control

Everybody, from the starry-eyed graduate to the seasoned business owner, wants to climb the “ladder of success.” After all, it’s the American dream. We step onto that shaky bottom rung with meager influence and income, and through hard work and determination, clamber up each rung until we reach the top.

I have a confession to make: I don’t use social media. I don’t tweet, post, snap, like, or live-stream. Cutting ties with social media was a choice I prayerfully made a few years ago in an effort to battle distraction, temptation, and time-wasting. However, I was still distracted because my smartphone was right at my fingertips, ready to offer me streaming TV shows, news articles, games, google searches, sports scores, YouTube, and a host of…

Clean-eating is a pretty hot topic in our culture these days, and like any other cultural trend, it’s important that we bring biblical discernment to how we think about our food and diet. Let me start off by saying that I don’t think any one approach to food is the right way. I have friends who have been greatly helped with certain health issues by changing their diets, and I think that is wonderful. I also have friends who enjoy a lot of freedom in what they eat and are thriving in that. So there is no “one size fits all” when it comes to how we eat. But I do think there are two big lies tempting us when we think about food in our current culture.

It was a beautiful spring day when my kids were much younger. I was cleaning and preparing for Easter weekend and all the family activities it would entail. I had just made a fresh batch of snickerdoodles and wanted to surprise my children by letting them have a cookie before the weekend festivities got underway. I called them. And then I called them again. I heard some scurrying around and a few hushed whispers. Mom…