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Choose Your Friends Wisely
During my childhood, my “church friends” were my best friends. They were the ones where I spent the night and knew their parents. The ones whose childhood homes I still have memorized in my mind. It wasn’t always rosy, despite us all attending church, professing Christ, and being raised by Christian parents, but the good…
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Your Praise Isn’t Just For You
It feels good to praise God. Just thinking about it makes me feel a joy and a fullness inside of me. When I praise God – I mean really praise him – I praise him all out. It’s a sing with my whole voice, lift up my whole hands, shout, jump, weep, laugh kind of…
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Prayer Begets Prayer
When my son was a baby, he was not a good sleeper. When he was very small he would sleep during the night, but his naps were short and irregular. As he got a bit older, his sleep was disjointed at all hours. I was given lots of well-meaning advice and I’m sure all of…
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Lifting Holy Hands
I grew up in a church where lifting your hands in worship was a very progressive movement. My childhood church was not particularly strict, but it was a Southern Baptist church that preferred songs from the hymnal over a repeating chorus on a screen. Even at camps and outside youth groups as a teenager, I…
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Sometimes Serving Sucks
I had an incident recently at church where I really didn’t want to serve God. It didn’t have anything to do with God. I just found myself serving in a capacity where I felt ill-equipped. I found myself working with a demographic I don’t generally enjoy. And I found myself having a bad day in…