• decluttering
    decluttering,  emotions,  Featured,  Holy Spirit,  temple

    Keys to Decluttering Our Souls

    Decluttering our souls with all sorts of negative thoughts and emotions doesn’t come easily. When I lived in Houston, road rage was… well, all the rage. The news constantly reported women getting out of their cars in order to physically attack one another.  In one almost comic plot twist, a man stole the car of one of the brawling women.  After all, she left the car running in her haste to bring it home to the woman who offended her.  But road rage isn’t that uncommon, although thankfully, yielding to its siren call is less usual.  But anger at the jerk who cut in front of you, endangering your passengers…

  • Emotion,  emotions,  feelings,  Heart,  Holy Spirit,  love,  mind,  Self Awareness,  soul

    In Defense of the Gift of Emotion

    *I am reposting this blog about emotion because of a contemptuous response I recently received on Twitter. They castigated me for my post about feelings and positive thinking, informing me that being a Christian is about having faith, not feelings. I chose not to respond to them, but my heart often breaks for Christians who feel they must cut off their emotional lives. No wonder our art is not longer the driving force in the world, as it used to be. Emotions certainly must be filtered and examined. But in the end, while love is a decision, it is also a feeling. I wouldn’t marry a man who did not…

  • delight,  Heart,  laughter,  relationship to God,  Self Awareness

    Delight: the Ministry of the Holy Spirit

    Delight did not come easily to me as a child. I had a somewhat lonely childhood. I even suffered from a lengthy stint of childhood depression. So when a lovely older lady named Winnie, from the house with the luscious orange and lemon trees a block away, invited me to milk and cookies in her backyard, I immediately agreed. This was back in the seventies when parental supervision was more relaxed. “You are such a good girl!’ she would say to me, and such was the pleasure in her tone that I was forced to reconsider my idea of myself.  I never thought of myself at bad, particularly, but neither…