How are you, friend? We hope your Christmas is wonderful and blessed. We thought it would be good to sit back and maybe enjoy a Christmas story to remind us why we celebrate and the significance of it. This story is called The Parable of the Birds by Louis Cassels. We hope this narrative will rekindle your faith, renew your hope and create the right mindset for the coming new year. Let's read...

Once upon a time there was a man who looked upon Christmas as a lot of humbug. He wasn’t a Scrooge. He was a kind and decent person, generous to his family, upright in all his dealings with other men. But he didn’t believe all that stuff about Incarnation which churches proclaim at Christmas. And he was too honest to pretend that he did. “I am truly sorry to distress you,” he told his wife, who was a faithful churchgoer. “But I simply cannot understand this claim that God becomes man. It doesn’t make any sense to me.”

On Christmas Eve...

We pray you are learning to RISE in all areas of your life!

This week, we have the incredible honor and opportunity to learn from a dear friend, amazing pastor, husband, father of six (yes six) boys and author of the incredible newly released book “Dirt Grenades: And other Explosive Parenting Moments”, Kent Kraning! 

Here’s a beautiful excerpt from his new book, we hope you enjoy:

“In the 1980s, my parents were asked to produce a video series on parenting called “Roots to Grow, Wings to Fly.” I still have the tapes packaged in vinyl on a shelf somewhere. When these were produced, my brother and I each received a copy. Now, mind you, we were not involved in the production nor were we even consulted, but my parents had “arrived” on VHS and we were excited to celebrate their premier. 

Sometime after we had received our copy, my wife Robin and I decided to unwrap the gift. We inserted the tape, pressed play and waited in...

We all want to slow down and be more aware of God’s presence in our lives, but our days often get full and our focus can get diverted. We have loved the book Get Your Life Back by John Eldredge where he highlights a few wonderfully simple practices, or what John calls “graces”- to begin to recover your soul, and to have a concrete way to disentangle from the hardships of the world.

These “graces” include…

• Learning to insert a One Minute Pause into your day.
   

• Practicing “benevolent detachment” and truly letting it all go.
   

• Offering kindness toward yourself in the choices you make.
   

• Drinking in the simple beauty available to you every day.
   

• Taking simple steps to unplug from technology overload. 

As you move forward into your week, we encourage you to explore trying the one minute pause occasionally throughout your day. 

You’ll be surprised what a minute can do for your soul! Honestly,...