The Warren & the World is Story Warren’s weekly newsletter, providing a round-up of our favorite things from around the web as well as a review of what was on our site over the past week. We’re glad you’re here!

Prep Work
Mandy writes at Life. Faithful. about the hard work of waiting in preparation. And the challenge of not quite knowing what that preparation is for.
- 4 years of prep work, of God getting me ready for whatever He has in store. 4 years of Him telling me to lean into Him and to rely on Him. When you think about it, 4 years is a pretty big investment. Like Tony Evans said in that sermon series I mentioned, God has been preparing me for my purpose and my purpose for me.I still don’t know what that purpose is. I don’t know what’s ahead on what has already been a pretty crazy path.
The Power of Consistency
Sissy Goff writes at Today’s Christian Woman about the work of being a consistent parent. She brings her counseling background to bear as she helps parents think through the best ways to be consistent at every age.
- “It’s just not natural to be a good, kind parent. . . . It’s just not natural,” she repeated again with growing emphasis. “What’s natural for me is to be angry, frustrated, and inconsistent. I try one thing and it doesn’t work. So then I try something else. I just wish there was some kind of manual. Parenting is harder than anyone ever tells you. I mean, they come into the world crying, after all. That should be some kind of sign as to what’s to come.”
NEW Spring Picture Books 2015
Over at Imagination Soup, Melissa Taylor suggests some new picture books just for spring.
- Isn’t spring the best? I love helping my kids notice all that is magical about it! Here are my favorite newly published spring (and Earth Day-ish) picture books.
Three Ways to Remember God’s Grace
Steven Lee writes at Desiring God about a right understanding of who God is and who we are.
- Remembering who God is and who we are is the antidote to grumbling. If we see our world, our lives, and our circumstances through the lens of Jesus’s cross, everything will come into focus. And that clarity of sight will awaken joy in us. It is looking through this lens that we find a deep sense of what it means to be loved by a good and kind heavenly Father.Here are three examples of how God calls the people of Israel to remember. Rather than just gloss over the past, we are called to recall it, letting the testimony of God’s faithfulness spur us on in love and worship.
Around the Warren:
My Mother Practiced the Piano
Rebecca Reynolds writes about the tension of fostering creativity and shaping a family.
- In 1972 my mother’s piano professor failed her senior recital because she was pregnant with me. She was a married woman, and that recital was one of the best performances of her life; however, the man had a point to make. A pianist as brilliant as my mother had no business changing the diapers of a squawling little brat. There wasn’t room in the art world for the distractions of motherhood.She went home and cried until she nearly miscarried; yet because more trauma would have put me in danger, she didn’t fight the grade. Instead, she redirected her goals and focused on protecting the life inside her.Years later, when I was a little girl living in in Ohio, Mom decided to finish that degree. She spent long hours memorizing Kavalevski and Schumann while I curled up near the piano in a thrown rectangle of sunlight, listening to her practice.
Almost forty years have passed since then. I am now a mother and a writer, and I often find it a struggle to balance my art with my maternity. On days of intense creation, I feel like I should be doing something more hands-on with my children. When I focus on investing only in my kids, I feel like I’m being a bad steward of my ability to write.
“…reflecting the gift of love…”
Paul Boekell’s graphic art. Elizabeth Goudge’s words.
Reading By Ear
Liz Cottrill looks at the pros and cons of audio books and reading by eye, recognizing that both have their place.
- I have often written about the atmosphere of reading, how the presence of books in the home, parents who read, and reading aloud to children makes reading a way of life for them, so I don’t know why I am chagrined by my grown children commenting, when some offhand remark about audio books occurs, “The sound of my childhood.” Perhaps it is because I fear that the droning of my cassette player was a barrier to my availability to them. Their background noise was not TV, but the voices of my favorite narrators as I cooked or did housework. In self-defense, I assure you I never used earphones; That would have been negligence as, for a blind mother, ears are most crucial for “keeping an eye” on the children.Listening to books was a way of life for me, long, long before it became popular. In 1960, when my “talking book machine” arrived in the mail from the state Library for the Blind – an enormous boxy machine that played records on three speeds for special longer playing records, my parents were more excited than I was, because I didn’t know what an enormous world was about to unfold for me with this access to literature.
Emily-1000
Glenn McCarty and Joe Sutphin have a tale to tell (or show, in Joe’s case) us. It has to do with robots, guys. Which is really cool.
Something to Do with Your Kids:
Spring is springing–though in portions of the country it did snow this week. For you folks, you just have more preparation time for this project. For those in warmer climes, here’s a fun project for you: create a fairy garden! Read how here.
And Something to Watch
In middle school, my friend Valerie and I did a research project in science class on the planet Pluto. It was a major project, culminating in a presentation to the class and a paper (we did the presentation like a tourism pitch–“Lay out in your beach chair and enjoy the faint rays of the sun turning the lop layer of methane ice into a temporary* atmosphere. (*methane atmosphere only available during the daytime, at night, temperatures can reach -400 degrees Fahrenheit).” We invested a lot of time on that project, and I was one of the many who found the tearing away of my ninth planet by the International Astronomical Union in 2006 rather disturbing. But CGP Grey has a way of making me believe that everything might just be okay after all (until the New Horizons probe going by and taking high resolution images later this year means we reclassify everything all over again).
Thank you for reading. We’re on your side.
- The Warren & The World Vol 13, Issue 4 - February 1, 2025
- The Warren & The World Vol 13, Issue 3 - January 25, 2025
- The Warren & The World Vol 13, Issue 2 - January 18, 2025
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