No, it’s not storming outside as I write this. I’m actually enjoying a very quiet evening alone in my serene living room on this Super Bowl Sunday night. (Just in case you can’t tell, I’m not a football fan at all.)   In my last blog I talked about the snowflakes that fall from the sky like postcards, noting that sometimes God’s messages to us don’t come so gently—like when rain beats against the roof like hailstones and thunder rattles the windows. (That rattling can be quite unsettling when the windows are as old as the ones in my little house!)   This week I read a gorgeous psalm that...

There’s something about looking out the window in the morning and seeing the gentleness of snow covering everything, the delicate glass of ice twinkling from the branches.     Perhaps it’s because falling snowflakes are, among other things, postcards from the sky (a lovely line I’m borrowing from the title of a beautiful orchestral composition by Marjan Mozetich.) Snowfall is another way that the “heavens declare the glory of God” (Psalm 19:1).   Here in middle Tennessee, it’s rare to look out the window to a world of quiet whiteness. It is perhaps the infrequency of snow that makes me...

I began the new year with great hope. A new day, a new year. New and unlimited possibilities! Change was coming, and I knew it. I felt excited.   But just a few weeks into 2010, I stopped feeling excited. Instead, I began to feel discouraged. And I’m not the only one. Several people I know have experienced a depression that set in as the month advanced. And that’s what I began to feel too—a melancholy pressure stifling hope and stealing the day-to-day joys of life.   Maybe it’s because there have been more clouds so far this year than sun. Maybe it’s the post-holiday winter blues that a lot...

Said Pastor Jordan today: When you don’t fix your eyes on yourself or your circumstances, but rather on Christ and who you are in Him, there are no limits on your life.   I loved that. A life without limits.   What a perfect way to look at 2010. My experiences from last year, my circumstances at the moment, my dreams and disappointments—none have the power to limit my life today. None can steal away the hope that lives in me, which is Christ Himself.   That is, as long as I don’t let them.   As I begin a new year, I’m thankful for the reminder to speak the truth of Christ over my...

I woke up on New Year’s Day to sunshine. That alone, and the fact that I didn’t have to go to work, made me wake up happy. Besides that, waking up to something called new is happy too.   While every day is a new day, one with no mistakes in it yet (as Anne of Green Gables says), there’s something different about the start of a new year. A bigger page is being turned. Another chapter, or even another book, of life is beginning. A larger chunk of the past is finished.   I think of each new year as unscripted, an opportunity to consider that things just might break outside the box of my present...