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Showing posts with the label holidays

Influence

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It has been a long while since I have posted anything here. I have been busy completing three years toward my B.A. in English and my senior year is underway. My current class (Creative Writing) has finally given me the space to take off the tight harness of academic writing rules, and it feels SO GOOD!! After reading my first assignment, Mom and Daddy gave it their thumbs up and suggested I make it a blog post, so here it is. It is my story and their story. It's a little longer than my usual posts, but as with everything I have ever posted here, I pray it encourages you to run "up the sunbeam to the sun" (C. S. Lewis). "Follow my example,  as I follow the example of Christ." 1 Corinthians 11:1 NIV I sat above them on the stairs. Looking down through the window-like openings in the partition between the living room and the stairway, I listened to the basketball players, football players, baseball players, wrestlers, track athletes, both the lettermen ...

When Thanksgiving Goes Missing

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"God is sometimes the strength of His people, when He is not their song" IVP NT Commentary on Psalm 118 Have you ever been there--are you there now--where God is holding you together, but your heart just cannot find a song?  You want to sing, but you don't have the spiritual breath it takes to run the notes through your vocal chords.  You WANT to be thankful--but REALLY thankful, not just listing gratitude because you're SUPPOSED TO and you know you SHOULD be thankful for so many things.  Underneath the debris of current hardships, you are actually thankful for these things but you can hardly find them in the clutter of your messy emotions.  You're fighting the cloying fumes of fear that everything you're thankful for today might be gone tomorrow because you're thinking of things you've already lost. Uh-huh . . . me too. So where do you run to find the real from-the-inside-out kind of gratitude that makes Thanksgiving spring out of you like a so...