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It is Finished
And just like that…We are finished!One of our 2021 New Year’s Resolutions, starting on January 1st of this year, was to read through the entire Bible in a year as a family. And as of today, we did it! Well, half of us did. 😉 Why am I posting about it? Not just for bragging rights, although we are certainly proud of our accomplishment. Most of all, I want to let you know that it is totally doable and hopefully inspire, encourage, and challenge you to do the same thing in 2022. I posted in my stories the other day that we were in the home stretch, and since then,…
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Attitude Check at 8000 Feet
On a recent cloud-filled flight with my husband the pilot, I discovered the concept of spatial orientation. Spatial orientation is the innate ability of any living thing to determine its relative position to the surrounding environment and regulate its body and posture accordingly. In aviation, spatial orientation is crucial, a literal matter of life and death, as pilots must maintain proper positioning of their aircraft to avoid crashing. Humans naturally and easily maintain spatial orientation on the ground; three-dimensional flight is unfamiliar to our bodies, unsuitable for an inflight environment. After all, we are not birds, and our human senses experience conflict in the air, especially in less than ideal…
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The Art of Subtraction
“But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two but one flesh.” Mark 10:6-8 ESV We nod our heads in agreement when we hear the phrase “two shall become one” in reference to marriage. We like the way that sounds. We think we even agree with it, and we think we know what that means. I marry him, he marries me, and we take two lives and bring them together and try to make them work compatibly until death do us part. But…
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Confessions of a Skeptic
The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, 1603 By Caravaggio I tend to view people and situations in life through a healthy lens of suspicion and skepticism. Or at least I thought it was healthy. What are you trying to sell me? What’s your pitch? Your hustle? Your angle? What strings are attached? The famous phrase “There is a sucker born every minute” attributed to P. T. Barnum would never be said of me, by Job! I am not sure when this all started, but this has pretty much been the predominant attitude of my adult life. I have prided myself on NOT being an early adopter. I want facts. As much info…
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In the Waiting
I hate waiting. Yet, I find that a good portion of my life is spent waiting. Waiting for appointments. Waiting on children to finish a class. Waiting on my husband to come home from work. Waiting for results to come back. Waiting for answers. Waiting for a promise to be fulfilled. Proverbs 13:12 says that a longing fulfilled is a tree of life. We all want that. But that fulfilled longing can take weeks. Months. Sometimes years. The rest of the verse says that a hope deferred makes the heart sick. Think about that. Our hearts can literally become sick when we are waiting on a promise, hoping for change…
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The Tyranny of Should Vs The Rule of Shall
This sign hangs in my kitchen, strategically near the coffee maker. My brother gave it to me years ago as a birthday present. I love it because it makes me laugh, and I think of him every time I look at it. My brother and I both share the same oddball sense of humor, as well as a profound love of all things strong and caffeinated. Lately, though, I am loving it for an altogether different reason. God is using this silly, ridiculous sign in my kitchen to teach me a life lesson. I love it when something humorous can actually be used as a teachable moment. For far too…
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Misplaced Hope
“Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a dream fulfilled is a tree of life.” Proverbs 13:12, NLT Have you ever been so disappointed by life that you have felt physically ill? Have you ever felt so let down, so disgusted by the cards that life has dealt you that you felt like giving up and throwing in the towel? Maybe you worked hard to make a relationship work and it fell apart. Maybe you gave hours of your time, energy, passion, and devotion to a job or a business or a ministry, and now you find yourself unemployed. You gave, poured out, invested, and committed yourself and all your…
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Throw Me a Frickin’ Bone Here
In my previous post, I referenced the rich young ruler and his interaction with Jesus. Today I want to contrast that scenario with another we find in the gospels and one of my personal favorite stories: the faith of the Canaanite woman. But first, a little history. Because I love history. We find this story in two of the four gospels of the New Testament – Matthew 15:21-28 and Mark 7:24-30. Matthew’s account refers to her as the Canaanite woman, and in Mark’s she is called a Syrophonecian. What might seem at first as a conflict between the two stories reveals, with just a little digging, an interesting and astonishingly…
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Suffering Better
I’m not big on New Year’s Resolutions. Yet, I find myself reflecting on some things as we enter 2010, thus leading me to a couple resolutions conclusions. 2009 was a really good year for the Buckland family in many ways. While it seemed that storms were raging all around us, we remained sheltered in what, at times, felt like a protective bubble. Our kids thrived, our marriage thrived, and our lives were, for the most part, pretty peaceful. During one of the worst economic crises our country has ever seen, Ren’s company also had its most profitable year. Oh, and Zoloft is AWESOME. But I’m sure that has had absolutely…
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Bad Tither
First of all, I have to give credit to the snappy title of this post to its creator, Mr. Wes Whitener. It’s a song of his by his band The Sheeps. You should totally check them out. They rock. I’ve been thinking about that song a lot lately. I hope he’s not going to expect any royalties. Cuz I ain’t got ’em. As you’ll soon realize further into this post. So, a while back, in this post, I mentioned duplicity. Duplicity is basically another word for deceit; having a different intent than what is being professed or projected. Saying one thing but doing another thing entirely; double-mindedness. It is the…
