Life with Sally

What you teach, model, and practice for your children is what they are most likely to value when they grow up. Give them small ways to be faithful in your home, so they can become strong in exercising bigger stewardship muscles when they are adults.

Sometimes we carry difficult marriages, past scars, the tension of hard relationships that will never end, financial burdens, guilt for our failures. But God longs for us to rid ourselves of these performative works expectations that we carry inside.

Today on my podcast, I talk about the kind of friend that helped me make it through some of my darkest days. I hope you will share it, too, and be encouraged to be that kind of a friend for someone who needs your love today.

When we capture the reality of God's nature being extravagantly generous on our behalf, this character quality born in our lives and trained into the lives of our children, reflects a wordless picture of a love that will reach hearts.

Our faithfulness ensures that our children may be trained in spiritual strength, moral excellence, and the influence of righteousness. I pray that every day, you will have a vision for understanding how very much each day of your faithful serving as a mom matters to God and to His wonderful plan to create us for this role.

Cultivating a life filled with beautiful rhythms, life-giving rituals, attitudes of gratefulness, is what shapes our hearts and minds in the midst of the storms. The agency we have to believe forward in God's goodness and faithfulness will make every day meaningful, every day a gift, as we wait with hope.

As I have been praying about releasing Help, I'm Drowning into the World, I hoped that it would be a book where women would feel seen, understood, and validated. I'd love for you, my kindred spirits, to join me, be a part of a robust community, and help share my newest book with the world. So if you did not get in before, now is your chance!

Choosing to be satisfied with what we have, laying our desires and dreams in God's hands, learning to love and bring light into the broken places we inhabit is the beginning of learning to be content.

When we add up a life of faithfulness in serving God, grace, wisdom, failure, forgiveness, compassion -- it is thousands of moments of choosing to persevere, one moment at a time. But it is only in making those small choices, when no one else can see, that we find ourselves progressing on the path of the righteous.

Thankfulness requires us engaging in looking for ways we might worship God, and then verbalizing our gratefulness. This week, every day, notice things that God has provided, and thank Him for each way He has worked and blessed your life.

Have you ever felt you needed to hide your feelings from the Lord? He is not surprised, nor does He condemn you. Jesus is our advocate, our God, ready to comfort us with sympathy and understanding.

Do you wonder how you will ever get out from this place — the place of financial crisis, serious health problems, loss of job or relationship and are paralyzed to know what to do? There will always be life storms to overcome and survive — that is why I wrote Help, I'm Drowning.

If we want our children to be godly leaders in this world, they must see self-sacrificing, humble forgiveness in and through our words, our lives and our actions.

Little by little, we must strengthen our children's muscles of brining hope to their world by giving them the opportunity to be sources of hope and comfort and love to those in need.

Words have influence over who a human being becomes. That is why we must consider how to invest words of love, hope, truth, and encouragement, practice saying them regularly, and why we must teach children to ponder what words of life are and how to give them to others.  

Through almost seven decades of life, I found myself tossed about in overwhelming life storms through many different seasons. In Help, I'm Drowning , I reflected on challenges that took me by surprise. Though there are no easy answers, I would like to help lead you to the One who is with us and will see us through.

At 68, I can see that somehow, as I literally cried through these life storms, as I begged God for help and wisdom, He was there, even when I could not feel or see him. This week, I am gently sending  Help, I'm Drowning  out into the world. I pray you will be encouraged.

If a child grows up serving, it will become natural to them. Making " I love you" cards, plates of cookies for neighbors, and serving meals at the homeless shelter helped our children to learn to give time and effort to ease someone else's life. We are called the serve one another, just as Jesus called his disciples to serve along beside him and in this practice.

People are always asking us, "How did you do it? How did you inspire your children to be authors, movie makers, composers, college instructors, podcasters?" This was the way — imagination, nightly discussions over great meals, close, delightful relationships every day. This is how their hearts, minds, and lives were shaped into adults who could imagine influencing their worlds for good.

Training a child to choose to love by showing kindness, gentleness and respect will prepare them to go before kings or paupers and to become leaders in their generation. It starts with an attitude that says, "God has designed me to love people, to be humble like He was, to show respect and kindness."

Cultivating habits that sustain our lives and fill us with joy is one way we have learned to move forward every day, to find how to make life sustainable. Join Joy and me as we share some of our thoughts.

We have an incredible capacity to be strong, grow in intellectual excellence as we exercise the muscles of our minds, to leave a legacy of faith and integrity — but it requires that we also exercise our will, submit to God's discipline, and strain after His ways by following His heart.

In writing 'Help, I'm Drowning' I wanted to share some of the storms I faced and how walking with God led me to a life of flourishing and one in which He was building my life on the rock of eternal values. I hope you will be encouraged right where you are in your own storms and difficulties in life.

Staying strong and faithful through all the years is what built my own precious one into the woman she has become. And though you can't see it yet, your thousands of moments of faithfulness is shaping that child into what will become a strong, loving, faithful adult.

Honor comes with humility—the ability to see others as more important than ourselves. To teach honor and obedience means we will have to occasionally cross our children's wills. It's not easy, but it's necessary.