Good Reads

Sunday morning. The acrid taste of dread fills your mouth as you think: I have to go to church.  You want to go to church; just not your church. Your church is a ‘good’ church. The music is tolerable, the people are fine, the sermon is okay — mostly based on...

We’ve all seen Hollywood caricature religious men as pasty-faced, effeminate, and hypocritical. Some artists even picture a testosterone-challenged Jesus. How has a Gospel begun by the Carpenter and spread by fishermen and other workingmen turn into a something for...

It was a painful lesson God taught me early. When I was in high school, I worked in a nursing home. One of the patients was Jeanie, a former nun dying at age 32 of colon cancer. She was bitter with God for the cancer and felt rejected by Him. In her younger days,...

The emergency room was deathly still except for my husband’s anguished weeping. Tearless, I held our little son Timmy’s chilling body to my breast, trying to warm him, unwilling to let him grow cold. Bruised from futile resuscitation efforts, he was naked except for a...

Initially, I wrestled with my calling to Christian leadership because I am female. I had proper gifts for leadership—passion, vision, education, experience, and desire—but I secretly questioned whether I had pushed myself forward when God really wanted me to sit down,...

(Given at the Advanced Writers & Speakers Convention, Denver, CO)  The average American woman is changing. Today’s girls have bigger shoulders, wider waists, and slimmer hips so clothing manufacturers adjust to fit that profile. Like clothing manufacturers...

It was a mistake. I knew it then and I admit it now.  I was in Atlanta attending a conference where I didn’t know hardly anyone. Lonely, I decided to telephone an old friend living there. He came down to my hotel, picked me up, and you can guess what happened next: He...

Once upon a time, germs were mothers’ biggest worry when they dropped off children in the church nursery. Today, it is pedophiles.  And don’t think pedophiles are all male. Mary Kay Letourneau and others are part of a growing trend toward violent female behaviors,...

A businessman was having a terrible time getting anything accomplished. He was distracted. Constant interruptions plagued him. At the end of the day, he faced a pile of unfinished work and felt like a complete failure.  The businessman hired a consultant who charged...

I am not a born leader. As the seventh of 8 children, I was born a follower, lost in a crowd of siblings. Like David, who was considered “least among his brethren,” God saw something in me not apparent to anyone — including me — and singled me out for leadership.  But...