Category: blog Page 7 of 53

Sidewalk to nowhere

“I bet our neighbors are jealous of our sidewalk,” my husband commented.

Dan and I added on and refurbished our home last year. Before they would approve our permit, the brilliant city planners required we put in a sidewalk. At our expense.

Photo by Kyria Pierre-Jérôme on Unsplash

The importance of color-coordinated bookcases

I was on a roll. The words were hurtling off my fingertips onto my laptop screen like so many tennis balls sputtering out of a launching machine gone haywire.

Photo by Paige Cody on Unsplash

7 Rules to Discover Who You Really Are

I think we do a fairly good job of hiding ourselves from ourselves. Recently I took up a challenge issued by A.W. Tozer designed to help people discover what they might not otherwise know about themselves.

Photo by Jayden Yoon ZK on Unsplash

Does knowing you’re dying change anything?

In her book Be the Gift, Ann Voskamp wrote about a close friend who was losing her battle with cancer:

My friend Elizabeth was dying, and she still hadn’t any idea how much time she actually had to live. Maybe knowing you’re dying changes everything—while actually changing nothing. Because we all know it every single day, whether we have a diagnosis or not: We all get one container of time—but no one gets to know what size that container is.

Photo by Wonderlane on Unsplash

“25 Days of Christmas” Fail

Last Christmas season, Dan and I established our first holiday tradition as newlyweds. We performed a random act of kindness, a service, or presented a gift on each of the first 25 days of December.

Photo by Ander Burdain on Unsplash

Why show up for class?

Dan and I had a recent conversation with one of our granddaughters who’s having a hard time at school. She moved to a new town after the school year started and a couple of the boys paid some attention to the ‘new girl’ … and now the popular girls don’t like her.


Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash

What holiday pace have you chosen?

I opened the shades to discover a young buck lying under our mountain ash tree. He shouldn’t be so comfortable living in town where there are people and traffic.

But there he sits during this crazy busy holiday season—in no hurry to decorate anything, purchase anything, wrap anything, or be anywhere.

The young buck six months ago

What If We Could Embrace Change?

Dan hung floating shelves, and I collected photos, ordered prints, and spray-painted old frames. Our family photo wall with his/her kids and grandkids is well underway.

 

Family photos

Who were you meant to grab hands and run with?

What I love most about her paintings is the whimsy, the playfulness. We commissioned our friend, Francie, to create a painting that would tell our love story, highlighting our first date—which really wasn’t a date.

 

All photos: Marlys

What if you could count to 100?

Not too long ago, I ‘endured’ the tiniest little bump in the road, something not even worth mentioning.

OK, OK … if you must know, it was an inefficiently run meeting.

 

Photo by Knut Troim on Unsplash

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