Weekly Devo

I received a gift bag today.  Everything inside was made for me, in someone’s kitchen, not at a store, not at a warehouse bakery, not even at Sluys here in Poulsbo.  Made by hand with carefully selected fresh ingredients and a plan for each piece to work with one another for maximum delight.  Delight for the eye, for […]

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. John 1.1 In the beginning … The first church I attended back in 1992 is in Omaha, Nebraska.  The more intimate chapel where the earliest smaller service was held had a beautiful wooden podium. The front of the podium was made of […]

I love how Scripture gives us a reason and purpose, don’t you?  As we’ve been studying Acts we’ve read of how the Lord Jesus prepares His chosen for each next purposeful step.  All steps lead to sharing the gospel message of salvation and hope.  This passage from the Book of Hebrews gives us a great picture of reason […]

I am a woman of comfort.  I want the spaces around me to be comfortable.  I need my shoes to be comfortable.  Entire companies have been hugely successful selling comfort … cozy throws and pillows and sweaters and scarves and slippers.  Like stuffed animals for grown-ups. But there is an internal comfort that is unmatched and it is right […]

It is a hard turn to go from a familiar course and make a radical change.  In my mind the word radical sounds, well, radical!  The dictionary definition says radical means an action that affects the fundamental nature of something; far-reaching or thorough. So should we all pursue radical change?  How helpful is it to change something part-way but not fully?  Or […]

My local grocery store has security guards.  Maybe they’ve always been there but now they are uniformed and obvious and I don’t mind a bit. I recently spent some time in a few airports where I felt entirely safe, in part because there was an obvious security presence. Then I wandered a bit through downtown Seattle […]

Craft.  Connect.  Uplift. It’s a slogan attached to a coffee company.  It makes me smile every time I see it.  I appreciate company names or slogans that make you think.  Like X-Spurts Plumbing.  Loved that one every time I saw it as a kid riding in the back seat through Spokane.  If you were selecting a slogan or name to describe […]

Have you ever had such a full heart of self-pity, self-doubt, self-recrimination that there wasn’t room for anything else? I can remember the place I was sitting, in a woman’s home, and the woman who was sitting beside me the first time I heard the life-giving words of Isaiah 55.  It was the invitation and the […]