My family and I were driving home to Chicago from a summer trip to southern Indiana when we were lured by signs of fresh cold ice cream to stop by Fair Oaks Dairy Farm. The ice cream was well worth the stop and as we licked our delicious dairy treats atop crisp sugar cones, we meandered around the farm.
I have a problem: I struggle to rest. Some people don’t get to rest—because they have too much work and too many personal responsibilities. That’s often the case with me, too, but even when I know I should take time to rest, or am simply blessed with the opportunity, I have a hard time doing so.
After Dad died it fell to me to take Mom to the supermarket. We had radically different shopping styles. I was an aisle-by-aisle person working one end of the store to the other. Mom was a recipe shopper wandering all over for items for the meals she was planning on cooking.
My daughter has a difficult time with transitions. Chalk it up to Down syndrome, obsessive-compulsiveness, or just being a teenager. Whatever the reason, when it comes to doing something she doesn’t want to do—wake up in the morning, get on the bus, ask a teacher a question, give a speech—she freezes up and refuses to move.
A recent Reddit thread asked the question: “Orphans who didn’t get adopted, what happened and how is life now?”
You may remember back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, people would sometimes hold up signs that read “John 3:16” at football games. More recently, when outspoken Christian quarterback Tim Tebow played for the Florida Gators, he wrote “John 3:16” on his eye black in a championship game.
Kindergarten was a half-day class, so I was already home when my third-grade brother came into the yard after school holding a big red helium balloon on a string that he had won. He saw the look on my face and carefully handed it to me so he could go inside and change out of his uniform and I could enjoy it for a while. He was a good guy.
At his Ascension, Christ assures onlookers “you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you.” Little did his disciples know that they would receive this spiritual power almost immediately after Jesus finished speaking. I
"In the Christian story," the English author and scholar C. S. Lewis once wrote, "God descends to re-ascend." With the exception of Jesus' final return, Lewis' words nicely bookend the big moments of Christ's life: Incarnation, ministry, death, Resurrection, and Ascension, just as the Ascension itself sums up who Jesus was and is.
At his Ascension, Christ assures onlookers “you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you.” Little did his disciples know that they would receive this spiritual power almost immediately after Jesus finished speaking. I