woman doing hand heart sign

“Love songs” in suffering: My Jesus, I love Thee 

My memories of last fall’s months are fading. Slipping in and out of consciousness, overcome by constant intractable pain and extra bouts of electric shocks, dealing with weakening side effects of treatment…well, it’s God’s mercy that I’m forgetting much of it now. Praise to our loving, powerfully healing, compassionate God! Read more…

silhouette of person raising hands

Nothing at all can separate me from God’s love

How can a loving God let this happen to me? Including Job and myself, I don’t know one person who’s experienced deep suffering and hasn’t asked this question in moments of pain and despair. As a mature believer, Job lamented to God, “I loathe my life…do not condemn me…I am Read more…

woman in white dress standing in field with raised hand

Great is Thy faithfulness, Lord, unto me!

The book of Lamentations is a book of agony and lament. Everything was falling apart as God’s people suffered. In the middle of the writer’s grief and fear, he interrupts his suffering by reminding his soul of an important truth about God: Great is Thy faithfulness! Great is Thy faithfulness! Read more…

baked bread

Great is Thy Faithfulness

I woke up with pain and fatigue as if I’d never slept. The computer screamed at me with work to do and the headlines blared loud whining about worldly troubles. How quickly my discontent and dread of today shot shrapnel into my thoughts. I needed a praise interruption.  Before I Read more…

wood typography photography connection

Tune my heart to sing, Lord

When suffering seems endless and despair kicks in, thoughts of “why” and “how long, oh Lord?” can permeate our thoughts. We fixate on circumstances, trying to understand them, and then stress multiplies even more.  Our songs of praise feel out of tune, inauthentic, cacophonous, ugly, filled with discord underneath. Sometimes Read more…

woman looking at sunset

What do I do as I wait for suffering to end?

Are you waiting for things to improve, hoping for things to become easier?  Sometimes, it’s years of waiting.  Sometimes, things don’t get better or easier, but worse and harder. What do we do then? What if…our waiting lasts a lifetime? Psalm 69 gives us the words to pray in the Read more…

God is good all the time

Singing Praise in Hard Change

One minute, things are fine. The next minute something suddenly changes. A hassle, a broken, a phone call, a mess, a tragedy. Suddenly, life changes and things are not fine. But are they good?  Somehow?  It’s ALL good If God is Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all (Eph. 4:6 ESV) and He Read more…

deep, deep love of Jesus

Deep, deep love of Jesus casts out fear

Do you hear pulsating fear everywhere? Do you notice an underlying “what if…” in spoken words and unspoken thoughts? I had a close soul-sister friend who could notice. She was the type of friend who saw my underlying “what if” as I talked. Her cancer brought her into eternity with Read more…

fortress

Fortress in the storm

Watching the radar, we knew it was coming. Time to inventory TP, bread, milk, canned goods. The storm bled red all over the screen. Hunker down in our basement. Exhausting, stay-up-all-night fear.  Immense interruption of normal life. Storms are chaotic, noise-filled, demanding constant attention and threatening our minds with imagined Read more…

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