Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been tagged as “hope”
@bethvogt Life stopped abruptly for me last week, thanks to unrelenting muscle spasms in my jaw. Forget powering through the pain – sleeping was the wiser choice, curling up in my bed with either a heating pad or ice pack pressed to my face. Not how I planned to spend the week. Several days in, I was in bed – …
@bethvogt Yesterday I was praying about this blog post, having pretty much determined I wouldn’t write one for today. And yes, I always pray about my blog posts. I told God if I didn’t have an idea by five o’clock, I wouldn’t write one. No harm, no foul. I’d just figure he was giving me the week off. Five minutes …
@bethvogt There are times grief throws us to our knees. We gasp for breath even as we try to grasp hold of what we’ve heard. It can’t be true. It can’t be . . . A longtime friend, someone I love and respect – someone who has shown me kindness again and again – died by suicide a few …
@bethvogt Let’s talk about the movie Mission: Impossible 3, shall we? No spoilers, I promise, although the movie released in 2006. My family’s been watching the Tom Cruise series and my son-in-love says the third movie is his favorite. I’m all for a good chase scene and you’re guaranteed at least one of those in an M: I movie, plus …
@bethvogt I worry about my mother-in-law every single day. I’m familiar with humorist Erma Bombeck’s assessment of worry: “Worry is like a rocking chair; it gives you something to do but never gets you anywhere.” Still, I find myself rocking away day after day. Ruth – “MiMaw” to her four grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren – turns 102 years old in …
@bethvogt I spent the past four years writing a “Little Women gone wrong” women’s fiction series about a trio of sisters trying to discover if they can move from a truce to trusting one another. Maybe they do. Maybe they don’t. Magicians don’t reveal how they do their tricks, right? And authors don’t reveal what’s hidden between the covers of …
@bethvogt My son Josh and daughter-in-love Meagan stopped by our house on Monday. “How are you?” A simple enough question, right? Not these days. My son Josh is white. My daughter-in-love Meagan is black. Meagan backed away from me. From responding. “I don’t want to cry. I can’t cry … I won’t stop crying …” And then I held …
@bethvogt A long-time wish came true for me two weeks ago. My family transformed the back corner of our yard into a hummingbird garden for me. It’s the barest beginnings of what will one day be a glorious garden with a ceramic bird birth, complete with a solar powered water fountain, two feeders, and yes, the proper plants and …
@bethvogt I struggled to write this blog post. For the better part of Tuesday, I thought I just wouldn’t write anything. The hours kept ticking away, and I kept tossing aside possible topics. And at ten o’clock Tuesday night I started typing words. Just how honest would I be? Life’s been hard the past few days – the kind of …
@bethvogt (With acknowledgement to Reinhold Neibuhr (1892-1971), who wrote the Serenity Prayer.) God grant me the serenity Help me to stay calm. To not yell at my family no matter how much longer we’re quarantined together or say out loud all the snarky comments I’m thinking, even if I do think they’re funny. to accept the things I cannot change …
