Tag Archive for: motherhood

Motherhood and Car Rides: The Traveling Ministry

Motherhood on the road

I recently shared in my monthly newsletter that parenting teens and parenting toddlers may not be as different as we think. When your kids were little and struggled to fall asleep, you grabbed the keys and drove around town to lure them into dreamland.

 

Recently, when one of my older kids was struggling with friendships and mood swings (all things preteen), I used the same parenting strategy: I grabbed the keys and took her for a drive.

 

But I’m not the only one who values a good car ride in the repertoire of tools in the mom tool belt. The value of time spent on the road with your kids came up recently with my new friend and fellow writer, Heather Cruz, author of Grace for Every Mom. I asked her to share with us the grace given to our families when we find unique ways Read more

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SLOW is a Four Letter Word

underside of mushroom

How to Counter-Culturally Exit the Hurry

 

SLOW is a four-letter word in our society. Like, one of those four-letter words. For some people, they may need to put asterisks and dollar signs in place of some of the letters because it is a BAD word. We don’t like slow. It is the opposite of progress. It is a sign of the weak. It means Read more

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Navigating the Unexpected

Housewife Title

Mom-Life in a Pandemic + That’s Just Every Day!

 

I thought my life was going to dramatically change this year. My youngest was heading off to kindergarten, and I was going to have 35 hours of uninterrupted single-minded brain activity a week where once I had zero. With all this newfound brain space (plus the reinstallation of my personal bubble), I was envisioning doing all the things I hadn’t done with my life over the last decade and dedicating that time and space to something other than wiping noses, pulling teeth, coordinating playdates, and warding off the World War III of sibling rivalry.

 

My self-diagnosed adult Read more

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“I’m a crabby person.”

“That’s just who I am,” I conceded to my husband the other day, my defeatist attitude brought on by a recent stream of moodiness I couldn’t seem to get a handle on. Any chance you’re in that kind of season, too? In “The Broken Way” calendar with daily quotations from one of my favorite authors, Ann Voskamp reminds me that sometimes the best way to remove the scales from my eyes and life is to evaluate where I’ve misplaced my identity. Ann writes, “Activity for God—is not the same as intimacy with God or identity in God. And it is your intimacy with Christ that gives you your identity.”

 

If I’m being honest, I must admit Read more

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When Jesus Comes

“To Seek and To Save”

Advent 2019

 

As one of the fullest and most complete encounters of Jesus’s life, my good friend Jenni challenged me to read the entire Book of Luke this Advent season. This particular Gospel also includes the most commonly recited version of Jesus’s birth story. I thought, why not and began by reading the brief description given in my childhood Bible preceding the opening paragraphs of Luke. What I found there were eight little words that cut right to my core and are becoming my theme for the entire Advent season. These eight words are emboldening me to come off survival mode, turn off auto-pilot that becomes “just getting through the season,” and embrace the choice to cherish an ever-deepening understanding of what the Christmas and Advent season is all about.

 

I’ll get to what those eight powerful words were here in a moment, but let me start with this: How many of you feel like you already messed up Advent season?! I mean come on, I left Thanksgiving early to participate in the Black Friday (ahem, Thursday) shenanigans at Target. Along with my brother and some of my cousins, we giddily walked out of the housewares haven with a red cartful of shopping bags and a 55-inch flat-screen lodged diagonally like a Keep Reading

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