GRIEF AND ALL ITS FRIENDS

A good word about grief.

WORDS

“That death, so full of suffering for us both, suffering that still overwhelmed my life, was yet a severe mercy. A mercy as severe as death, a severity as merciful as love.” Sheldon Vanauken, A Severe Mercy.

Stepping into the world of grief is like taking five giant leaps out of absolutely nowhere, and entering a whole different universe. We watch loss every day – if you grab your remote control right now and watch the news, you’ll see it. Newsflash: another life gone, someone dies, someone suffers because of it … the headlines have almost become numbing.

Then it happens to you. No headline can properly explain the essence of grief, sadly we will all some day know it. For twenty years of my life, I never felt it. I watched friends lose parents, friends, or any family members. I always found myself on the edge of grief, grieving…

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From Marriage’s First Kiss to Final Breath

J.M. Ritchey

Psalm 123:1 “To you I lift up my eyes, O you who are enthroned in the heavens!”

Imagine it’s a Friday afternoon, you just got off work and you’re making a b-line for those plans you’ve been looking forward to all week. You click on the radio and your favorite song is just starting, so naturally you turn it up, roll down the window (assume it is fall if you’re in Georgia), stick your hand out, and cruise down the highway making waves in the air as it weaves up and down over your fingers. Pause there in your mind. It’s bliss. Beside the inevitable Friday traffic, all seems right with the world. Have you had moments or seasons of life like that? Where things are going good, I mean really really good, so much so that you pause and look to heaven to say, “Why me?” or “God, I…

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PLEASE HELP When the face on the milk carton is your Daddy’s. PLEASE HELP

This gallery contains 12 photos.

Originally posted on MollyROCK (Radical Open Conversation and Kindness):
Missing: Lamar Putnam, 79. Last seen in Cleburne, County, Alabama on January 16, 2016. He was…

My One Minute Mind

“Be the change you hope to see in the world.” Mahatma Gandi

Just Bits and Pieces

I’m not one to watch the news. As a matter of fact, I usually do my level best to avoid it.

It is rare indeed to catch me sitting down in front of my TV and flipping the news on.

Local news, national news, world news, matter not to me, I just don’t watch.

To some of you that may sound wrong.

I’ve heard the arguments; how do you know what’s going on in your community? How do you know what’s going on in your nation? How do you know what’s going on in your world?

People talk. Social media talks. Newspapers talk. Magazines talk.

You see, there’s no escape.

The awful hurts, tragedies, anguish, they’re never far away.

I can’t close my eyes or my heart to the hurt of this world.

It isn’t possible.

There’s more. There’s more to it than all of this.  More than all of…

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Thank You

Sweet Surrender

“Never in  the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.” – Winston Churchill

My husband and I watched American Sniper last night. Wow! It was heartwrenching-inspiring. It’s the kind of movie that stays with you.

I recognize how clueless I am to the complexities of war. They don’t fit into the parameters of my neatly ordered world. War is so messy…Bloody…Heartbreaking…. Hard decisions are made that may seem heartless-cruel. In American Sniper, the main character, Kris Kyle, reluctantly shoots a child and then his mother as they are carrying a bomb with the intent of throwing it in order to blow up American servicemen on a specified mission. This is so beyond the paradigm of my thinking. I have no point of reference for this. I have no words for an ideology that exposes young hearts to this kind of hate and…

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I’ll have a “MAC memoir”

Sage of the South

Okay, it’s not what you’re thinking. I’m not talking about a manuscript and some rabbit food on a sesame seed bun. What I’m referring to are the basic building blocks of any good story, whether it’s fiction or non-fiction. The acronym for this magic formula is MAC, and it stands for Motive, Action, and Consequence.

Think about it. Good stories hold a reader’s attention through action–things happen, they happen for a reason, and there’s some sort of outcome, good or bad. (Indifferent outcomes don’t generate any appeal, so they aren’t a good option.) How is any of this different from life experiences?

Little Lord Fahrquar wanted to join the swim team (motive). He begged Lord and Lady Fahrquar to let him participate (action). They gave in; he attended his first competition, and was not just beaten but humiliated (consequence). This could be fiction or biography, couldn’t it? Of course. Now, how does little Lord…

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Heart Healthy Desire

Let’s keep our hearts in tune as we carve our name on hearts, not tombstones.

Abide in Him Blog

“Hope deferred makes the heart sick,
But when the desire comes, it is a tree of life.”
Proverbs 13:12

This fallen world is full of disappointments and delays in things hoped for. We may imagine that getting everything we hope for in our timing is the answer to having a heart that is no longer sick. But the only prescription for a healthy heart is to keep our hope in something that never delays or disappoints; it’s to make God Himself our heart’s desire through the Lord Jesus Christ. He never disappoints and waiting on His perfect timing is always the way to go.

Let’s take this verse to the ultimate and eternal where our hearts and minds should be anyway. Hope deferred or delayed can make the heart sick, for sure. But we must know that our Savior is not delaying. He is always moving right on schedule. Hebrews…

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