Blogs

Blogs

Our blogs offer thoughtful content from a variety of writers that will help you live with simple focus on Christ and His kingdom. This feed will give you all our newest content from all our blogs. These posts, we hope, will help to separate our thinking from the surrounding worldliness of our culture, and live deliberately at home, in the church, and in the world!

Links to each of our blogs may be found in the left sidebar. You may also browse all our blogs by topic by clicking the link in the right sidebar.

Use Your Talents {A Girl’s Guide to the Good Life}

By in Highlands Blog on

Big Problems In the course of a day, how many times do you make contact with the suffering of another living being? Really, if you counted them, how many would there be? It is 6:00 a.m. your radio alarm clicks on and reports that another suicide bomber took out twenty-three more people somewhere in the Middle East (one). Good morning. After mining the nighttime crusties from your eyes and brushing your teeth, you take a scroll through your social feeds. Your college friend just got back from India, a medical mission to the slums, and she brought back scads of. . .
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For the Love of Food

By in Highlands Blog on

Human beings share a common love: food. I’m not referring to our common need of food, but of our common love for food. We relate certain foods to events, traditions, and people. When I think of Destin, Florida, I think of fish tacos. When I think of Crowder, Mississippi, I think of chicken and dressing. When I recall a trip to Zimbabwe, I think of grilled wart hog, a trip to Peru with cow heart and french fries, New York City with homemade mozzarella sticks, and Yemen with grilled lamb and flat bread. When I think of Tate County, (the. . .
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Filed under Community, Sacraments

The Merits of Saying Nothing

By in Highlands Blog on

A ten year old boy with a new pocketknife takes it out of his pocket many times throughout the day for no specific reason. He isn’t necessarily planning mischief, but after admiring it and waving it about for the fifteenth time, something ends up getting cut. You are that ten year old boy. Your tongue is that pocketknife. You don’t plan to say something hurtful or thoughtless or dumb, but as the words come tumbling out, some of them get away from you. The worst part is that in many cases there was no reason for you to open your. . .
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Is Your House a Hiding Place or a Home Base?

By in Highlands Blog on

What should the activity inside our homes look like when those homes are situated in communities where the foster system is over loaded with kids, many who have been abandoned and abused by their very own parents? What should drive our daily schedule when a few steps from our door our helpless pre-born neighbors are being taken to the slaughter in “safe and legal” clinics? What should we be doing with our down time when the powers-that-be decide it is beneficial to the community to steal our neighbor’s property in the name of economic development or threaten his business with. . .
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Filed under Education, Family

The Impossibility of Lonely Christmases

By in Highlands Blog on

Lonely Carols There is no better way to respond to Christ’s birth than with singing and over the centuries the Church has amassed a wealth of carols and hymns that is the envy of the world. This has led to all sorts of crooners and warblers without a religious bone in their body recording Christmas albums, interspersing sentimental seasonal fluff alongside forthright carols of Christian joy, topped off with an original or two to try to make their collection distinct. Sometimes this results in a beautiful voice singing beautiful truth, in a plundering-the-Egyptians, blind-squirrel-finding-a-nut sort of way. Other times, we’re. . .
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Filed under Relationships
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When Your Christmas Traditions Falter

By in Highlands Blog on

Difficult Christmases I don’t mean to come off like a Debbie Downer, but the Christmas season has been somewhat difficult for me for the last couple of years. Not in an overwhelming sense, it has been more like a wet fog and slush in contrast to fresh snow under a blue sky. I’ve struggled to discern the root of my difficulty because it has been even more of a struggle in recent years than it was right after my wife Kim passed away. I began to comprehend the problem after reading an article by a well-known national journalist and a. . .
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Filed under Personal Growth
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It’s NOT About YourSelfie {A Girl’s Guide to the Good Life}

By in Highlands Blog on

Selfie-ish DayDreams That fantasy you have in your head—it’s not real. You know what I’m talking about, the Instagram filtered version of your future where everything your life now lacks will finally be in your grasp. You’ll be an adult and free of your parents demands on you, or you’ll be done with classrooms and test taking and on to your dream job, or Ryan Reynolds will have finally realized what a doofus he was for not finding you and marrying you sooner. Yep, it sounds nice. The problem is, it’s the daydream equivalent of a selfie. The foreground consists. . .
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Filed under Faith, Women

Tell Your Kids the Christmas Story . . . Then Celebrate It!

By in Highlands Blog on

Telling the Christmas Story Christmas is an event so wonderful and important that time and history are kept according to Jesus’ arrival. This is a story that must be told annually. American Christians are in a unique position because we simultaneously have a cultural and religious holiday mixed together, and we end up with manger scenes that have either Santa Claus flying overhead or Santa bowing down at the manger in worship of Christ. Certainly if the historical Saint Nicholas had been present at the birth of Christ, he would bowed before Christ, but Santa Claus bowing seems rather strange. . .
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Filed under Parenting
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Personal Rituals & Doing What Matters

By in Highlands Blog on

First I take the cream out of the fridge and pour a half cup into the bowl on the stove top next to the pot where the steel-cut oats will cook. This is so that the bowl and the cream will be warm after the oats are done. Walnuts, raisins, nutmeg, and cinnamon are also added to the cream (or sometimes eggnog instead of cream). The coffee beans are then ground and the French Press is also strategically place on the stove near the kettle and the small pot of oatmeal so that it too might be pre-warmed. Soon the. . .
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How Not to Lose Your Faith When Illness Strikes

