It might sneak up on you or be slow to develop, but there is one day in every mom's life when she realizes that she is becoming her mother. Whether you find yourself using a phrase from your childhood, or mimicking the way she made the bed, you realize—for better or worse—you are shaped...
Rest in This Moment
Has anyone ever encouraged you to rest? The house is quiet this morning. For the first time in months, everyone is gone. Kids are in school, husband or wife is at work, in-laws have returned home, and the neighbor kids have also returned to their families after a long summer. Your first response in...
Love that Lasts a Lifetime
I am a sucker for a good love story, and I admire couples who have weathered the test of time. I always want to know the secret of couples whose have love that lasts a lifetime. One such couple is Chuck and Cynthia Swindoll. He is the Senior Pastor of our sponsoring church, Stonebriar...
What Is the Point?
On Valentine's Day, we tend to focus on intimacy with our spouse, boyfriend or girlfriend, and even our children. But this week, Pastor Dave Carl asks the questions: What is the point? Why would you want a relationship with Christ if you were not dedicated or willing to develop it, nurture it, grow...
What Fills You?
The realist in me knows there are things we do in life because we have too, but there are also those things we do with passion. This week we are talking about how to find those things that fill you, feed your soul, and help you to be at your best. Finding ways to...
Four Ways to Reset Your Family
We are one week into the new year, the kids are back at school, most of us are back to work, and if I am honest, a little funk has set in. I am enough of a realist to know that we would not wake up on January 1st, 2021 and all of 2020...
Draw Near in Troubling Times
I am going to take a little detour from our normal path of encouragement for your parenting journey and share with you where I am right now. It is my prayer that parts of this story will resonate with you and you will find encouragement in knowing you are not alone. You see, I am...
Our Lives Are Changed by Our Foster Care Journey
May is National Foster Care Month! We want to introduce you to Paula Bohlinger and her family. She and her husband, Tyson, have two beautiful little girls, and three years ago, they opened their home to a big bubbly bundle of joy. Their foster son entered their home when he was only two weeks...
Stop the Fighting: Helping Your Kids Get Along
Our family schedules went from busy and over-packed to blank over night. The first few days were great. We retreated to our homes to get some extra rest, baking and watching movies, and it felt almost idyllic. But now a couple months into sheltering in place, school at home, and and activity limitations, the...
Mom . . . Where Does Your Help Come From?
How often have you fallen into the mom-comparison trap? Are you judging your own mom cred? Do you look across the street and see the mom of four doing creative art projects with her perfectly clean and dressed children, while you look around and realize it's almost noon and your two kids are still...
Don’t Tell Them, “It Will All Be Fine”
In the daily crush of stay-at-home orders, quarantines, gloves, masks, updates on the number of infected and deaths, school at home, and so on, there is great temptation tell our kids that "everything will be okay." But in our effort to soothe their fears, are we setting them up for a crisis of faith?...
Serving and Growing TOGETHER as a Family
Once upon a time, there was a family—a mom, dad and three precious children, who lived in a beautiful house in the suburbs of North Dallas. Life was fairly normal for this family of five, until one day during dinner, the father shared a passage from the Bible in 2 Corinthians 5:18-21 with his...