Roses of Grace

Happy Valentine's Day! Everyone lives in community. And so, relationships are something that everyone deals with—except for hermits and astronauts, and I sincerely doubt you're one of those. So everyone deals with the ups and downs of being in community.  And American culture places a heavy focus on romantic relationships in particular. According to one article from Forbes , Americans typically spend over $20 billion in total for Valentine's Day. That's a lot!  Even for those of us who don't date, relationships can take the top priority. Friendships give us the pleasant feeling of being admired, and we love connecting with like-minded people.  And that's great. But sometimes I wonder if we take it too far. There's nothing inherently wrong with these relationships. They can be a blessing. But it's also easy to let them become too important in your life. It's easy to let them become an idol. What defines you? Is it your earthly relationships with your...

A few weeks ago, we put up our Christmas tree. It was only a few days after Thanksgiving, which is as it should be—though I'm sure that those of you who start the Christmas season before Thanksgiving are perfectly lovely people regardless. 😉 Anyway, we usually get a live tree from a local farm, and we decorated it with all the ornaments we had in the attic. Looking at the ornaments is one of my favorite things to do. We have such a wide variety of them that it's really entertaining to go through the boxes, and it brings back a lot of old memories—a ballet shoe picture frame ornament that I used to put hand-drawn "art" in, for instance, or the set of silver, pink, and green mushrooms with sparkles on the top.  I'm sure you have ornaments that bring back a lot of memories for you when you look at them, so you know what I'm talking about. And decorating our tree this year was a very interesting experience. It made me think a lot about the traditions around Chri...