By Beth Demme Lean in close, I have a secret to tell you. I love football. It’s a secret because for twenty years I’ve made my husband think it was his idea to turn on the game. I’ve made it seem like I was doing him a favor by watching the game with him. For the first few years of …
How to Find True Joy
By Beth Demme What do you know about gold? My knowledge of gold is mainly this: it makes pretty jewelry, like the wedding ring I’ve worn for nearly twenty years. It turns out there’s a lot more to gold than its beauty. Gold starts as a rock in the ground. It gets mined —cut— out of the ground. Picture bulldozers …
Four Thoughts on Forty Years
By Beth Demme It’s my birthday! This blog post publishes on the day I turn … wait for it … FORTY years old. On the one hand, ugh. I’m 40. But at the same time, I find myself thinking: “I’m 40? Wow! Time flies when you’re having fun!” In celebration of my first forty years, I have some very random …
A Lesson In Humility
By Beth Demme “They are the problem. Not me,” I said, completely unaware of how sanctimonious and unfriendly I sounded. “They don’t seem to know how to express the love of God.” I went on, still unaware of the growing plank in my eye. “Some Christians are just closed-minded and they wrap that mess up in a cloak of false …
How to Write a Spiritual Autobiography
How to Write a Spiritual Autobiography By Beth Demme A Spiritual Autobiography is the story of your own life and how God has been present in it. It can include your journey in, and out of, organized religion and all things spiritual. Writing your Spiritual Autobiography is an opportunity to identify specific experiences of God and to reflect on how …
New Download Available
Get your FREE download today and set a Bible reading goal you will actually accomplish. It’s easy! Summer is over. School has started nearly everywhere. My church, and probably yours too, has launched the new Sunday School/Discipleship year. We have new classes and Bible studies starting this week and next. That makes this the perfect time to ask yourself: Why? Why study the …
My Messy Heart is Beautiful
By Beth Demme My daughter is an artist. She has always had an eye for shape and color and an incredible ability to understand spatial relationships. I find her skills especially amazing because they are so different from my own. Spatial relationships–and all things geometrical–are fairly mysterious to me. I remember feeling utter confusion as a child looking at the …
How Ugly Leads to Beautiful
I spent the week pausing to #NoticeTheBeauty around me. This particular week blended the last of my family’s summer fun with the beginning of a new school year. The busyness made it the perfect week to intentionally notice the natural beauty around me and the beautiful moments in my life. I noticed the natural beauty of fawns feeding in the …
The Notice the Beauty Challenge
By Beth Demme I tend to be a task-oriented person. I like to have a plan for each day or at least a list of things I hope to accomplish. For some people, the perfect Saturday involves waking up late and then “going with the flow.” To me, that sounds like the worst Saturday ever. Days like that feel wasted to …
Strategies From An Angry Mom
By Beth Demme I was standing at the stove the other night boiling water for spaghetti. As I stood there mindlessly watching the pot of water, my mother’s sweet voice rang through my mind, “a watched pot never boils.” It’s an old expression about the passage of time and how everything seems to take longer when we’re waiting, but lately …