We have several beautiful apple trees in our yard, but one is our favorite. It produces crispy, tart-yet-sweet apples in abundance each year. They’re great to eat, to use in baking, to make applesauce or to juice for cider. But in the last couple of years our favorite tree has had issues: it produces way…

There it was again. I should have known it was coming. I’d done this before, after all. As I sat down to have my quiet time and flipped through to this day’s passage, it stared me in the face. The book of Leviticus. The first two chapters. My new devotional book was laid out to…

What does “serving God” mean?  What does serving God look like? I grew up in an era when every young person I knew was encouraged to go into full-time Christian service. All of us. It was considered the most you could aspire to, the one field of work that really meant you’d given yourself to…

John the Baptist was written by Candid Gal, Valerie Riese We fall in love with the Bible characters to whom we most relate. We inherit their struggles and adopt their hopes as our own, even though the Bible gives us just a keyhole peek of their most candid moment before the Savior. So, we wonder,…

Fix Your Eyes and Run is a guest post by Hali Arbes I ran around my yard barefoot as a kid growing up in the hills of Tennessee. My legs would get covered in mosquito bites and the humidity frizzed out my hair. I’d spend hours outside with my brothers playing games and exploring. It…

I have an old houseplant, a golden pothos, that’s at least 15 years old, perhaps much older. Back in 2009 when we moved in to help my husband’s grandparents in their old age, Grandpa D had been caring for the plant for I don’t know how long. Back then it was big, bushy, with long…