Picturepocket's Blog

Category: family

  • Anything but Beige 

    A doctor asked me yesterday if anyone in our family has been diagnosed with mental health issues. The short answer is no, but the long answer goes like this: If you gave me a list of all the different things that one would associate with ADHD, autism, OCD, anxiety, depression, hyperactive or ultra focused, I…

  • H-A-double P-I-N-E-double S

    Our women’s study is going through the “Every Thought Captive” book by Kyle Idleman. This week we are reading about the pleasure fallacy where people pursue things that make them feel good, only to find themselves worse off. He’s right, in an attempt to make ourselves feel better we binge eat, binge watch, and binge…

  • Arrivals & Departures

    When my father passed decades ago, it was a quick. He seemed relatively healthy and active, then just died on his way to work. Within two weeks his body was buried, and within two months all of his paperwork was closed out. His name was carved onto a headstone and deleted from all of the…

  • Love in 700 Words or Less

    I said I’d write about romance, how I met your father, etc. So here goes.  I met Tim on MySpace. It was this time of the year in 2006 and I had been home from Thailand for six months. If you had asked me a year before, how long I was going to live overseas,…

  • Sweater Weather

    People talk about mental labor of running a household and I will give you a half-day example. In order to feed my children breakfast and make lunch and get them into the car for carpool, it helps to start with a clean kitchen that started the night before.  At eight last night, the kitchen was…

  • Acts 18: Multiplication 

    Paul goes to Corinth and meets up with Aquila and Pricilla, Italian believers who left when Emperor Claudius kicked the Jews out of Rome ~50 A.D. He stayed and worked as a tentmaker with them. Even missionaries need to make money sometimes. Every week Paul went to the synagogue to try to reason with the…

  • John 19: Death of a King

    Early Friday morning, Pilate has Jesus flogged and beaten and the soldiers put him into a purple robe and a crown of thorns as a mockery of his being called a king. In this state, they return him to the Jewish leadership. Pilate says, “Behold the man.”  They called for Jesus’s crucifixion, but Pilate said…

  • Focus on the Fear

    A staple of my childhood passed this week and wow, do I have a lot feelings about it. I remember Dr. James Dobson and Focus on the Family as an inescapable part of my childhood and young adult life. My parents read his books and listened to all of his broadcasts. They bought me his…

  • John 14: Rooms for All

    Jesus tells his disciples to not let their hearts be troubled, but believe. “In my Father’s house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?” Thomas asks him where he is going so that they can follow. Jesus tells him that…

  • Children’s Stories

    Something fun to do in Oregon is to visit the Enchanted Forest outside of Salem. Built into a wooded mountain side, kids can interact with various Grimm fairy tales before their Disney glow-up. I went as a kid and I’ve taken my daughters several times as well. They have a cute Humpty Dumpty, scenes from…