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Dear Great-Opa Pieter — If I could ask you one thing, today, I would wonder aloud — How did you survive when your world was muted, beaten, starved for six long years away? How [...]

My three children require my entire heart and mind and emotional capacity. Shaping character is as painful for me as a mother as it is for their tender spirits. Some days the discipline bit [...]

Grief doesn’t always look like grief. It disguises itself in addiction, acting out, anger, sarcasm, toxic friends, impatience, isolation. That’s the short list of some expressions of my own grief. Grief — for me [...]

How many times have I asked the Lord to reveal Himself, provide an answer, and I remain near to Him, believing God for His guidance? Yet I sometimes sense silence, or absence, or delay? [...]

Their Queen announced victory and peace for the Dutch people and claimed 5 May 1945 as their Victory Day, as papers were signed in Wageningen of a treaty, with Germany’s admitted defeat. Hundreds of [...]

In one week she will be nineteen, and I will drive one hour northwest and pick her up from her first year of college. She's still a starry-eyed daydreamer and she is a true [...]

Today is Decision Day and I'm wearing my Hope College t-shirt to encourage my sophomore students to consider a variety of colleges and universities in Colorado, the USA and around the world as they [...]

The brevity of her presence is preeminent. Soon she will scatter, petals dashed in a western wind. She is a bright, delicate beauty, a complicated explosion of colorful passion. Buds cluster together like intimate [...]

{I remember the way the light danced across your eyes in the sunlight and you lifted your face in laughter.} I probably gave you more than if you portioned everything out, measuring as in [...]

One of the difficult tasks I face as an introverted educator has been learning how to navigate cynical, sarcastic, and discourteous verbose people who live in our world. Sometimes these are outrageous, angry, and [...]