Posts from December 2016
One Big Tip to Make Your Resolutions Stick
“‘Tis the season to begin to consider those annual New Year’s resolutions. ’Tis the season to first evaluate whether such resolutions are a good idea or a bad one. Speaking personally, I am a believer in New Year’s resolutions. I believe our lives benefit when we take time to think, evaluate, and dream a little, to consider how we are doing and how we have been living, and to compare it to how we want and ought to live. The…
Purchasing Joy
With the gift giving of Christmas just around the corner, can we purchase joy? “But here’s the thing. I look at those pictures, the pictures of the presents, and realize that they are almost all long gone. They’ve all been forgotten and thrown away. Most of them, anyway. The Playmobil fell apart, the kids grew tired of it, and eventually we freecycled it. My son got bored of the trucks and we gave them to a friend. Or maybe they’re…
Worship Interrupted – Sunday Morning with Little Ones
“Attending worship with small children in tow can feel like trying to sleep with a helicopter hovering over your bed. What you want is refreshment and inspiration; what you get is low-level tension, discomfort, and distraction as you brace yourself for what might happen next. Those who have attended worship with small children for a period of years, as I have, might begin to feel that the effort expended in the fight for focus isn’t worth the seemingly small return…
Here comes Santa Claus
From an author who recently wrote a book on St. Nicholas – “I don’t remember ever ‘believing in Santa’. I never found out Santa wasn’t real. There was never a conversation in which our parents ‘told us the truth’. Instead, something about how we celebrated Christmas in our home allowed me to hold the character of Santa in an amiable tension with the Christmas story. When I tiptoed into the living room on Christmas mornings as a girl, some of our…