A little over five years ago, YLCF posted a series of interviews. The YLCF team members answered questions that you, the readers, asked. I remember so enjoying reading these interviews as they helped me feel like I knew these girls a little better. I remember several “What! You, too?” moments as I realized more and…
Jessica Telian
A wife and mama who loves her life of learning to know her Father, loving her amazing husband and babies, and keeping her little mountain cottage with green gables.Not when you say “I do”
For us, thus far, this month has been full of weddings. In the past two weekends, we’ve had as many weddings, and while the two weddings couldn’t have been more different from each other, they’ve been filling my mind with thoughts of weddings and marriage and honeymoons and other such lovely things. And very early this morning, when I was up nursing my little guy, I randomly started thinking of the wedding cards that we gave these two couples.
The curse of politeness
After personal experience and much thought about some of the things the Lord has been teaching me lately, I’ve come to a conclusion: politeness is a great destroyer of true fellowship and close friendships.
That may seem like a ridiculous thing to say…I mean, aren’t we supposed to be polite to each other?! Well, actually, according to the Bible, we are supposed to love each other. Jesus tells us that by this the world will know that we follow Him…”By this all will know that you are My disciples, if you have love for one another.” (John 13:35). And before anyone argues that being polite to each other is loving each other…it’s not. According to my trusty Oxford Desk Dictionary and Thesaurus, “polite” is defined as “having good manners, courteous…cultivated, cultured…refined, elegant”. Those are all nice things, but loving someone goes much deeper than just being courteous to them.
Singing psalms
For a long time I was very disillusioned with the contemporary Christian music scene. When I was younger, there were certain artists who I was big fans of and collected their CDs, but in the last ten years, I’ve been very unimpressed. It seems that so many of the songs sound the same, and in general, the lyrics are rather weak and trite. Granted, there definitely are exceptions to this, but even among the exceptions, I couldn’t find any artists that I just loved. That is, until several summers ago…
Where Edmund was looking
“‘You have a traitor there, Aslan,’ said the Witch. Of course everyone present knew that she meant Edmund. But Edmund had got past thinking of himself after all that he’d been through and after the talk he’d had that morning. He just went on looking at Aslan. It didn’t seem to matter what the Witch said.”
~C.S. Lewis; The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
I’m guessing that many of the readers here have read The Chronicles of Narnia and therefore know the context of this quote. The White Witch comes to demand Edmund’s life from Aslan. As stated, Edmund is a traitor and as such, by rights, his blood belongs to the Witch. The night before the Witch’s audience with Aslan, Edmund had been rescued from almost being murdered by the Witch, and that morning had a conversation with Aslan that “no one ever heard…[but] Edmund never forgot”.
Reading Kinship
It always amazes me how books can connect people. I know that whenever I meet someone new, a question that is sure to show at least part of our “kindred spirit-ness” is “So, do you like to read?”. If the answer is in the affirmative, and the person starts waxing eloquent about their beloved authors and books, I know we’ll definitely have something to talk about for awhile.
One Thousand Gifts
I’m really not one for “inspirational” books. Too many of them seem fluffy, unsubstantial, or fake, written by people who seem to not realize that life is actually really hard sometimes.
When I first heard of One Thousand Gifts: A Dare to Live Fully Right Where You Are by Ann Voskamp, I wasn’t even planning on reading it…
Real life isn’t always like the courtship books
During my teenage years, I read a lot of courtship books. Joshua Harris. Eric and Leslie Ludy. Elisabeth Elliot. You name it. If it was about courtship, I probably read it.
In and of itself, reading those courtship books was not a bad thing. Even though I already knew beforehand that I wasn’t going to “date” casually, and that any relationship I would get into would need to be moving the direction of marriage, reading and knowing that there were others out there who believed the same as I did was encouraging.
However, a steady diet of those type of books during the years when I wasn’t courting–and therefore had nothing to apply what I was reading to–ended up not being a good thing. It essentially caused me to put God in a box in regard to what makes a relationship that is glorifying to Him…
