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Follow Your Heart: Good or Bad Advice?
I grew up in the 1990s, the heyday of Disney princesses, love stories with happy endings, and the self-esteem movement. I’m almost certain I owned a t-shirt that said “Flower Power” on the front in big, bold letters, and I wore jelly sandals during the hot summer months. I loved figure skating and inspirational stories–remember Chicken Soup for the Soul? And then Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul? One of the most popular phrases of the 1990s was “follow your heart,” an outpouring of the feel-good culture in which I was raised. As a young person, I didn’t take any issues with this idea. To me, “follow your heart” meant…
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Book Review: “True Life: Practical Wisdom from the Book of Ecclesiastes” by Carolyn Mahaney & Nicole Whiteacre
Introduction Have you ever felt like no matter how much you try to organize things, they never turn out quite how you’d like them to? Do you spend your life trying to make special moments happen, only to watch them slip through your grasp? Do you feel like life is an endless cycle of repetitive activities that you must do over, and over, and over again? How can you find joy when things go terribly wrong? True Life: Practical Wisdom from the Book of Ecclesiastes provides you with answers and encouragement from King Solomon himself, who had every earthly pleasure and found no satisfaction in any of it. “Vanity of…
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Happy Thanksgiving {Weekend}
Dear Readers, Thank you for following Teacher by Nature for another year! I’m so thankful for all of you, and it is such an encouragement and a joy to write for you. I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving with family and friends, and if the holiday season is more challenging for you than anything else, I pray that you would find rest in the peace of God through Jesus, which surpasses all understanding. We had a fun day with my family. Our menu consisted of turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, green beans with bacon and mushrooms, butternut squash soup, dinner rolls, pumpkin pie, cherry pie, and sugar cookies. After…
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The Cozy Season
This post was written by my friend, Danielle Roberts. Danielle and I knew each other back in high school, and recently reconnected after discovering that we had attended the same church for a while, just at different services. Danielle is a wife and mom of 4. She helps burntout mom business owners make room for rest through productivity. She is the host of the podcast Created for This and author of the Christian devotional of the same name. She and her family love to travel, be outdoors in beautiful Wisconsin, and curl up with a good book. You can connect with her on Instagram @danielle.m.roberts. By the way, I wrote…
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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…