By in Highlands Blog on

Haven’t We Done This Before? Have you ever read a story about the people of Israel and thought, “Why are they losing faith again? Didn’t they learn their lesson the last time?” Hi, I’m Israel. Have we met? I thought I had learned the lesson of God’s grace being sufficient in my weakness during my early years of mothering, but the Lord has shown me that I need this lesson again. I have struggled with health issues off and on for many years. With so many pregnancies, it is inevitable to have fluctuating hormones and my body seems to have. . .
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No One Wins at Whack-a-Sin

By in Highlands Blog on

Lessons from Whack-a-Mole Those clever little electronic moles! Just when you prepare to whack the one in front, he disappears and the rascal in the back pops up. You prepare to smite him and now he’s gone too. Look, over there! That’s the mole you should focus on now! Wait, no, that one! Mostly you just pound empty holes. The moles try to survive by alternating and distracting you, blurring your vision and confusing your aim. As a carnival game, it’s great fun. But when a sinful world adopts the same strategy and convinces you to play along, no one. . .
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Know Who Your Boss Is {A Girl’s Guide to the Good Life}

By in Highlands Blog on

No matter how independent we imagine ourselves, we are not. Before we can toddle about on our own two feet, our hearts (if not our lips) impetuously bawl, “You’re not the boss of me!” to anyone with the audacity to order us about. Unfortunately, infantile outbursts against rightful authority are not outgrown as quickly as a two-year-old stretches the limits of her toddler clothes. When last season’s footie jammies are pulled out of storage it’s obvious they need to go, but we continue trying to outfit ourselves with positions of independence and autonomy refusing to acknowledge that no matter how. . .
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I Have Overcome the World

By in Highlands Blog on

Jesus has left the building . . . and that’s a good thing. I know that those two statements don’t seem to go together but that is basically what Jesus is saying to the disciples in what is commonly called the “Farewell Discourse” found in the Gospel of John, chapters 13–16. A Troubling Announcement In these chapters, Jesus isn’t healing anyone or speaking to the crowds or contending with the church leaders; He is spending the last hours of His earthly time with that rag-a-muffin band made up mostly of blue-collar men who have followed Him for three years and. . .
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Evangelism & No Judgment Zones

By in Highlands Blog on

Unwelcome Evangelism The world desires safe spaces be maintained; spaces free of judgment, free of guilt, free of fear and shame. They love sin, and do not want their daily routine jarred by the Word of the Lord. Jesus said, “Unless you repent you will all likewise perish”—He preached a jarring message. When we take God’s Word to the streets we see how disturbing it is to feelings of safety in secular spaces. Worldlings chafe under the proclamation of the only existing remedy for their guilt and shame, and as their consciences are rubbed raw they scorn the ones who. . .
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Settling In & Serving God

By in Highlands Blog on

Life Altering Changes In February 2010, there were two events which changed the course of my life. The first was finding out my wife Brittany was pregnant with Reid, our first child. The second was the next day, when we moved into our first home, which we lived in for six years. Now it may seem I’m over stating the importance of these events. After all, these are normal events in the life of most. Yes, they are important and special, but not unique, and in most ways quite ordinary, to which I would respond “precisely,” because these were the. . .
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Filed under Family, Marriage, Parenting

The Lord Reigns, Even in Dark Times

By in Highlands Blog on

I’ve been beset lately with a downcast spirit of sorts. It doesn’t feel like a storm raging, just dark clouds and a fog within me that blocks out the sun. It isn’t anything clinical or particularly intense, but a consistent feeling of sadness or frustration that many things in and around me simply aren’t as they should be. It might be a frustration with our current cultural or political climate, which is a total mess; I think we can all agree on that. In my memory, I don’t remember a time that our nation has been this divided and pessimistic. . .
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Filed under Faith, Sovereignty

Contention: Poison in the Field of Righteousness

By in Highlands Blog on

Growing Righteousness Where does righteousness grow? This is an important question for everyone who wants to reap a harvest of righteousness like James 3:18 talks about. But a harvest is an outcome and not every field contains the right kind of soil to produce that outcome. Many Christians sow seeds of righteousness only to find that the expected harvest never comes. James addresses this frustrating state of affairs by reminding us that soil matters just as much as seed, that righteous convictions must be combined with peaceful wisdom in order to produce fruit. Christians who share the same high opinion. . .
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Filed under Church, Relationships

Profiling

By in Highlands Blog on

When I was born They looked at me and said What a good boy What a smart boy What a strong boy When you were born They looked at you and said What good girl What a smart girl What a pretty girl We’ve got these chains Hanging ‘round our necks People wanna strangle us with them Before we take our first breath Names, descriptions, categories, We are born with them, gifted or cursed with them, as we move into and through life. Parents, peers, teachers, drill sergeants, friends, and enemies all play Adam with our lives, for better and. . .
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Filed under Character, Culture

Enjoying Things as They Are

By in Highlands Blog on

Here is a question for our modern world: Is it possible to enjoy something merely for what it is and not for its outcome or what good it serves? Or asked another way, are there some things that are enjoyable just because they are good and we need not explain why? More and more, our modern world answers this question “No.” Being happy and enjoying isn’t enough. The modern world not only needs a deeper purpose for value but we need that purpose explained to us. We want life broken down into working parts that make sense and if we. . .
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Filed under Culture

God, the Great Storyteller

By in Highlands Blog on

Writing a Good Story In the last couple of weeks, I’ve started taking an online video class in screenwriting taught by Aaron Sorkin, an Oscar and Emmy award winning screenwriter and producer. My writing efforts have, in the past, always been focused on essays, devotionals, articles, sermons, and blog posts. However, I’ve recently become fascinated with the particular skill set that enables one to tell stories and write dialogue, not merely for reading but for viewing In one of the first lessons, he made the point that in any good play, movie, or TV series, there has to be a. . .
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Filed under Faith, Sanctification
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