(I was asked to write my breast cancer story for our local paper as a part of Breast Cancer Awareness month. The following is just a little piece of 2016 in the Harms house. It’s a bit longer than my typical blog posts, but I am publishing it as it was printed in the paper.) The hardest part is telling your kids. Watching your child navigate heartache is painful. But when you are the one who causes the heartache, it is almost unbearable. We sat in front of the fireplace, Corey and I. It was January 21. Two days after…
Proverbs 23:22 Listen to your father, who gave you life, and do not despise your mother when she is old. I had a friend years ago whose relationship with her mother was strained. They talked regularly. And though they honestly loved each other, it was not uncommon for their conversations to end in utter frustration. You see, they loved each other, but they didn’t really like each other. One expected too much, the other couldn’t let go of the past. I have lost touch with that friend and don’t know where her relationship with her mother stands today, but I…
Proverbs 22:6 Train a child up in the way he should go and when he is old he will not part from it. Whew! That verse puts a tremendous amount of pressure on us if we read it to mean that if we raise our kids right, they will become followers of Christ. Putting the full responsibility of our children’s faith on our own shoulders will surely lead to feelings of failure when one of them strays. I love the following explanation of Proverbs 22:6 from Captivating by John and Stasi Elderidge. This verse is not a promise about faith….
Proverbs 21:9 Better to live on a corner of the roof than share a house with a quarrelsome wife. When my husband’s little sister asked him to read scripture at her wedding, she gave him free reign to choose whatever passage he wanted and opened the door for his crazy shenanigans. Corey stood solemnly in front of the wedding guests and read Proverbs 21:19. “Better to live on a corner of the roof than share a house with a quarrelsome wife.” After the laughter subsided, he flipped to the New Testament and read a much more appropriate wedding passage. It’s…
Proverbs 19:2 It is not good to have zeal without knowledge, nor to be hasty and miss the way. Zeal is a good thing. To be enthusiastic and passionate about a goal is a great first step. But if zeal is all we have, we won’t get far. After I watched Florence Griffith Joyner break world track records in Seoul in 1988, my 12-year-old self was going to follow in her footsteps. I would be a runner, and I would run in the Olympics (forget that those Olympics sprinters are not white girls.) So I went out of for track…