Today's piece by Jen Pollock Michel snagged me up in my own faithlessness. Remembering God's workings from yesterday gives us courage for today and hope for tomorrow. Elisa Amnesia By Jen Pollock Michel "Keep your sunglasses on." When I had asked a friend about dropping our firstborn off to college, this was the only advice she offered. This month, our daughter graduates from high school. Two shorts months later, we move her into her college dormitory six hours away. In one sense, it's been eighteen years that we've been preparing for this goodbye, raising Audrey to assume broad-shouldered independence (and do her own laundry). However, the prospect of her absence is like a blindsiding, sudd

Childlike wonder can be a bother, or a direct line to the heart of God. Read on as Jennifer Grant helps connect us to this often-overlooked element in our everyday. Elisa I Wonder By Jennifer Grant "I wonder," a little girl at my church said to her mom recently, "If teeth had families and hometowns. I mean, before they lived in my mouth." She's in kindergarten, after all, and, well, it's her job to wonder about things like that. Wondering preoccupies young children. Many of us start asking "Why?" by the time we're about two or three years old. One study I read reported that girls aged four are the most curious; they ask almost 400 questions a day. (It's no wonder parents feel so ragged by

In 1962 my mother made it through a difficult day with a nine-year-old, a seven-year-old and an eighteen-month-old. It was difficult because she was in a new home in a state far away from her own family and friends. It was difficult because she was working full-time while trying to raise us. And it was difficult because she was doing this all alone. She was divorced. At the time, I didn't appreciate her struggle. And in the years when I was raising my own toddlers, I didn't grasp the fact that she'd actually experienced much of what I was facing. But now, looking back over my life and hers, I've come to understand that while she may not have parented me perfectly, she did, indeed, share some

Are your eyes down on the task before you - or up in openness to connect? Mandy Arioto reorients us to connection. Elisa Choosing Connection By Mandy Arioto If I have the choice between getting through emails or chit-chatting with my seatmate on a plane, my default would be to choose email every time. Through my work at MOPS International, I get to travel the world and talk with a lot of women, and I've learned I'm not the only one with such a struggle. You see, everywhere I go I hear the same two things. It doesn't matter where I am - whether it's sitting on the dirt floor of a home in Honduras or in a corner office in New York City. First, women tell me they feel exhausted because they are