight of a tree near the top of a mountain that had been hit by a bolt of lightning. The tree was shredded, splintered into long strips that left the tree apparently lifeless and utterly destroyed through no fault of its own. But ...
Fishy Blessings
For a time, my 7-year-old grandprincess wanted to be a professional fisherwoman when she grew up. When I was her age, I dreamed of being a ballerina or a grocery store cashier (both equally glamorous jobs in my estimation), but with two brothers and a dad who loved nothing better than gripping a rod in ...
My Pace Place
You got to move it, move it! You got to move it, move it! There – has that song worm embedded itself in your brain for the rest of the day? It most assuredly has in mine. But hey, that might as well be my theme song these days. You may recall me mentioning a ...
Blessings for the Blesser
I heard a story this week about a man we’ll call Mark, who got stuck on the interstate in touch and go traffic. During one long interval of stagnation, he glanced at the cars around him. The older green model to his right was inhabited by two little white-haired ladies in their seventies. As the ...
Back in the Saddle Again
I’ve been wrestling lately with a thorn in the flesh. Do you recognize that phrase from the passage in 2 Corinthians 12: 7-10 where the apostle Paul talks about suffering from a thorn in the flesh issued to him by Satan to make him miserable and styme his work for the Lord? We don’t know ...
Near-Misses
I hope you haven’t tired of the incessant grace notes I blog about whenever I can, because I’ve got a doozy for you today. It’ll make you cry and give you God bumps at the same time. I’m doing ’em both as I write this. Now please don’t stop reading before you get to the ...
Conduit for Blessings
I’ve been rereading one of my all-time favorite books, God’s Smuggler, about the true experiences of a Dutchman called Brother Andrew in smuggling (then illegal) Bibles behind the Iron Curtain in the 1950s and 1960s. The remnant of faithful Christians in repressive Communist and Socialist countries was being systematically snuffed out when God placed it on Brother ...
