Kara Haschke’s has kindly hosted the next stop on the blog tour over at her blog Home with Purpose. Hustle on over there and check it out. Don’t forget to enter the giveway! Thanks Kara!

Head on over to Christina Fox’s blog for the first installment of a Fit to Burst blog tour (and give-away!) Thanks to Christina for her review, and Q&A!

Many years ago when my husband was both in high school and working at a Chicago food restaurant, he burned himself badly. It was an exciting tale of the gas hose being loose and popping off behind the stove when a mop handle hit it, and the gas coming out of said hose while he crawled back behind the stove to fix it, just before he realized that the pilot light was still burning. He had flash burns on his face, and some second degree burns, as well as missing eyebrows and eyelashes. He went to school the next day with bandages here and there and a lot of Bacitracin on his face.

His brother was at the same time running a political campaign at the school and saw his opportunity to have Luke advertise. So my husband stood outside of Chapel holding a sign that said, “Don’t get burned, vote for Mongold!” Read More

Modesty can be a super discouraging topic of conversation, but it doesn’t need to be. Surely we can all discuss it like Christian women who are serious about what God has for us. Titus 2 lays out the things that are important for the older Christian women to be teaching the younger Christian women, and in that list there are three things that really stand out to me. 1) To be kind 2) To love their husbands and love their children and 3) To be self controlled and pure. Now each one of these things is very relevant to the topic of modesty. Read More

The other morning while we were in a frenzy of putting hair in ponytails and putting lunch bags with school bags and finding shoes and reminding Chloe to take a bite again, Blaire broke a necklace. It was made by Daphne with regular sewing thread and a lot of different colored plastic beads. The little beads scattered all over the dining room and no one even really stopped to think about it (including Daphne who laughed at Blaire’s apology). We kept on with our hustle and our bustle. But because man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upwards, Shadrach did not forget. He sought out those beads. He crawled around in them and popped them in his mouth. He belly crawled under chairs and stretched fat fingers out to their limits. I kept hauling him out of the beads and putting him somewhere else – eventually in high chair with a Ritz cracker.

Later in the day, I wondered to myself what Shadrach was doing so quietly and found him, yet again, rollicking in the beads. This time I was actually cleaning the house up and so I swept up the beads and eliminated that problem. I couldn’t help seeing how much this is like all of life with little kids. When there are choking hazards on the floors of our soul, you can trust your children to find them. You can trust them to keep on sitting in them until they actually do choke. Be sure your sins will find you out, and be sure your children will find them out first.  Read More

It is incredibly easy to criticize your own church. Chances are good that your church is not friendly enough, does not hold each other up in prayer enough, isn’t hospitable enough, doesn’t have enough outreach to young moms, doesn’t do enough mercy ministry, or any other of a number of things that can frustrate or annoy us. And the reality is that many churches are failing in many ways – missing out on all kinds of opportunities that they should be taking. But there is a subtle lie that sneaks in and twists our perspective on this.

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