The Hey You Lady

"I don't want you eating pomegranates.  They'll stain your shirt." It seems I heard that all the time from my mother when I was in grade school.  Gotta love the Catholic school uniforms - white shirt and plaid skirts.  We didn't have many other restrictions about what we could eat or could not eat, as long as it would not mess up our braces.  But get caught eating a pomegranate --- And then I dared.  A classmate offered to share her pomegranate with me, and I accepted.  Then suddenly it happened.  A red stain - a deep, deep red stain - tainted what was the cleanest of white.  I suddenly felt a familiar queasiness in my stomach.  I was caught not only red-handed from the seeds, but red-bloused as well.  I spent the rest of the day worrying. "Mom is going to kill me when she sees this!"  It wasn't so much that the stain wouldn't come out, no matter how much of what product or laundry trick she would tr...

The Monday Blues. We all go through it. We feel it when we return to the routine of the routine of our routine jobs that sustain the routine of the routine of our routine lives. Is there any relief to the futility, dread and drudgery of the Monday Blues, other than enduring until Tuesday? In my opinion ... "Monday Blues" is not limited to any one day of the week. The phenomenon stems from allowing ourselves to become jaded with life, viewing activity as just that: activity. Get up. Take the kids to school. Go to the office. Prepare reports. Meet with the boss or clients. Grab a fast-food lunch. Move forward with what was decided in the meetings. Pick up the kids from the sitter's. Dinner. Homework. Kids to bed. Get yourself to bed. Repeat the process tomorrow. Until Friday night, when the cycle breaks for a couple of days. And then Monday comes, and you get the blues all over again. Is that all there is to life? Somebody shoot me, already! (No, d...

Have you ever heard what to most people would seem like a random comment, but the words stuck with you as something profound? I remember one such comment that my pastor said at a Christmas Eve service a few years ago. He and the choir director had just finished singing a duet of “Mary Did You Know.” Since they did not have much opportunity to rehearse ahead of time, there were a couple of noticeable blunders in the performance. At the end of the song, the pastor made this unscripted throw-away comment that went past everyone else except me: “It is better to be real than to pretend you have it all together.” Being real. I think the ones who know how to do that better than anybody are children, especially the preschool and kindergarten set. Yes, kids are masters at pretending. When they play they often imagine to be grown-ups. Girls pretend to be mommies to their dolls and have tea parties with their stuffed animals. Some children pretend to be firemen or soldiers, astronauts, ...

“I'm going to start calling you Belle (from Disney's Beauty and the Beast) because you go through books like nobody else I know!”   That's what my husband tells me when he sees me reading for what seems like hours at a time.  Although I haven't dedicated as much time to reading in recent weeks as much as I would have liked, I do like to read quite a bit.  Like most readers, I have my list of favorite authors that I go back to more than others:  Ted Dekker, Max Lucado, Mark Batterson, and A.A. Milne, to name just a few.  But the series of books that tops the list of favorites (other than the Bible) is a set of one-of-a-kind hand-written books:  my Journals.  This collection of wire-bound books chronicles my passions, frustrations, disappointments and joys for the past nine years, from the summer of 2001 to the present day.  Why would someone nowadays keep a hand-written journal?  Isn't keeping it on a disc or online good enough?...

Back in the 80's there was a movie called " The Money Pit ".  In this movie, Tom Hanks and Shelley Long play a young couple who buy what they believe is the "perfect" house at the "perfect" price.  It's not long before they find their new home is really a fixer-upper, and not much longer before they realize how much fixin' this old house really needs.  Every time they'd fix something, another thing would go wrong, or the thing they just fixed would need re-fixing, requiring more and more money to be spent just to make the house habitable. Don't you sometimes feel that way about life?  I know I do.  Things seem to be going pretty good, and BAM!  The washer and dryer quit working.  Then you receive a photo package in the mail of you running a red light.  Not only do you have to pay the ticket, but your insurance rates go up ridiculously as well.  Then the dog gets sick, requiring long-term medication and periodic blood tests at the vet...