Inspirations

Dandelions, are they a weed or are they a flower?  Some would argue that they are definitely a weed.  They will spend hundreds or even thousands of dollars just to get rid of those pesky dandelions. Others will argue just as vehemently that they are a flower.  Children will come running in with a bouquet of dandelions they picked with you in mind.   In their mind, they are flowers.   Whether they are a weed or a flower is not for me to decide.  There is nothing better than seeing dandelions after months of cold, barren winter.  Dandelions remind me that no matter what this life throws at me, I can get back up shake off the dust and I’m good.  Satan can not defeat me. Have you ever tried to mow dandelions?   You can mow them over and in a few days, it seems like hours, there they are standing boldly, proudly right where they were.   The mower did not defeat them. They also spread like crazy....

Today as I was working, I started thinking about how mundane my life was.   I get up, I go to work, I come home.  The days run together creating a sameness a blur.   We all want to live exciting lives and do amazing things.  For most of us, me included, our life seems to have more of a humdrum feel than one of exhilaration and excitement.  As I was considering this, it occurred that most people, past and present even people who do truly great things spend most of their life in the trenches of the mundane.   Perhaps the problem is that we fail to see the excitement in the ordinary things.   Or maybe, we feel that everything in our life has to be extraordinary.  Somewhere in life, we tend to forget that most of our life is filled with ordinary things.   Most of life is not exciting and flashy.  Somehow it helps to remember when I start to feel that my life is going nowhere and boring that ordinary days are not bad...

A few years ago, my daughter went for a walk.  She got turned around on the backroads and got completely lost.  She spent the whole day lost, wandering around.   Of course, I was worried and had no transportation so I spent the day praying and crying hoping we could find her.  I should tell you she is not a young child, and she was not young when she got lost.  Finally, at about 9:00 pm we received a call that the police had found her.  I chronicled the story, and you can buy it from Amazon.com.  As we talked later, she said something profound.  The only person I met while I was wandering around those backroads only told me I was lost.  She said, “Mom I already knew I was lost.  I didn’t need him to tell me that.  What I needed was for him to point me in the right direction.  Or better yet see that I got home.”.  It made me think about how we respond as Christians to those of the “world”.  See, that man told her...

As the curtain closes on another mother's day, I am forced to think about the legacy that I have given to my children.  I often question what I have taught them.  Not whether I have taught them well, somehow we all manage to teach our children well.  But…  what we teach them is a different story.  I wonder when I have made the final exit from life's stage, what will they carry with them. Did I teach them to stand alone rather than fit in with a corrupted world?  Do they know that you can not love the things of this world and God?  We either love this world or God.  Choose God Did I teach them to love unconditionally?  Love should never be dependant on who you are or what you’ve done. Did I teach them to defend the weak, the defenseless,  the poor and homeless?  If I could hear from heaven would they be pleading the causes of those in need or will they have a calloused heart? Did I teach them to forgive, even when it’...

Sometimes, I have a “lightbulb” moment, and I begin to see things a little more clearly.   Tonight as we were sitting at the table having a sub sandwich and soda, my children and I were talking about church.   My son said, “I don’t like that they put so many church services on the television and internet because then people feel like they don’t have to go to church.”  My daughter, who loves to debate, said, “they can go to church without getting too close to people.”  As my daughter said this, the light bulb kicked on.   How can I help and encourage people if I’m at a distance?  I can’t.  Sometimes, at work, in my neighborhood, in my circles I have found that we often fail to get close enough to people to help them.  If I was walking across the road and fell, in order to help me you would need to come to where I was.  You would need to come beside me.  It’s why Christians need to meet with other Christians too....

Religion  that  God our Father accepts as  pure   and faultless  is  this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world. I was sitting in the break room talking with a friend that just migrated back north for the summer.  She told us of the place where she had stayed down south.   It was right on the ocean, and they encouraged dolphins to stay near the shore because the sharks stay away from them.   Somehow, never sure how, we started talking about how some animals sharks, in particular, will look for the weak and wounded and attack them.   I have to confess I was lost for the rest of the conversation because I was thinking about how sometimes we, as people are not that much different than the sharks.  We don’t attack someone strong, but the poor, the defenseless, the new person at work, one who has no way to fight back.  I have to co...

This morning, as I sat in the local coffee shop with a éclair and a café mocha I was assaulted by the TV behind me.   The big news was the rioting in Baltimore.  Some were blaming police brutality as the cause of the rioting.  Others were blaming the black mayor and a black President for the rioting because they encourage black people to use force.  Still others faulted the communities in which they grew up as the reason for the rioting; it was because they lived in the ghetto and didn’t have two parent families.  The problem is much deeper than ANY of the factors mentioned.  First, I have a feeling that none of us know the whole story.  We know the story that the media has painted FOR us.  We see the picture they WANT us to see.  Second, any one or all of these factors may have contributed to the problem.  As I was listening to these people pointing fingers and blaming each other for the problems in Baltimore; My heart was heavy...