It was a perfect night for baseball, but you wouldn’t have known it by the look on the pitcher’s face.  

The team they were facing was undefeated, and that only added to his list of troubles.

 “These guys know all my pitches,” he told his coach, “I walked too many the last time we played them.”

Knowing all the correct motivational words, his coach sized up the situation and decided to approach it from a different angle – a spiritual one.

And their conversation went something like this:

“You know, whether you do well or poorly out there doesn’t determine your worth or value as a person, right?” he said.

Starting his “pep talk” this way, the coach knew he was taking a risk. He was supposed to stick with the program, after all. He knew that, but he also knew one more thing -- when God opens a door, you’d better walk on through it.

“All that matters,” he told the pitcher ...

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The email came as a surprise and after reading it, I felt like I had been punched in the gut. 

A woman who had been receiving email updates from my Christian Devotional blog had decided to unsubscribe and her reason left me deflated.

Her comment went something like this: “Sorry… your writing is just not speaking to my heart.”

Ouch. It was a blow, and it took me a few days to recover. My mind filled with questions like: Why even try? Is this how all my readers feel? How could I not see how awful I am?

Criticism is tough isn’t it? And learning how to ...

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Laurie had been dealt a tough hand in life...

She was a nursing student in the college I attended, and she had a goal to make it through one of the toughest programs at our school with little or no support from her parents.

To me, Laurie was one of the funniest, most creative and self confident girls that I had met. As an underclassman, I found myself looking up to her, copying her and in some sense, wanting to be like her.

I don’t know if it was her struggle to make the grade or her lack of parental support, but Laurie had a downside that I only got a glimpse of from time to time. You see, she would sometimes believe a different story about herself.