Every so often, I get frustrated with our kids. There are moments–and even days–when they get on my last nerve, and sometimes they jump on it a few times for good measure. The amount of time it takes to discipline, teach, and motivate gets to be overwhelming at times. But every so often, those words ring in my ears, “Unless something changes, you’ll never have children of your own.” For those who don’t know our story, Mary Carol is our adopted treasure. We were told by a reproductive endrocrinologist that having children was a very, very faint possibility. To this day, I am thankful for the way he told us.…

Life isn’t always easy. Sometimes we get dealt a difficult hand. Today’s post is not meant to downplay those times in life. However, there are several ways to handle it when life hands you one of those lemons. 1. Turn sour. Sadly, this is where most people end up. They get handed a tough lot in life and they allow their situation to make them bitter about everything. Frankly, it takes a great deal of work and desire to avoid becoming sour on life, but it can be done. 2. Eat the lemon. In other words, there are some who just internalize everything and never let it out. However, there…

I would like to say that I pray every night with Turner, but I miss some nights here and there. The effort is there, but sometimes I still fail. His prayers are what you might expect from a little boy. They are short and are for those things he is thinking of right then. Every so often, he throws a wonderfully heart-felt request into the prayer, and I try to really cover him with praise for those. Over the last few days, though, I have had the privilege of praying with Mary Carol two nights. If you know her at all, you know she is all heart. I have never…

Do you ever feel frustrated? Do you ever feel like you know there are certain things you would love to be doing, but you just can’t get to it? Often the everyday, the menial, and the ordinary takes so much of our time that we fail to get to our dreams, our visions, or even just our long-term goals. Homemakers struggle with this so much, because they are raising little children who require so much time and energy. Then there is the laundry, the grocery run, cooking meals, cleaning the house, and so on. It never truly seems to end, and all of it seems to be just “regular” stuff.…

I hear and read stories all the time that cause me to shudder. We hear of how deeply sin is entrenched in our culture, and we see evidence that it is getting worse all the time. Many of our young people laugh at the “puritanical” nature of early TV programs, where everyone was respectful and where sexual situations–even between husbands and wives–were never discussed. We remember that it took the “signing off” of some people to allow a singular curse word in the film Gone with the Wind. As fashion has grown more and more sensual, we think the days when groups like the Beatles wore suits in their performances…