by Gwen | Jul 15, 2020 | America, Arkansas, Basics, Brokenness, Challenges, Church, Community, Family, Forgiveness, Freedom, Friendship, Grace, Heathcliff, Home, Hope, Jesus, Joy, Justice, Love, Marriage, Peace, Relationships, Stella, Truth, Uncategorized, Unity, weirdness
Let us be the people who decide to be different from the crowd. Let us be the movers and shakers–the leaders–who show the rest of Arkansas how it’s done. Let us reject the narrative that it has to be either/or. Let us be weird and different from the whole world if that’s what it takes to also be wonderful. We can find the courage in our hearts to lock arms and stand together on the middle ground. Some might say I’m naive, but I know we can do it. Let this be the place where reconciliation begins!
by Gwen | Jan 1, 2018 | Basics, Family, Holidays, Joy, Kids, Love, Marriage, New Year
I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not…. I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be. Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem It is my twenty-fourth...
by Gwen | Apr 28, 2017 | Devotions, Education, Family, Grace, Gratefulness Project, Gwendolyn Brooks, Home, Hope, Iran, Jesus, Joy, Justice, Margaret Atwood, Marjane Satrapi, Social justice, Students, Thankfulness, Uncategorized, Writing
Every day I leave the Triple F Ranch to enter the world of academia. In academia I spend a lot of energy in conversations about language, perception, and communication. I do a lot of critical thinking. In between classes I take forays into my writing life where I think about poverty, and justice, and hope and Jesus (and coffee and kids and fiction and memoir and Guideposts devotions). And sometimes I come home with a headache.
by Gwen | Jan 27, 2017 | Beauty, Darth Vader, Education, Family, Gratefulness Project, Joy, Kids, Literature, Students, Thankfulness, Uncategorized
That’s what The Gratefulness Project is for me, for us. A happy place. What good came into focus for you this week? Here’s one of my biggies: students.
by Gwen | Dec 24, 2015 | Christmas, Dianne Neal Matthews, Faith, Family, Joy
Sometimes the innocent wonder of a child points us back toward what’s really important. As December approaches, we can feel pressured to put together the perfect Christmas. That drive for perfection steals our joy and piles on the stress whenever our holiday, or when life, gets messy. We can truly experience Christmas by looking past the messes in our lives, focusing on the Child in the manger, and worshipping Him as the One who was called “Wonderful” hundreds of years before His birth by the prophet Isaiah.
by Gwen | Nov 25, 2015 | Anxiety, Darth Vader, Joy, Peace, Thankfulness, Thomas Hardy
I read an article once about Thomas Hardy called “The Uneasy Victorian.” I remember that the writer compared Hardy to other Victorian authors, saying that out of all of them, he felt the most anxiety about the world they inhabited. And there is less hope, more sense...
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