Elementary

The day I was baptized was a cold day in December. It was five days before Christmas and nearly 17.75 years after my earthly entrance. My pastor helped me to keep the Fourth Commandment...

Ten years ago, my mom and I were tying pieces of silky purple ribbon to the top of dozens of lovely wedding bulletins. It was a few weeks before my wedding, and she and I had had so much...

It’s a tough season for my family. It’s not the toughest it could be. We’re all (mostly) healthy. We’re not looking to move or leave our jobs anytime soon. We’ve settled into a rhythm of...

“Everything will be okay.” “Don’t worry. Be happy.” “Hakuna matata.” These feel-good yet frothy phrases center around an issue that is near and dear to my sinful heart: worry.

“I don’t want to pray right now,” my two-and-a-half-year-old says. I know that these words don’t actually mean she doesn’t want the comfort of prayer, but she doesn’t want to go to bed....

My three-year-old and one-year-old had just thrown F5-level meltdowns for the first fifteen minutes of church (some of it in the pew, some of it in the nursery, some outside … you get the...

We long for deep community. We strive for healthy and helpful relationships with family members, church people, and neighbors. But if we’re honest with ourselves, especially as parents,...

We are now entering the one time of year in our world that is focused on being generous, giving back, and serving our neighbors. Bell ringers at stores, social media posts of friends...

Psalm 119:15–16 states, “I will meditate on your precepts and fix my eyes on your ways. I will delight in your statutes; I will not forget your word.” When I read this verse, I cannot...

“You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male servant, or his female servant, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything that is your...

My wedding anniversary is coming up. Every year midsummer, I think about the vows we made and how we continue to live out those vows. And if I’m being honest, sometimes I think about how...

We’ve all felt the struggle. When you’re sitting in an awkward waiting room, when your kid asks you the same question over and over, when you’re tired at the end of a long day—we struggle...

“Daddy! Daaaaaaaaaaaa-deeee! Daaaaaaaa-daaaaa! Dada! DADA!” My two-year-old cries out in the middle of the night. We can hear her over our audio monitor getting more frantic. She is...

May isn’t just the month of Mother’s Day; it is also Maternal Mental Health Awareness Month. Before I became a mother, I thought that the conversation surrounding maternal mental health...

In college, I attended a Bible study hosted at a pastor’s home. One week, he said our homework was to make a list of our biggest questions about faith, and we’d discuss them and seek...

It was a month or so after our second child was born, and my almost two-year-old decided he wanted to join the rest of the family and stop sleeping too. Fighting bedtime, skipping his...

I’ve never been a person who really relied on or noticed patterns in my life. I never struggled with feeling too scheduled or the opposite feeling of overwhelmed with no structure. That...

“In 2024, I plan to . . .” Fill in the blank. Maybe you’re hoping to exercise more, eat healthier, start a new job, go on a big family trip, spend more time with your spouse, spend less...

I never had any interest in watching the 1946 James Stewart Christmas classic, It’s a Wonderful Life, until college. Many adults and teens in my life had droned on about how boring they...