If you’re like me, you’re probably disappointed with kids films these days. They’re generally cliche, cheesy, and not very well thought out, which I don’t think is fair. Kids deserve good, truthful stories that both bless and challenge them. In the past few decades the film department has been pretty lacking in this area, so…
Every Friday night, our family snuggles up on the couch with pizza, popcorn, and ice cream to watch a movie. It’s our way of sliding into home plate after the typical chaotic week of all of the activities in all of the places at all of the times. The only problem is, after years of…
We so often talk about ‘going to heaven’ but the stand out picture for me in the Bible is that heaven comes to earth… or more specifically the new heaven comes to the new earth. And that gets me so excited! It’s embodied, it’s vibrant, it’s free from suffering and packed full of life! I…
Over the weeks and months of staying home brought on by Covid, I looked for ways to keep things exciting inside our four walls. One day threatened to blur into another as the seven of us bounced off each other inside the house. Boredom and repetition made us all a little bit crazy. For a…
If your kids are anything like my 8-year old, they may be slightly obsessed the the Hello Ninja series on Netflix. It’s loosely based on N.D. Wilson’s picture book of the same title. And after listening to Wilson discuss it on the Stories Are Soulfood podcast episode about poetry for kids, I was curious to give it a try….
Do you remember how old you were when your imagination first started to wane? When it became harder to play with toys, to see magic in the ordinary, to enter the kingdom of Make Believe? For me — as, probably, for most — it started around the time I was twelve years old. I remember…
Someone somewhere once said, “Youth is wasted on the young!” But is that true? Maybe it should be said, “Middle-age is wasted on the shriveled!” How does a person enter the prime of his life and one day wake up to find a shell of himself, a wizened soul covered in a brittle exo-skeleton of…
My children have all grown up reading the children’s classic, “We’re Going on a Bear Hunt,” so when it showed up on Amazon Prime as a 25-minute special we were all over it. We expected a fun, endearing story, but we got more than we bargained for. Published around 27 years ago and selling millions…
The Riot and the Dance Part I: Earth is a film described by its creators as, “A boisterous new nature documentary featuring a biologist who was once told he would never succeed if he kept blabbing about all that silly Creator-creature nonsense.” I got to watch an early screening with my family, and we found…
The year was 2007, and Jon and I were living in a miniscule house in Valrico, Florida. We had no children, and we both worked, and there wasn’t much else going on in our lives. Then, out of nowhere, something lit up our Sunday evenings. In those days, we attended church on Sunday mornings, ate…
A few weeks ago I had the chance to see a screening of the biographical documentary Many Beautiful Things, about the life of Lilias Trotter. Lilias (from England, 1853-1928) was a talented artist early in her life, showing promise from a young age. She was mentored by John Ruskin, who at the time was one…
When I married my husband, I married a single dad of two young children. One of my earliest memories of our time together was observing a weekly routine that he had with seven-year-old Ashley. Every Sunday evening, they had a standing date for David to paint her fingernails. Hair still wet from the shower and…
