“Father, help me to come closer to You and to others.” These are my words of prayer today as I seek His quiet voice within my soul. I do not like the place that cell phones have in our society because they have stolen the personal connections, the face-to-face conversations, we have with each other. They have disrupted our lives, and yet, we have learned to accept and manage their interruptions. Somehow, we seem to have more patience with cell…..
I like to think I pray twice when I sing, but for the last two weeks, I have had laryngitis. A virus went directly to my vocal cords and is squeezing them. I’m not sure if my acid reflux disease is involved, as well. I hopefully will find out more tomorrow when I see the Ear, Nose, and Throat specialists. Acid reflux occurred after my second husband’s liver transplant, and the stress involved me having to carry everything for us…..
Max Lucado and Rick Warren are two of America’s prominent ministers in community-style congregations. They offered thees ideas about Americans’ fears. Worrying is “half-minded living.” One part of our minds wants to cower before fears; the other part wants to fight, by all means, to put them in a pine box in the ground. The answer to this troubling situation is to believe in Jesus Christ, to let Him lead us beside the still waters and for us to lie…..
God calls on us to have courage despite the darkness that surrounds us in the world. Peace can be found by observing God’s accomplishments amid the storms. There is a silver lining in everything dark. By focusing on God and remembering His great works, we can see that God is the commander of every storm, every trouble that stirs doubt and fear within us. Something good came out of the COVID years in respect to attending church services. While we…..
I have been watching the HBO series, “Band of Brothers,” for the past couple of days. Our current outdoor scenes fit so well with the scenes from the Battle of the Bulge in 1944. The snow is a foot of white cold, and the temperatures have dropped to minus twenty degrees. The fierce wind has brought down trees, not by bullets but by fifty mile an hour speeds. The roads are looking like black soot from the snow plows and…..
“Fear thou not; for I am with thee: be not dismayed; for I am thy God: I will strengthen thee; yea, I will help thee; yea, I will uphold thee with the right hand of my rigtheousness.” (Isaiah 41: 10 KJV) “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.” (Psalm 23: 4 KJV) I have written about fear…..
I have taught some very fine, committed music students over the years, fifty years as of next year for me. Teenagers today are involved in so many activities; it makes my head spin. I’m glad I do not have to keep the schedules most parents have to know where their children are at any given moment. That point came full circle for me as I tried to get three students in one place at the same time to practice, “Believe”…..
Do you hear the bells at Christmas? Do their promises of hope, love, peace, and grace fill your soul with a yearning for better times? When you go to a tree lot or cut your own tree down in a forest, do you want a straight tree or a tree with slight imperfections? Four authors have taught me a lot about the bells and trees at Christmas: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, and Max Lucado. If we do…..
Who was John the Baptist? Of all the people in the Bible, I must admit that I really find him strangely weird. He dressed in clothes that were never washed, ate all kinds of bugs and plants, many people called him a “wild man, even crazy,” and was the man chosen by God to proclaim the coming of a Savior to the world. At his extremely violent death, decapitation, he said that he could not begin to fill Christ’s shoes,…..
Very few of us who are poetry fans do not recognize the name of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, America’s poet of the 19th century, but many people do not realize where his inspiration came from for his poem, “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.” I have often wandered why I am so inspired by the tolling of bells at any time of the year but particularly on Christmas Eve. Their sweet tones welcome in the birth of Christ on Christmas…..