Gravel Road Musings

The Freeing Truth about What Your Kids Really Need My children don't need a five star hotel with five course meals, immaculate housecleaning skills and a set of rules they must abide by. My children don't even need me to act like I need Jesus while trying to do it on my own. What my children need is for me to need Jesus and to live like I'm serving Him every moment, every day. Too many of us live the me-gospel that Brooke talks about where we are concerned about what we need and we use the gospel to meet our needs, to get what we want, and to close the gap on our emotional and physical shortcomings.  That's not the true gospel. We need Jesus, each and every day. We need to recognize that what we want might not be what God knows we need and yet God is still good. We need to want what God wants and live out of that rather than focusing on what we want and how it's not working for us. This book challenged me so much to spend more time reading God's Word and...

Heart of Alaska Book Two Curry, Alaska, a town that is no more today, deep, overgrown grass covers the site, but a town that is the base of the series, Heart of Alaska. While in some ways this is another of those chick flicks, as I like to call them, where the girl always gets the guy of her dreams, this one is much deeper. For one, I like how it is based in truth. There was a town of Curry, there was a Druze Revolt in Syria and so while the characters and actions are fiction, the authors did their research to make the story as true to life as possible. This book has a lot of hurt in it. The girl didn't just get the guy easy, peasy. She was first forced to marry a cruel man, a Senator no less, but cruel behind closed doors. Abused both physically and verbally, Katherine is beaten down in the three years she is married to him. Then he dies, but his words linger in her head and she believes she is no good. Her grandmother is determined to pull her out of this and a dark cave ...

How to overcome the fears of today and renew your hope for the future The God of Tomorrow Principle: "Since tomorrow belongs to God, we can graciously offer hope to people today." I wasn't sure of the book when I saw it and then I saw the author, Caleb Kaltenbach. I read his other book, Messy Grace , about growing up with two homosexual parents and his journey to God and lessons on relating to the LGBTQ community. It was such a good read, I knew I wanted to read this book. It did not disappoint. His God of Tomorrow Principle shines through the whole book: we have a God who is unchanging, we have a God who loves us, we have a God who is in charge--therefore we have hope and we have a hope that we can offer to those who are fearing tomorrow. But we don't do this blindly. We stay up to date on society, we become aware of the culture around us so we can offer this counter-cultural Gospel in a way that is appealing and relevant. We accept our neighbors. We don...