Tag Archives: Encouragement

What To Do When You Can’t Fix Your Friend or Her Life

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Don’t you hate it when your friend comes to you with a prayer request you can’t answer?

I know, the very fact that it’s a prayer request means that it’s supposed to be a need that only God can answer. But I confess, I like to answer them too. (Sometimes I even try to claim solutions that weren’t my idea. Like when the friend says, “I wonder if I tried…” and I say, “You know what, you should try…!”)

I like to suggest the answer that works.

Especially, I like to be the answer. (It’s far more heroic to be the answer than merely to suggest the answer.)

Sometimes, if I can’t suggest the answer or be the answer, and especially if I can’t even see the answer, I tend to lose interest in the need.

I guess I just like to fix it. Continue reading →

Today

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Outdated garage sale signs are one of my pet peeves. Not just any sale signs, but the ones that simply say “Garage Sale Today.”

If you put a date on your sale sign, you can leave it up for years, and it won’t bother me a bit. Leave it nailed to the telephone post until the poster is ripped and the corners are yellowed and curling with age—I won’t care.

But leave the date off your sign, lead me down a trail of undated signs to a two-week past garage sale, and I’m not a happy camper. So much so that while I love garage sales, I’m unlikely to follow undated signs. It doesn’t matter how fresh they look. Unless I see someone posting the sign, I’m assuming it’s old. Continue reading →

When Impossible Isn’t

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When I was growing up, we actually had “the Joneses” living next door. Only, it was just Mrs. Jones—a sweet, elderly widow who had cookies and Kool-Aid for the neighbor kids.

I didn’t know anything about the cookies and Kool-Aid, however, until the day that my sister Michele and I were riding our bikes near her house and ran over her yard decoration. It was a wooden cutout of a redbird on the top of a wooden stake painted red. One of us (I won’t say who because it might make Michele feel bad) ran over the cardinal, and the stake broke.

We quickly hopped off our bikes and examined the broken decoration, hoping there was some easy fix. Nope, the wood was unmistakably broken, and the splintered top half was too short to stick back in the ground. We propped it up against the bush and sadly rode home to tell Mom. Continue reading →

Plastic Bag Flights

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Perhaps you’ve never wanted to fly. I have.

Actually, what I most wanted was to parachute. I think I must have been about six or seven when I learned about parachutes and how they work. Ready to experience the thrill for myself, I found two ready-made chutes (a.k.a. plastic grocery bags) in the kitchen drawer and persuaded my sister to go parachuting with me off the top of our backyard swing set.

Quite honestly, it was a disappointing adventure. No broken bones, but no working chutes either. Continue reading →

Does God Care about Your Comfort?

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You’ve heard the quote: “God is more concerned with our character than our comfort.”

It’s a true statement, but it’s not the whole story.

God’s concern with our comfort depends on what kind of comfort we are talking about.

Do we mean that it is His job description to provide us with a comfortable, trouble-free life? No. That is impossible in a sin-cursed world; and frankly, it wouldn’t contribute to our Christian growth.

But do we mean that He wants us to know spiritual and emotional comfort through the difficulties we face? Absolutely! Continue reading →

Larger than the Cloud

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Two years ago this week, I found myself in a craft store in Northern California waiting on some friends. As waiting is what I do best when others are shopping (no, I’m not much of a shopper), I searched for entertainment—anything to help pass time.

My eyes landed on an old book used as a display prop. I brushed aside whatever the book had been displaying and picked up the book. Its title was taken from a line of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem “Aurora Leigh.” I didn’t get to read much of the book, but I will forever remember the line of the poem: “The blue of heaven is larger than the cloud.”

God knew that at that very moment I had a large cloud hovering over my sky, blocking sunshine and, to a degree, concealing His presence. He also knew that another black cloud, heavy with painful news, was rolling in and would be further covering my sky in less than forty-eight hours. Continue reading →

Petes and Repeats

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When I was little enough to be dumb, my uncle (who is just three years older than me) asked me a riddle:

“Pete and Repeat went down to the lake. Pete fell in, so who was left?”

The answer seemed so obvious, I couldn’t believe Scott thought this was a riddle.

“Repeat.”

“Okay, Pete and….”

Would you believe, it took me about three rounds of this to figure out what was going on?! And once I caught on, I thought it was so clever that I tried it on others, too. Unfortunately, no one else ever fell for it. Continue reading →

Adventures I Wanted to Avoid

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I’m reopening a blog post draft that I began almost six months ago, which wouldn’t be so bad if the first post hadn’t been about transmission trouble.

I’m no mechanic, but I know more about a failing transmission now than before I began this post—either time. And I know that the loss of a transmission signals one of two events—days of misery or an unfolding adventure.

Thankfully, both times I got to experience the adventure.

Adventure 1

My brother Daniel, my friend Jill, and I were 627 miles into our 2,000 mile drive home for vacation when our transmission gave out. That left us stranded on the shoulder of the interstate at 5:30 p.m. on a Friday night. Not good. Continue reading →

The Difference

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Have you ever wanted to say, “Yes, Lord, but….”

I have. Just recently, actually.

I was faced with a difficulty with which I had no choice but to trust the Lord. I couldn’t control, change, or manipulate it if I wanted to. (And, frankly, I wanted to!)

When my fate of no control was confirmed, I gave it to the Lord with the words “Yes, Lord.” Yet, in my heart, I added “but….”

  • “…I don’t like it.”
  • “…it’s hard.”
  • “…only because I have no alternative.”

Even as I thought “but…” the Lord whispered a substitute word to my spirit—and. Continue reading →

Today…

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…marks 171 years since David Livingstone first sailed for Africa.

I recently had the opportunity to read another biography about Livingstone this summer. I was especially impressed as I learned that, in the minds of many, he didn’t have much “missionary promise” when he sailed for Africa. He wasn’t a bombastic preacher, and he didn’t have a charismatic personality. Not likely to succeed.

Much of what Livingstone did in Africa was tedious and slow-going. He preached the Gospel everywhere he went, but he was navigating unexplored territory, usually sick, often hungry, and sometimes deserted. He persevered and died without seeing the full fruit of his labor. Continue reading →