Country living is the best. Well, it was awesome to me, anyways. For a time in my childhood, my Dad pastored a small church in a tiny Arkansas town, population 630. It wasn’t exactly a metropolis. We had one bank, one gas station, one small grocery store and one restaurant where you could buy anything deep fried. That’s it. Everything else consisted of houses, churches, dirt roads and cows. Lots of cows. Everywhere. Oh, I forgot to mention chicken houses. Growing up in a small, Mayberry type of town is awesome when you are a little kid. The closest Wal-mart,…

A fable A water bearer in India had two large pots, one hung on each end of a pole which he carried across his neck. One of the pots had a crack in it, while the other pot was perfect and always delivered a full potion of water at the end of the long walk from the stream to the master’s house. The cracked pot arrived only half full. For a full two years this went on daily, with the bearer delivering only one and half pots full of water in his master’s house. Of course, the perfect pot was…

Homeschooling is an adventure. It’s a study of exploring your children’s learning style, combined with discovering the number of emotions that can be expressed in one day, all while acquiring knowledge of how long a mom can lock herself in a bathroom with chocolate before her family calls 911. I’m baffled how quickly I can teach my kiddos something and have it drain from their spongy brains like sweet tea in a mason jar at a church potluck. This was never more apparent when teaching history. One afternoon, as I was helping my daughter prepare for a history test concerning…

In part one, we looked at the very real possibility that many of us, although we accepted the freedom Jesus bought for us, continue to have our minds and emotions stuck in the 'slavery mindset'. It conditions a person to accept harmful circumstances to themselves as the natural order of things. They view their own worth through their master's eyes. They believe about themselves what they have been told to believe, whether it's true or not. The dichotomy between our freedom and the slavery mindset is like longing for a certain gift, yearning for it, building our hope upon it,…

“I freed a thousand slaves. I would’ve freed a thousand more, if they only knew they were slaves.”  ~Harriet Tubman If they only knew they were slaves… In writing and researching the Civil War, I learned Confederate plantation owners often made it their goal to break the will of their enslaved.  They would make it their goal to have the slave accept their "station" as a mindset. After all, ‘normal’ is whatever you grow up with. ‘Normal’ is what you’ve always known. Frederick Douglass put it this way: “I have found that, to make a contented slave, it is necessary…

I’ll never forget the night I told God, “I want out.” I was Miss Christian. I did it all. Taught the classes. Organized VBS. Took the teens to church camp. Always smiling. Always ready to lend a hand. And I was miserable inside. Depression is a silent cry. Likewise, anxiety is a storm of crippling intensity inside the mind, but can appear like a tranquil lake on the outside. Depression is not always the dark-clad figure hiding in the back of the room. It’s the smiling cheerleader, the teacher, the mother, the pastor, or the successful businessman. It demands perfection.…