Over the past three years, Brent and I have adopted three citrus trees because we absolutely adore home grown fruit. My favorite thing about our lemon and lime tree is they continuously bloom throughout the year, always yielding fragrant blossoms and a constant production of fruit. However, if you want a healthy tree that nourishes optimal lemons, limes, and oranges, you must prune your tree. If you let it stay in an unmanicured state for the entirety of its life, will it still produce? Yes. But if you want your tree to reach its full potential, you must cut back some of the growth so that light can penetrate into…

Brent and I just experienced a blissful evening like no other. Not because anything special happened, but also because something very special happened.  But first, a little backstory. After reading The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, I felt challenged and inspired to revisit what it means when God commands us to remember the Sabbath. To keep it holy. As it turns out, we’ve been doing it wrong. Growing up, I always viewed Sunday as the Sabbath. To me it was the last day of the week before a new school week started. That was the day my family dressed up, attended church (I could barely keep my eyes open I was so exhausted all the…

I hope my son earns a mediocre education. I hope my daughter marries a sub par person. I hope my son lands on a career that’s only minimally fulfilling. I hope my daughter turns out to be second-rate person. I doubt that any of the above sentiments would be what a parent wishes for their children. In fact, we do our very best to intentionally shape our kids so they can reach their full potential. We discover and nurture their gifts, we pray over their future spouses, we coach them with the wisdom we’ve gained, because you can’t simply leave the aforementioned things up to chance. They are too important.…

Nothing makes me want to light my house on fire and start over more than clutter.  I don’t mind a house gone bananas during the week, but I need everything put away at some point so I can feel that inner peace that only comes with a tidy space. To be honest, I think it’s spiritual. Let me explain by taking you on a journey. There’s something beautiful that happens to me when I visit the mountains. Growing up in the suburbs of Asheville, NC, I have so many fond outdoor memories. Vegetable gardens, forts in the woods, camping, white water rafting. Did you know you can tie a string…

I’m interested in a relationship with Jesus. That was the box my daughter checked when prompted at the end of our Easter service. Of course I did what any good mom would do: I peeked at her answer. On our way home, Brent and I both agreed we needed to circle back around to her response card when we put her in bed that night and knew she would be open to talking. What it came down to was not her uncertainty of salvation, but rather her lack of desire to have her own quiet time, something Brent and I had been encouraging her to do. “I hear you and…

If it seems as though I only write from a place of my failures, it’s because those are the times that I learn and grow the most, and believe me when I say I’m a work in progress. The moment I think I have something down, I’m reminded how much more I have to learn or how much deeper I so desperately need my roots to grow. So, here’s another chapter out of my life from just a few weeks ago. It all started with one of my administrators coming in for an observation during the last 10 minutes of my class. What did he see? Almost all of the…

One of my health goals this year is to hit my 40th birthday the healthiest I’ve been since I was a high school athlete.  I tend to exercise and eat right in cycles, but I’ve yet to find that stride that helps me keep going when I trip up.  Believe it or not, my biggest enemy is not a binge fest of highly McFatty foods and sweets. I know how to pick myself up and recover from that. It’s also not about missing a workout.  It’s the psychology behind missing two planned workouts in a week. I struggle with OCD tendencies when it comes to ordering. For instance, if I want…

If you want to know how the third list has been working out for me, it’s been great! Until this last week. It was the perfect storm of a sick child, my ever-growing school and home to do list, and my anxiety and depression that left me crying in the living room after fixing dinner a few nights ago. And not a casual mist. The ugly cry that requires a poncho. The one that comes with intrusive thoughts. The one that makes you feel like you’re in a black hole and will never get out. And sometimes you don’t want to get out. You just want it to go ahead…

When we moved into our current home ten years ago, it was always our plan to plant a Valencia orange tree. As a kid, my family juiced oranges every winter, and once you’ve had true fresh squeezed juice, store bought jugs just won’t do the trick anymore.  We initially put off purchasing a tree because of the expense. At the time, $100 just seemed too extravagant when we had so many other things to fix up around our new home. With the passage of time we rarely thought about our initial plan. Occasionally one of us would say, “Remember when we wanted to plant an orange tree? Do you still want to…