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Perspective

G2 and Cruz with our puppy Buck “This isn’t the worst day of your life,” G2 said as he watched me clean up the mess he and Cruz made while I was out getting groceries from the car. “The worst day of your life is that day you went crazy. I think this is the second worst day of your life.” I paused to look at G2’s precious little face while scooping up a thousand popcorn kernels mixed with powdered Gatorade. Cruz, his chubby bare feet dyed blue from the Gatorade, was now standing innocently beside his blue-footed brother […]

By Paula May 22, 2013

A Kinsman Redeemer

They met during the barley and wheat harvests, Ruth the young widow from another land, and Boaz the kinsman redeemer. He had all the power. She had nothing but hope on her side. The mother-in-law Naomi brought Ruth to Israel, two destitute women searching for life and protection in the land of the Living God. If you’ve ever hungered for more of a life than you are presently living, read on. These two women, Ruth and Naomi, had no husbands. No children. No money. Today we might think these things don’t matter as much, but ask any young single woman today […]

By Paula May 15, 2013

Hello Motherhood! 2014

In honor of Mother’s Day, I’m posting a second blog this week. Normally, I do one blog a week. The post below is last year’s Mother’s Day piece, and little has changed except I feel more alive today than I did yesterday. “We can live again!” as Grandpa Jack used to say when the peach harvest came in and that check from the cannery arrived along with it. This morning, I found myself with the same ultrasound lady who examined my pregnancy three and a half years ago when Cruz (in the above photo) was just twenty weeks old in […]

By Paula May 8, 2013

Bound Up Love

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully around with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.” C.S. Lewis. The other day I asked Scott […]

By Paula April 29, 2013

River of Mercy

The other night I dreamed my husband held sin in a box. My sin. All of it. He stood on the bank of a river holding the box of sin, smiling at me. I smiled back, but couldn’t breathe. All my sin in that box in my husband’s hands burning like the leaves in the fall before they fall. Why can’t we sin alone like a tree in the forest topples with nobody to hear it? Why must sin shake us all? A world of sin on the shoulders of a Savior. My husband has big shoulders. I married him for that. […]

By Paula April 10, 2013

THE CANYON

In one of Ralph Conner’s books he tells the story of Gwen. Gwen was a wild, willful lassie and one who had always been accustomed to having her own way. Then one day she met with a terrible accident which crippled her for life. She became very rebellious and in this murmuring state she was visited by a sky pilot, as the missionary among the mountaineers was termed. He told her the parable of the canyon. “At first there were no canyons, but only the broad, open prairie. One day the Master of the prairie, walking over his great lawns, […]

By Paula April 4, 2013

WHEN THE BOUGH BREAKS

I feel her bed, where she lay during the night, still warm with her sleep. Calculate the time. Perhaps twenty minutes since she left for work in the deep before dawn. Don’t worry. Don’t worry. Don’t worry. And still I worry as she drives under the moon to a job more than an hour away. Today we’ll color Easter eggs without her. Do the egg hunt at church without her. Watch It’s the Easter Beagle Charlie Brown without her. And she is just one bough breaking. We have seven boughs. The mother in me came apart this week. A way […]

By Paula March 30, 2013