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Connection Starts with Me
I was a really good Christian girl, and I was disintegrating in my marriage. I was doing all the right things as far as I could tell – serving in church, praying daily, reading and memorizing Scripture, reading great books about giving Jesus control over every area of my life, and earnestly endeavoring to apply everything I read. Yet I was continually hitting my head against the same walls in relationships, especially at home. My husband and I were experiencing the same painful cycles repeatedly, replaying the same arguments over and over again until we could each perfectly recite the other’s lines. We knew where the arguments would start, where…
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Connection – The Heart of Our Family
Five of my six kids have never met my parents. Despite the fact that family was a huge priority for my mom – she verbalized that value often and committed regular time to family gatherings – she and I haven’t spoken for over ten years. Family estrangement is hard and multi-dimensioned, and my experience has caused me to spend a lot of time reflecting on what went wrong. I desperately don’t want to duplicate the cycle with my own children. The thing is, my parents were good parents in a lot of ways. They were good providers, deliberate with their money, because they wanted to give us kids a better…
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Why Family is a Big Deal
Mama animals always make me feel so self-reflective. A few weeks ago I sat by a pond outside a neighborhood restaurant, watching a pair of goose parents being followed by their fluffy goslings. The babies were like little mimics, doing everything their parents did. They swam in a neat little row, mama in front, papa in back (I imagine this is to keep them all in line; if Jamin and I were geese that’s definitely how we’d do things). The babies waddled around pecking at the grass surrounding the pond looking like tinier, fuzier versions of their parents. Tonight I came back to the same restaurant, same pond, and saw…