Good morning... I met a best friend over the coffee pot at Northside Church in 2003. In kindness, she reached out to me yesterday morning. Keenly aware of the tragedy I described last week in our post She Died Unexpectedly, my dear friend texted, "Hey I was thinking about you last night and this morning and I assume [...]
Good morning... This summer, our Northside Church family is making 200 bagged lunches on Mondays and 200 bagged lunches on Wednesdays and taking them to PAWkids to share with our friends in the Grove Park neighborhood. For three Mondays in a row, I have joined in the fun, tangibly connecting with my two favorite non-profit organizations. [...]
Good morning... This is one of my favorite pictures of Charlie, our first grandchild. His official name is Charles Shepherd Allen, and Charles means "free man." This name matters a lot to our family, because Charles (Charlie), like all of us, is born into the freedom Jesus Christ purchased on the cross, once and for all. Christ has [...]
Good morning... A friend just happened to send me this happy yellow saying on the morning our first grandson visited our home for the first time. I witnessed this enduring truth in action. Charlie is being smiled into smiling, loved into loving and eventually he will be talked into talking and sung into singing. [...]
Good morning... This quote from Sarah Young's Jesus Always mirrors the quote from Richard Foster's book Prayer: Finding the Heart's True Home. "The truth of the matter is, we all come to prayer with a tangled mass of motives— altruistic and selfish, merciful and hateful, loving and bitter. Frankly, this side of eternity we will never unravel the [...]
Good morning... For the first time ever, on this special Father's Day, my 89 year old dad is a father, my 63 year old husband is a father, and our 31 year old son is a father. What a rich blessing! This month I have spent quality time with each of these very important men in my life. [...]
Good morning... The Juneteenth holiday commemorates the emancipation of enslaved African Americans on this day in 1865. June 19th is the perfect day for the Obama Presidential Center, in the south side of Chicago, to open its welcoming doors to the public. In yesterday's opening ceremony, Michelle Obama spoke these encouraging words. "Y'all, hope is all we have, [...]
Good morning... I love the rhythm of our Women's Ministry at Northside Church. We enjoy a fertile fall semester and a wonderful winter/spring semester, then, for the summer, we channel all of our study and our service opportunities into a few awesome options. Our weekly summer reading group begins at 10:00 am on Wednesday, June 3rd. Our first [...]
Good morning... Thirty-nine years ago, on Memorial Day weekend, Steve and I were married in my hometown of Berea, Ohio. This anniversary morning, we wake in Athens, Georgia, new grandparents to Charlie, who is a week and two days old. Our youngest daughter could not come to meet Charlie at the hospital, since she woke that day with [...]
Good morning... A line lingers from yesterday's post. "Looking out the window, we might ask: 'I’ve got to raise kids in this?'" Multiple wars. Gun violence. AI explosion. Financial worries. Racial injustice. Deadly disease. Deep deep division at home and abroad. God, I've got to raise kids in this? I met a poem this week which brings to [...]
