MyLeslieNotebook

It's November 1st: my favorite month. It's a Thursday, which is my favorite day of the week. Last night was Halloween, and though my kids did not snag me any of my favorite candy (Butterfinger cups ; not the bars! It's gotta be the cups...) I got to hang out with my favorite man and favorite kids trick-or-treating.  Which brings me to another of my favorites: requests for a blog post. Straight from one of my all-time favorite girls, here's what she asked for:  "Something addressing what God says about how he made us to fulfill a certain calling, but how to deal with or reason with the 'I definitely failed that test and I tried so hard and if this is what I'm meant to do, what is going on from here?' moments" I was going to attempt to summarize this request, but honestly it was too perfect in its imperfect state. I loved the desperate, personalized crazy that sneaked through. And though I honestly don't have a clue as to the exact situat...

These two posts on friendship (first one here and second here ) have really struck a nerve. I've had more texts and face-to-face conversations with people saying to me, "I needed what you said about friends. I shared it with mine." I don't think I'm being overly dramatic here: We know, deep down, the value of our friendships. But we don't always live it . I raise my own hand at this struggle: between running a household, responsibilities, job, your own kids, commitments, and (gasp!) church, I find myself longing for time to develop my friendships but little of it. I savor every moment with my friends, but sadly our time over coffee or cooking a meal together is never as often as I hope. The best friendships aren't cultured only in our disasters; they are forged through the ins and outs, the day-to-day as well as the "I'm bored sitting here in the waiting room so I thought I'd call you" moments. There is freedom in great friendship...

[If you didn't read Part One of this 3-part post on friendship, you can find it here .] So that we're all together on the same page, let's review: grown-up friendships are a matter of choice, not a matter of convenience. But where in the world do you find these friends?  I actually laughed out loud when I thought of all the places I intentionally found some of my dearest friends: Sunday school . I knew my sweet friend Holly only by name and knew she sat across from me in our "young married Sunday school class." One day she made a deep, thought-provoking statement about the Bible and I thought to myself, "I need to get to know this girl better." We talked that very day and decided to start studying the Bible. I feel like, now, she knows my soul. Your family . Hard to believe, but you might actually get some friends from your extended family. My dad's sister, my Aunt Lesa, is a wise, godly woman that I count not just among my family but amo...

A wonderful thing happens about the time you graduate from high school: you get to choose your friends.  "I've always chosen my friends," you say. Well, maybe it seems like that. But I bet if you look back with a careful eye, you'll notice that your friends were your friends because of convenience: you sat next to each other in kindergarten, your moms were friends, your last names put you next to each other in line, and so on. We are blessed by those early friendships because they are easy : one of you at one time said, "Hey, do you want to play?" and BOOM, you're friends for 13 years.  Grown-up friendships aren't so easy.  But oh, oh, oh are they so much more rewarding. Childhood friends serve a purpose: camaraderie and love and acceptance for the growing-up years. But grown-up friendships last UNTO DEATH. Even if you only see each other in person every 5 years. Even if you don't text that often. Even if you often say, "I wish we we...

I've got some friends going through trials right now that seem like mountains: health issues, extremely sick children, impending financial ruin, marriage teetering on the edge of collapse, family issues that won't go away. Through much of our lives, time and wisdom will guide us safely through our momentary struggles. Scriptures and love and a listening ear and a great Lauren Daigle song will guide us through our everyday issues. But then we come up to the mountain-sized stuff and we wonder, "How in the world will I get through this?" And, to top it off, it usually seems that the mountain-sized trial comes not isolated but after you're already tired, stressed, beaten down, and struggling in other areas. King David went through the same type of situation when he said, "They confronted me in the day of my calamity," (Psalm 18:18). Or, as The Message translates it, "They hit me when I was down." In situations like these, I don't have ...

I home school my kids, and most of the time I love it. I enjoy watching them learn with me and, even more, I love watching them pursue things they really want to know, such as how to raise chickens or create beautiful paintings or make your own robot that can pick blueberries for you. (That last one is theoretical, for now.)  We just began a new school year, and I've been getting a lot of "why" questions from my kids. "Why do I need to know how to factor?" "Why do I have to do spelling today?" "Why do I have to write that in cursive?" I understand their whys: We had a nice, long, school-free summer with no formal math or spelling or writing. [It was so school-free that both of my kids were writing letters backwards...in their own name.] So getting back into the routine of learning brings out the why in them. It does the same thing in me. This fact hit me just yesterday, when I gave my daughter a math assignment and she said, "W...

"Charm is deceptive." I've had this phrase in my mouth, heart, and mind for a month now. The girls in my church have spent the entire summer studying Proverbs 31, and since I had a few weeks between teaching lessons so I really wanted to dig deeply into what the verses meant.  One of the verses I knew I'd teach was verse 30, which begins with the phrase, "Charm is deceptive." At first I simply glossed over it; I knew what it meant:  It meant we could fool people with our charm. It meant the Proverbs 31 woman doesn't use her charm to deceive others.  Right? Well, kinda. Not really. The meaning of this phrase changes when you look up the word "charm" in an online concordance . That's when you realize that, in its dozens of appearances in the Old Testament, it's rarely translated "charm" but more likely "grace" or "favor." As in, "Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord" (Gen. 6:8) or ...