Well, Valentine’s Day is this weekend, which always leads to a slew of questions no one wants to answer. Single people just want to know how to survive the day and married people just want to know how to please him/her without being cliché, reading minds, hiring a babysitter or blowing the budget.

It’s the first group of people I’m mainly speaking to – those who are single.

What do you do on Valentine’s Day? That’s the million dollar question that arrives every Feb. 14.

For those who are single on Valentine’s Day, it seems like there are two inevitable options:

• Have a girls night where you have a romantic moviefest, chocolate and wine.
• Have an anti-Valentine’s Day party where you treat the day like it didn’t exist.

I would like to propose…neither. Continue reading…

“When trying to discern God’s will for our lives, it is tempting to spend all our our time in prayer. God, what do you want me to do with my life? Should I take this job? Should I move to that city? Should I enroll at the school? Should I marry him? Should I break up with her?

The list of prayers could run on till eternity. But what if the key to discerning God’s will for your life was to stop praying so much about it?”

Read the full article here

“I heard God say, ‘You want to know what I want you to do? Start by being obedient to what I’ve already commanded you. I’ve given you a lot to do.”

Great article by Greg Darley, director of college and millennial mobilization for International Justice Mission.  

Sometimes it’s important not to take things too seriously. Today, just for fun, check out John Crist’s parody of Christian Girl Instagram  #Blessed

Well played, John Crist.

Well played.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men.

The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it.

…The true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world. He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God — children born not of natural descent, not or of human decision or a husband’s will, but born of God.

The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us…From the fullness of his grace we have all received one blessing after another. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.

No one has ever seen God, but God’s only begotten, who is at the Father’s side, has made him known.”

John 1

One of my favorite Christmas traditions is of course, decorating the tree. It’s kind of a spiritual experience for me. I like to put the tree up early in the season so I can enjoy it for weeks. Its ornaments are a reminder of childhood, whimsy and a few of my favorite things.

Below are a few of my favorites:

I used to joke that my Christmas tree was pretty much all Auburn and Jesus. That’s still pretty much true, from just about any angle.

Two of the oldest ornaments on the tree — a popcicle stick ornament with an “M” I made in kindergarten and Strawberry Shortcake, who captured so much of my childhood.

Continue reading…

You know you love it. C’mon, you know you love it. We’re talking about Hallmark Christmas movies, of course. Well, Hallmark/Lifetime/Ion Christmas movies, to be exact.

By now, year three of my Hallmark Christmas movie review, you ought to know that there are a few elemental rules of said movies:

• Someone is teaching someone else the meaning of Christmas.
• A city slicker finds magic in a small town
• Saving a town that’s going to go bankrupt because they’re shutting down a toy factory
• Someone is in the wrong relationship (usually dating a rich jerk)
• Someone is a secret relative of Santa
• Someone trades places or gets a glimpse into the future
• A businessman falls in love with his penniless assistant, or a woman loses a promotion to her boss’s relative, then falls in love with them

Continue reading…

“We have entered the Culture of Whatever. Ironically, the more we know, the less we care. This info-glut age can make us dangerously numb…

The greatest challenge is to attach yourself to the cares of the world and still keep going. To know the world, and love it still.”

To know the world, and love it still…In One Thousand Wells: How An Audacious Goal Taught me to Love the World Instead of Save It, author Jena Lee Nardella takes the reader through the 10-year journey of Blood:Water mission, which has brought clean water to more than 1 million people in Africa.

Nardella offers these observations and more from the perspective of a start-up non-profit and a 20-something trying to find their way in the world.

Overall a great read — you can check it out here: One Thousand Wells

Today’s weekly find is an article by John Pavlovitz, “The Greatest False Idol Of Modern Evangelical Christianity:”

“You can see it in the way they complain on social media, in the way they comment on the news of the day; in the defeatist, alarmist language that they use as to describe the world. You see it in the way they furrow their brows and throw up their hands and slam their pulpits. It shows-up in the lazy stereotypes and the religious rhetoric that flows so easily in church lobby coffee chats and extremist blog rants…”

What is it, you may ask?

“…The symptoms of Fear Idolatry are pretty easy to spot. When you’re not sure that God is there or that He’ll really come through, you start to spend most of your time defending Him in absentia. You become a self-appointed Crusader of Truth, whose mission is to do the holy work of policing the world (just in case God can’t or won’t). You spend a lot of time calling out evil, forecasting disaster, and predicting damnation.”

To read the entire article, click here to visit Pavlovitz’ blog.

Here are a few more favorites from autumn in the Smokies:

Continue reading…

Fall is my favorite time of year — and the week before Halloween is one of my favorite weeks of the entire year.

This past weekend I visited The Great Smoky Mountains and it was a breathtaking trip. I could write about the beauty of autumn in the mountains of east Tennessee, but pictures speak louder than words.

Continue reading…