February 3, 2012
Tags:
women, retreat, Martha Anderson, grace, LeAnne Hardy
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A lively game of spoons is likely to get you acting
like a bunch of teenagers
who don't [think they] need sleep. |
I'm not big on women's retreats. First off, I'm an introvert who finds small talk stressful. By the time I have had a half dozen getting-to-know-you conversations I can't for the life of me remember which was the woman who had been on a short term missions trip to someplace I know and which has a daughter who went to the same college as mine, much less come up with their names. Multiply this by
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January 27, 2012
Tags:
blog, LeAnne Hardy, figure skating
Yesterday I interviewed author Melanie Dickerson over on the
International Christian Fiction Writers blog. (She's offering a free copy of her book,
The Merchant's Daughter to someone drawn from those who comment before February 3. Come on over and check it out.) In my brain, I had done my blog for this week.
Wait a minute. That was International Christian Fiction Writers. It doesn't put anything on
My Not-so-ordinary World. At writers' conferences they tell us that the best way to lose readers is to be irregular in your posts. Those of you who stop by are expecting to find something interesting, thought-provoking, worth your time--something that makes you want to come back for more next week.
Of course, they also tell us
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January 20, 2012
Tags:
Robert Foster, David Livingstone, medical missions, AEF, SIM, Angola, Zambia, Stephen Foster, Stuart Foster, heaven, LeAnne Hardy
Dr. Robert Livingstone Foster passed away last week. Dr. Bob, as he was always known within our mission, was born in what is now Zambia in 1924. His parents were missionaries who experienced first hand the medical challenges of Africa, losing a little girl to cerebral malaria, which also left young Robert’s brother, Edgar, mentally challenged. In an effort to protect their remaining sons, Bob and Harold, their parents left the boys in Canada when they returned to the work to which they believed God had called them.
Dr. Bob became a medical doctor, starting hospitals both in Mukinge and in Luampa, Zambia and later in Cavango, Angola. When civil war ravaged Angola, Dr. Bob
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January 13, 2012
Tags:
Dale Cramer, Paradise Valley, Captive Heart, Daughters of Caleb Bender, Amish, non-violence, book review, LeAnne Hardy
The Daughters of Caleb Bender series by
Dale Cramer is based on the daughters of the author’s own great grandfather who was the elder statesman of a colony of Old Order Amish who emigrated to Mexico in the 1920s when the state of Ohio passed laws requiring the Amish to send their children to public schools. Dale’s father was born in Mexico so he has a strong vested interest in these stories.
Multiple daughters mean multiple possibilities for romance. In the first volume,
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January 6, 2012
Tags:
New Year, resolutions, Philippians 3:7-10, Knowing You Jesus, Graham Kent, Charles F. Smith, LeAnne Hardy
So how many New Year's resolutions have you broken so far?
I wasn't brought up to make New Year's resolutions. My parents taught me that if something was right to do, I should start now. If it was wrong, I should not wait for January 1 to stop. They had a good point, but the fact is that for many of us the new year is a time of thinking back over the past twelve months, noticing things we wish we had done differently and planning
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December 27, 2011
Tags:
Zacharias, Christmas, Debi Alexander
My friend, Debi Alexander, included this in her Christmas letter. I found it so thought-provoking that I asked her permission to repost it here. Thank you, Debi.
What would happen if I couldn’t talk for nine months? How much could God say to me if I weren’t so busy organizing? What would that look like in my life? I look at Zechariah. Where he was. Where he ended up after his stint of silence. They seem to be two very different places.
He must have known the prophecies; he was a priest after all. But as I read his song, it seems he's undergone a change. When he meets
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December 23, 2011
Tags:
Maputo, Mozambique, Christmas, missions, short story, LeAnne Hardy
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| Our house in Maputo, 1986-90 |
No one had told her Mozambique would be hot at Christmas. Not this hot. Sweat ran down between her breasts to pool in her bra. She opened the oven door to check the turkey they had brought from
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December 16, 2011
Tags:
snow, pictures, LeAnne Hardy
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| My little sister in 1955. |
It sounds like the title of an avaunt-guard play--Waiting for the Snow. As I recall the play, they are still waiting in the end.
Most years we have a white Christmas here in the Northland. But this year it looks unlikely. Before Thanksgiving we got a few inches that have long since melted. This week we had rain--rivers of it. A few degrees colder and we
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December 9, 2011
Tags:
Finding Father Christmas, Engaging Father Christmas, Robin Jones Gunn, book reviews, Christmas, LeAnne Hardy
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Ought to be a snowy picture for Christmas,
but, hey! Robin's a California girl. |
Let's start with a disclaimer:
Robin Jones Gunn is one of my favorite people. I met her at a
Litt-World conference in Brazil. She has a HUGE heart for women and girls. Robin began writing when the girls in her Sunday school class had nothing decent to read. She recommended some books that they
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December 2, 2011
Tags:
Almost Christian, Kenda Creasy Dean, Soul Searching, Christian Smith, Melinda Linquist Denton, National Study of Youth and Religion, adolescence, teenagers, teens, faith, book reviews, LeAnne Hardy
Moralist Therapeutic Deism—the religion of this age. There is a God, and he wants us to be nice and to feel good about ourselves. True, but what a watered down version of faith! It’s a far cry from “Be holy as I am holy!” This is not the religion of the apostles or martyrs, nor of medieval saints or the reformers. Moralistic Therapeutic Deism would never have driven the Pilgrims to the rocky shores of New England, or sent anyone to the Gulag Archipelago for
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