This post is the second in a four-part series of devotions celebrating Advent. The earlier post titled "Advent Devotions 2016" provides an explanation and some encouragement about how to make use of these posts. God says, “I have loved you with an everlasting love,” (Jeremiah 31:3). ◊ Read this verse again, and put your name... Continue Reading →
This post is the first in a four-part series of devotions celebrating Advent. The previous post provides an explanation and some encouragement about how to make use of these posts. We have hope when we cherish a deep desire and the expectation that our desire will be fulfilled; we don’t yet have what we long... Continue Reading →
During Advent, the four weeks leading to Christmas Eve, the Lord invites us to prepare our hearts to celebrate Jesus' birth with the most JOY possible. I will post one Advent devotion a week for the next four weeks. Because joy erupts in our hearts when a deep longing is finally met with glorious... Continue Reading →
“And she laughs at the time to come,” Proverbs 31:25 Rebecca Terry The last time I spoke with my grandma, late on an August afternoon, she had labored all day with chest pain and asphyxia. She closed her eyes for the last time just hours after we hung up the phone. While we spoke, she... Continue Reading →
The quiet kitchen looks blurry as I struggle to focus my eyes this early in the morning. As the timer measures four minutes for my French-press pot of coffee, I stand in my bathrobe waiting. Do I turn to the window to awaken my vision with the growing daylight in my backyard? Do I still my heart in anticipation of the time of scripture-meditation for... Continue Reading →
When you see the setting sun burn the clouds into wisps of gold and red and those colors shimmer toward you across the blue-dark water, what do you feel? When after a snowfall you step into the sunshine where your breath makes mist and the mountains extend before you, glistening to the north and south as far as you can see, what happens inside you? When... Continue Reading →
Darkness: Two girls from my daughter's school will spend Christmas Day awaiting charges of conspiracy to commit murder. They intended to shoot students and teachers. Darkness: Yesterday my friends wept at the funeral of a sixteen-year-old boy who shot himself in his loving family's basement. Darkness: People dear to me face Christmas with empty chairs where those they... Continue Reading →
Traversing the corridors of my mind can be risky. Simply thinking about this or that, I can tread upon a trap door of fear. Then my footing--my walk by faith--falls away, and I tumble down into the pit of "What ifs?" But the pit is dark fantasy, a bleak unreality. Because never do I find there a Loving Father. Down where the... Continue Reading →
My dear friend lost her husband last month. Another friend wrote to me about her dark thoughts and anxiety because of this man's death. Since then, I have battled my own inexplicable anxiety. Meanwhile, I have been reading Timothy Keller's "Walking With God Through Pain and Suffering." So this morning I am thinking about our dark emotions and praying I can... Continue Reading →
What was (is) Jesus like? If he walked into my house, if I sat at his feet, how would I find him? What is he like to be near? I long not just to know, but to experience, the answer to these questions. I have tears in my eyes even writing them. And I have been soaking... Continue Reading →
The Deepest Love 