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Growing older

If you’d told me twenty years ago that I’d like myself better now than then, my younger self would’ve shrugged off that comment without another thought. Grays are taking over my hairline, I have put on pounds, and it seems that there’s a never-ending discovery of “something new” that’s weird or off with my physiology. Yet, I am happy. Lump this in with the mysteries of this journey we call life. As it turns out, getting old and growing older are distinctly different. While the former references the inevitable decay of the body and/or how many years it’s been since we were born, the latter is a reflection of the gifts of aging. (Spoiler alert: There actually are blessings in growing older.)
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A trio of trinkets on Jamie's kitchen windowsill: a wooden yellow bird with black feathers with the words "Sing to him a new song," along with a miniature Jesus and a wooden cross with the word blessed in cursive printed across it.
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Singing a New Song

More than twenty years ago, when my husband David and I rekindled our relationship that we began in college (maaaany years ago), we, like most couples, had a favorite song. Ours was a bittersweet tune by Dave Matthews Band about a complicated love affair. As time went on, I began feeling a deep, underlying angst about that being the song that we identified with as a couple…
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Shortchanged

Not too long ago, God brought this phrase to my mind: Shortchanged or short on change? It wasn’t a message I wanted to hear. It certainly wasn’t something I wanted to take to heart. I was in the early doldrums of a coming depressive episode… already in the mental quicksand of negative thought patterns, catastrophic thinking, and withdrawal into the fortress I’ve built over time to block out the rest of the world.
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One more step

I was thinking this morning about God’s will for me. Several years ago, it was a revelation to me, embarrassingly, to discover that God’s will for all of us is to bring Him glory and that we do that by learning about Him, trusting Him, obeying Him, and walking in faith. If we do those things, we are assured not only to fulfill our purpose in this earthly life but also to be rewarded in heaven. And, as I’ve also deduced, this Christian journey will take each of us our entire lifetime to complete. As the saying goes, if you still have a pulse, then you have a purpose.
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What to do when you’re prayed out

This strange season of quarantining, physically and socially distancing ourselves from others, and near constant monitoring of how we are collectively faring against COVID has produced in many of us a feeling of hitting the wall when it comes to prayer. Those of us for whom prayer is a lifestyle are ambling through days and nights, both wanting to keep and deepen our walk with God and struggling to stay on that path.
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21 pieces of advice I’d give my younger self

At a recent client event that my company had the opportunity to help produce, more than 700 women filled a ballroom and were asked a simple but profound question: If we could go back in time and give advice to our younger selves, what would we say? It sounds simple enough, but I think we can all attest, our lives might be significantly different if we had even a small kernel of wisdom then that we do now. And, therefore, what we would say, if we could only say one thing, seems incredibly important.
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Remembering

September 10, 2001, was a normal day, only, I was tired. I’d been working what seemed unruly hours to my 24 year-old self and hadn’t run errands, rested, or gone to get my physical in who knows how long. But, I was living the city life. New York had a captivating energy, almost like the pure oxygen that they pump into the casinos. It allows you to believe that you can run and run, and never have to stop. That day, though, I realized that I needed a time out. Just to get a few more hours of sleep and tend to myself. So, I requested a personal day the following day. The following day was September 11th.
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