The Kingdom of God Drawn Near

Everyone loves a parade. There’s just something about Main Street being blocked off and a steady stream of performers riding elaborate floats, big balloon characters and marching bands that causes us to line the parade route with anticipation or gather around the television to watch. Whether it’s the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City, The Rose Bowl Parade in Pasadena, CA or the local...

Anybody out there like me, who grew up in the 60s and 70s in a Southern Baptist church? If so, you most likely have vivid memories of flannelgraph stories in Sunday School. For those of you who didn’t grow up as I did, or weren’t even born yet, a flannelgraph is a storytelling tool consisting of a board covered in flannel fabric. It is used to display cut-out pictures and illustrations to enhance...

While on a nature walk, a preschool teacher asked her students to keep their eyes and ears open for anything unusual. Suddenly, one of her 4-year-old students pointed to a green pod-like structure hanging from a leaf and asked his teacher “What is that?” “Would you look at that?” his teacher exclaimed, as she gathered the rest of the class around their classmate’s discovery, “You found a chrysalis...

I do a lot of listening in my counseling work. Clients regularly entrust their stories to me, an honor I try hard not to take for granted. As I’m listening, I’m also praying for the Holy Spirit’s help to connect the dots in my client’s story, to draw out themes and trace them to their origins. I want to understand their particular sin struggles, their temptations, their specific suffering. Recentl...

It was supposed to be a normal day in Asheville, NC, just like any other; but then, with seemingly no warning, everything changed and lives were washed away. Sure, the residents and visitors of the lovely mountain community were aware that the Atlantic hurricane season lasts from June 1 to November 30 each year. They were accustomed to hearing about one or two big storm systems that threaten the A...

Five years ago I had back surgery. While the initial recovery was fairly quick, I had to commit to a lengthy regiment of physical therapy in order to recover my strength and flexibility. My daughter had just completed her certification for hot yoga and so I commissioned her to create a customized yoga flow for me. Now I had never done yoga before. I didn’t know a downward dog from a milkbone dog b...

Praise the Lord!! It is Sunday again and our fifth Feast Day!! On this Lord’s Day, enjoy worshiping with your church family through songs and hymns, through the reading and teaching of God’s Word, through giving cheerfully, and enjoying the blessed gift of food, chocolate, social media, or anything you may have set aside for your Lenten promise. Moments of Prayer Are there things, people or issues...

We hadn’t had our brand new 34-foot long travel trailer 24 hours before we broke it. I was so excited to see Dale backing it down the driveway, having picked it up from the dealership. It still had that brand spanking new smell and I couldn’t wait to see everything. The fact that it was lightly sprinkling did not deter us; we hooked it up to power, started moving the slideouts and extending the la...

The Beatles - Can't Buy Me Love Lyrics In early 1964, phenom British quartet, the Beatles, performed a marathon concert series at the Olympia Theatre in Paris doing two and sometimes even three shows a night for eighteen days. While in Paris, the Beatles and their entourage stayed at the luxurious George V Hotel . "This song was written on a piano in the George V in Paris," Paul McCartney reflecte...

A few short weeks after moving to the Washington DC area in spring of 2010, Dale and I celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary. We had dreamed about taking a Mediterranean cruise, but we had just moved and didn’t feel it was the right time to leave our kids for 10 days and fly overseas. Dale asked how I would feel about a dinner cruise down the Potomac River…not quite the plan B I was hoping for....

I have a friend who would be embarrassed if I mentioned her name in sharing this story. She worked for years as a special education teacher and specifically taught children and teenagers with cognitive disabilities. While her students grew up and no longer qualified to be students in her classroom, she has kept up with them by hosting regular “Friend Parties,” getting her former students together...

Breadmaking is making a comeback! At least that is what I have concluded from the 30-something’s women I follow on social media. It is not at all uncommon to see posts of sourdough starters, loaves or rolls rising and then the final pic of the beautiful bread fresh out of the oven, posed on a wooden cutting board with a colorful dishtowel, sitting next to a small vase of daisies. It truly is an ar...

“Wordy! Wordy! Wordy!” My darling 3-year-old grandson throws up his hands in the air and belts out to Brandon Lake’s “That’s Who I Praise” or as Séamus calls it, “Dance Party!” The lyrics are actually “The only One who's worthy, worthy. Worthy of all of His names,” but the best approximation Shay can make with his growing acquisition of language is “Wordy!” It is the cutest thing I’ve ever heard a...

