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Showing posts from 2015

Why I Pray for ISIS

"I just don't understand, Mom," my 11-year-old asked me yesterday morning. "Why would people hurt other people just because they don't believe the same way?"       Our conversation was one held in thousands of other households across the globe, but for us, it was unique. All these years I've shielded my children from the world's chaos and destruction. I've ceased watching the news in their presence, unsubscribed to newspapers and guard their online activity like a hawk watching over her babies. But at a certain point the world intrudes and we must face these discussions head-on and with spiritual awareness.      I used the opportunity to explain that hardened, dark hearts don't feel remorse for such actions. That, for reasons we can never comprehend, they feel this is their spiritual duty.     "But," I stressed, "the scripture is very clear about what to do with our enemies. We must pray for them."      The look on

Walking Along the Road

You shall therefore impress these words of mine on your heart and on your soul; and you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontals on your forehead.  “You shall teach them to your sons, talking of them when you sit in your house and when you walk along the road and when you lie down and when you rise up. I have spent six years in a blissful Norman Rockwell-esque existence with my two boys. But yesterday, the bubble popped around my fragile world. That's right. My oldest son is now an official middle-schooler. He graduated, despite the fact that I was all but shackling his ankles to his desk in an effort to keep him in his safe little cocoon. You see, I live in a sweet front-porch community where the elementary school sits smack dab in the middle of my neighborhood. Every temperate morning, I walk my kids to school and then back again at the end of the day. We literally stop and smell the roses growing alongside my neighbor's picket fence a