There are many people who believe themselves to be peacemakers because they avoid conflict at all costs. But peacemakers don’t avoid conflicts, they walk through them in order to find peace – if not an actual resolution. To be a peacemaker, you must learn to tolerate conflict – even when that means having someone mad at you! (This doesn’t mean tolerating abuse from someone who … Continue reading Learning to tolerate conflict
My high school English teacher told us to do this and I still do: say a prayer when you see flashing lights or hear a siren. Keeping a good perspective is absolutely essential to enjoying life and emergency lights and sirens are great reminders of just how good our lives our. Because somewhere nearby someone is having a really, really, really bad day. Flashing lights … Continue reading Emergency Prayers
Let me share a few things about myself which may not be immediately clear just from reading my blog: I became a mother at age 21. Last year I took my first commercial flight since I was 3. I have never been outside of the USA. I have done almost no traveling outside of the Midwest. I was planning to be a high school English … Continue reading Just a housewife
It doesn’t happen as often as one would think given the current state of my life, but I woke up today cursing the fact that modern medicine means that instead of being able to look forward to a nice, early death in the next couple of years, I’m probably facing another 40+ years of this shit. Yup. It’s going to be a long day. So, … Continue reading Woke Up Feeling Awful
If you ever meet me, have ten minutes and want to see me laugh, ask me about my wedding day. It’s a story I would never tell a bride-to-be. That would be like going into the gory details of how you and your baby were painfully maimed in labor with a pregnant woman. Because things didn’t just go wrong that day; they went absurdly wrong. … Continue reading An Appreciation for the Absurd
Shortly after I got married, a girlfriend passed on this advice: “Sometimes you have to ask yourself if you would rather be right or you’d rather be married. Because you can be right all the way to divorce court.” The is the best advice for life I have ever heard. We humans have a strange obsession with being right. Not only do we tend to … Continue reading Being right is not the most important thing
“You’re being too sensitive.” Oh are those ever familiar words. All through my childhood they trailed after me like a tin can tied to the end of my shoelaces with each step in danger of sending it bouncing across the floor. The sound of those words clanging along behind me made me wince until I could hardly bear to move from my spot any more. … Continue reading “You’re so sensitive!”
Imagine being given a box of parts with no directions or labels or pictures to guide you. You would be forced to put whatever it was together without the benefit of even knowing what the end product was supposed to look or how it’s supposed to work. It would take time to look through the pieces to see what is there. You would have to … Continue reading Whatcha Makin’?
As we go through life, many of us are excellent at noticing and trying to protect ourselves against what is wrong or bad. However, if we don’t force ourselves to, we will rarely spare a thought for what is right and good in the things and people we come across. Basically, we become experts at studying the dark while remaining mostly oblivious to the light … Continue reading Every good gift
Note: A few years back I did some writing for a now defunct Christian magazine. I never put these articles up here because the magazine owns the rights to them, but now that they are defunct, well, I’m going to share! In the early ‘90s Salt-n-Peppa famously sang “Let’s talk about sex, baby” and boy, oh boy do we take their exhortations to heart. Sex … Continue reading Let’s talk about sex, baby!
The Upside Down World 