The Bible Story Family

  Eight girl cousins. Eight years of tea parties. Ever since 2015 the daughters of Elise Williams and their other cousins have been meeting at their grandparents place in Montana for an annual event none of them would ever want to miss. Elaborate, stylized, adventurous tea parties provide life-long memories. Various themes have been featured through the years. “Alice In Wonderland” recreated one of the most famous tea parties of all literature. “Princesses” provided a great excuse for dress-up. “Vintage” took the girls back to a previous era, to their great delight. “A Tea pARTy” encouraged the girls to do some painting and ART after the snacks and tea. There are boy cousins as well. They do their own thing during the party but manage to sneak back and eat some of the leftovers at the end. “I absolutely love doing stylized sessions of all kinds,” says Elise, who is also a photographer. And the cousins love it as well. It has become the highlight of every summer.

  My mother-in-law, Marie Odens, recently celebrated her 101 st birthday.   That certainly qualifies as a long life, since less than one percent of the population of the United States lives to the age of 100. God promises in Psalm 91:16 that He will satisfy with “long life” those who love Him. It is easy to focus on the length of days and see that as the blessing God has promised. But Willem VanGemeren in “The Expositor’s Bible Commentary” turns our view in another direction. “The Lord assures that his own will enjoy themselves as his children in this life.” From his viewpoint the emphasis is not as much on the number of years as it is on the satisfaction we get from knowing God through those years. The truth is that some live what we would consider a long life and yet find no satisfaction in God. At the same time, some die at a young age and still have lived in God’s love and found satisfaction in Him. “Oma,” as her family calls her, has lived in our home for the past four ye

 The sun shines in magnificent splendor across the face of the entire globe. Yet I sit in a cave of awful darkness. Only one pinprick of a crack in the roof of the cave permits even a minuscule beam of light to enter my dwelling. Such a scene describes the extent to which I credit myself with a grasp of knowledge of an infinite God. All I know of Him exists in a single shimmer when compared to the extent of the fullness of His radiant transcendence. And yet, how I treasure that beam of light. I am thankful that God has revealed Himself in the Word of God and in the Person of Jesus Christ. His attributes and actions flood the pages of the Bible. While I have studied His revelation to us for years, I see what I know of Him as nothing more than a microscopic view of His totality. And yet, how I treasure that view. I have explored what I know of God in one part of my Dare to Walk on Water series . The book is called “Dare to Walk on Water: Treasuring God.” It has been used in a  number of

  During the week I was prepping for a colonoscopy, my youngest son decided to encourage me by posting an alternative definition on our refrigerator. Colonnade -- the worst sport drink. This was not the first alternative definition he had contributed to our mornings in front of the fridge. Here are some of the other offerings we have witnessed. Deranged – a cowboy in retirement. Pirate – ranking filled pastries. Vigilant – a relative who likes to burn candles. Convent – angry lawyer. Napoli – pasta with sleeping pills. Cowboy – wild west centaur. Sublime – almost as good as a lime. Disney – not dat knee. Now it is your turn. Send me your own original alternative definitions and sometime in the future I will do a follow-up blog sharing your creative humor with others.