Praise the Lord!! It is Sunday again and our fourth Feast Day!! On this Lord’s Day, enjoy worshiping with your church family through songs and hymns, through the reading and teaching of God’s Word, through giving cheerfully, and enjoying the blessed gift of food, chocolate, social media, or anything you may have set aside for your Lenten promise. Don’t you love these weekly glimpses of what we are...

It was a Saturday in November 2022 and we were in Athen’s, GA, for the UGA/TN football game. Dale and I had enjoyed having season tickets to the Georgia football games for several years at that point and were accustomed to the huge crowds descending on the Classic City to cheer on the Dawgs, but this Saturday was different than any we had experienced before. First of all, UGA had enjoyed a long wi...

“Mama, that’s not appropriate for you.” This became a regular phrase I would hear from my teenaged children as they read books for their literature classes or watched assigned films that were rated for mature audiences. The first time this happened was when Mary Grace, a junior at Yorktown High School, had to read Into the Wild , by Jon Krakauer, a non-fiction account of Christopher McCandless's r...

It was the summer of 1990. Dale and I had married that March and I had just finished my first year as a kindergarten teacher. I had a list a mile long of all the things I wanted to do, to learn and experience. One of my top priorities that summer was to learn how to cook. My mother was an incredible cook but I’d never had the time or inclination to learn myself. Before our wedding, Mama suggested...

My husband’s family is from rural South Georgia, where almost every two-way highway is lined with farmland on both sides. Peanuts, corn, soybeans and cotton are the major crops that are cultivated in that region of the country. Before traveling to visit Dale’s parents, I had never seen a field of cotton. I remember looking out the car window and thinking that it had somehow, impossibly snowed in S...

We’ve all been there - the first days and weeks in a new job or maybe a new position with the same company. You’re super excited to be in this new role and can’t wait to get started. Maybe this job change or promotion came with a higher salary, more responsibility, new challenges or even a physical move to a new location and a bigger office. The perks are significant, but so is the learning curve....

We were new to the DC area and I was driving on the Hwy 66 toll road, heading out to Reston, VA, to meet a friend for lunch. We hadn’t yet purchased the EZ Pass for our vehicles yet, which would allow me to breeze through the toll booth in the fast lane. But because I was new to the area I didn’t realize that the long line of cars to my right were waiting for their turn to pay the toll. Once I rea...

Yahoo! It is Sunday again and our third Feast Day!! On this Lord’s Day, enjoy worshiping with your church family, through songs and hymns, through the reading and teaching of God’s Word, through giving cheerfully, and enjoying the blessed gift of food, chocolate, social media, or anything you may have set aside for your Lenten promise. Moments of Prayer In today’s moment of prayer, we see once aga...

One of my favorite things to do at our new home on Lake Hartwell is to go paddleboarding with my therapy dog, Tuck. We head down to the dock, put on our life jackets and climb onto the paddleboard. Tuck lays down in the middle while I straddle him and steer. Actually, now that I think about it, Tuck provides no assistance in this activity. I do all of the work! When it’s sunny, warm and the lake i...

Recently I’ve been reading A Woman of Firsts , the extraordinary story of Margaret O’Shaughnessy Heckler, written by her daughter-in-law and my dear friend, Kim Heckler. The biography offers a rare view into the behind-the-scenes world of American politics from the 1960s through the 1980s, her career spanning five presidencies: Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan. The daughter of Irish immigr...

Are you easily offended? Think back to the last time someone cut you off in traffic. Was your first response, “He probably didn’t see me.” “She’s in a big hurry, I wonder what’s going on in her life?” or “Wow! That was scary! I’m glad I was paying attention and not looking at my phone at that moment!” If any of those thoughts were first to cross your mind, then you should be nominated for a selfle...

In EB White’s classic tale, Charlotte’s Web, a young farm girl named Fern rescues a runt pig from certain death, names him Wilbur and watches him grow into the favorite of all the barnyard animals. But what Fern can’t protect Wilbur from is what the geese claim is likely to happen once he grows up. Wilbur is so distraught by the other animal’s predictions of his future demise that he cries himself...