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On a Sunday Morning
This week, I have two posts set to publish on Wednesday and Saturday. How exciting–two posts in one week! Both posts are on the same topic, but one is an essay and one is a poem. I hope they both encourage you to take your thoughts captive to Christ and to worship God in a way that honors him. Today’s post is a poem. *** On Sunday mornings, when I wake up,I wonder what I’m going to wear:The orange dress with the white flowers,Or the fuscia dress with the rouched-up sleeves?Then, it’s on to hair. Up or down? Should I wear my black barette,Or my giant turquoise claw?My kids are…
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Listening to Myself Sing
This week, I have two posts set to publish on Wednesday and Saturday. How exciting–two posts in one week! Both posts are on the same topic, but one is an essay and one is a poem. I hope they both encourage you to take your thoughts captive to Christ and to worship God in a way that honors him. Today’s post is an essay. *** One of the first lessons you learn when you join a choir is to listen to the people around you sing instead of listening to yourself. In fact, I teach my students the very same thing. When I notice one student singing louder than the…
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Rex Goes Outside at Night
This poem started out as a poem about our shed cat, Rex. (He’s a shed cat because we don’t have a barn, so I can’t call him a barn cat.) He lives outside with Luna and we hope helps keep the gopher population at a manageable level. By the time I wrote the second stanza of this poem, it had changed into a poem about a completely different cat–not a shed cat, like my Rex, living a wild life outside, but an indoor/outdoor cat, longing for the great outdoors, but scared out of his wits. I had a lot of fun with the rhymes in this poem, and also the…
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A New Way to Keep Track of the Books I’m Reading
Earlier this year, I realized I was reading six books at once: one for Sunday School at church, one for a church ladies’ book club, one for review through Crossway, an audiobook with Samuel, a fiction book on my own, and a non-fiction book on my own. This is almost unheard-of for me. As a younger reader, I took my books one at a time and read them slow enough that I thoroughly appreciated them. I paused to imagine what the characters looked like and built entire worlds in my imagination along with the author. Now that I’m teaching, attending a church that likes to read books together, and have…
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A Small Book with Big Ideas: Does It Matter What I Believe? by Samuel James
For this month’s book, I chose Does It Matter What I Believe? by Samuel James. I chose this particular book for two reasons: one, I think Samuel James is an excellent writer. I’ve been reading his articles online for a few years and find them to be insightful and helpful in navigating our current cultural trends. I admire how he engages with modern-day issues from a biblical worldview and expresses his ideas in a way that’s easy to understand; I don’t do this well at all, and I’m thankful for writers who can and do. And two, I was hoping this small book would distill the big ideas of Christianity…