About Me
Introduction
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Sovereignty and Providence: What’s the Difference?
Maybe good things have happened to you that you could not have imagined or arranged for yourself. That’s providence. Maybe bad things have happened that you didn’t want or see coming and didn’t think you deserved. That’s sovereignty. In both cases, I’m referring to the providence and sovereignty of God. On one occasion, when given opportunity to ask an eminent preacher a question, I asked him, “What’s the difference between God’s Sovereignty and Providence?” His dismissive answer, “There is none.” I disagree. And I have spent a good bit of time and thought to answer that question myself. Lessons from My Life Three different families at three different times and…
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Seeing Bob Dylan––A Dream within a Dream
The night before my husband and I went to see Bob Dylan, I dreamed I met him. It had not occurred to me that I would ever get to see Dylan in person––the opportunity, the tickets, the timing––this desire had never registered on my life’s continuous imaginary movie screen. In my dream, Bob Dylan first made eye contact and then walked straight toward me with an outstretched arm bent slightly at the elbow, the crowd parting before him like the Red Sea parted before Moses. Transfixed, I resisted the instinctive urge to turn around, seeking where he had in mind to go. He couldn’t be looking at me, I thought.…
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We Can Think About and Remember People Any Way We Want
“Dead people have germs.” When their father told his daughters to “kiss Mother goodbye,” my then 7-year-old mother refused, while her 5-year-old sister complied. Leaning against the doorframe, observing her sister do as she was told––kiss their mother goodbye––my mother said to her sister, “Dead people have germs.” Those spoken words hung in the air and lodged in my aunt’s memory up to the time she died at age 83. Auntie must have repeated this story to me a hundred times. And I wondered what picture of her 26-year-old mother who had died so suddenly had stuck in the memory of my 5-year-old aunt? Peritonitis from a ruptured appendix, their…
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Children Need to be Seen AND Heard
The proverb “Children should be seen and not heard” dates back to medieval times and particularly applied to girls. In the presence of adults, children were expected to keep silent. Children who experience chaos and trauma especially need to be heard as well as seen by caring adults. Mountains of misunderstanding and the valleys of assumption can exist between children and adults. For the sake of young, immature minds whose imaginations naturally feed fears of the unknown, adults need to climb those mountains and cross the valleys that characterize real life trauma and chaos. When adults ignore children, remain preoccupied with their own problems, or fail to consider the way…
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Are Your Stories Worth Telling?
If someone were to ask you about your life story, where would you start? Would you start from today and look back? Or would you start at your beginning, from when you were born? Would you begin explaining relationships? Your parents? The place where you grew up? Teachers? Friends? Would you want to talk about your childhood and adolescence? Or have the years since high school and college proved more interesting? Would adult years that perhaps include a spouse and children emerge as most significant? Or maybe you would want to tell about your career, or people you have met that have made a difference in your life? What about…
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Writing Can Help Make Sense of Your Story
You want your life to count for something. You want your experiences to benefit somebody besides you. You want to know before you die that it makes a difference that you lived. You need to write down some of your own story footnotes. You need to leave a trail. You need to write to hear yourself think. Your problem is my problem too. People used to write letters. Letters kept track of some of the important events in life. Letters said, “I’m thinking of you and I want you to know what’s going on in my life.” But now, few people write letters. And few people make prints from the…
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This Pilgrim’s Progress Report
In January of 2009, I started blogging. I’m giving myself a pilgrim’s progress report. In the book Secrets in the Dark, by Frederick Buechner, he suggested that the reader write a letter to the person he or she hopes to be in 15 years. I did that. So from that galaxy far, far away in the past, these were some of my hopes in 2009. Hopes vs. Goals Blogging is a goal. Hopes have to do with the kind of person I want to be. Who I am from the inside out. I hope that in fifteen years I’m still having toothpaste wars with my husband. Do you envision two…