The time has changed and the darkness closes in early during this season. Check out our links from around the web as we look for hope in darker days.

Around the Web

When We All Need A Song of Hope

Christa Wells reminds us that we all need hope some days.

I’d been paying attention for years. I’d paid attention when my friend, Vaneetha, who had survived the loss of her baby boy, told me what she’d seen of God in the blackness of loss. How joy did return…eventually.
I’d listened as Patty talked about her John, whose brief battle with cancer left her alone in a lake of grief with their three young daughters.
All around me were people who’d had more than their share of trouble, and I had absorbed their stories and written a few songs that attempted to frame their experience of grief and God and hope and healing.
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Hope for the Worries of Tomorrow

Heather Molendyk points to the truth about the antidote for worry.

My third-grade daughter brought home a joke from school.
“Imagine you are in a boat,” she began. “You fall out of the boat and into the ocean. You’re surrounded by sharks swimming in the water. What do you do?”
Digging into my memory for facts about nature, I speculated what one might do if swimming with toothy sharks. The far less exciting truth is I would probably squeal like a squirrel, promptly pass out from fear, and sink to the depths of the sea while the man-eating beasts swim off refusing to hunt such wimpy prey.
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4 Meaningful Picture Books About Friendships

Melissa Taylor has a booklist for us, centered around friendships.

I can’t wait to tell you about these picture books! They’ll spark important conversations — and I hope be helpful in teaching about communication, prejudice, and self-worth.
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How do I help my kids start social media—without losing my mind?

The folks at the Fuller Youth blog have a series right now about navigating technology with your families. This post helps navigate the world of social media with your kids.

When is the right time to let my kids join social media platforms?
What does too much—or too little—monitoring look like? What’s the line between being in the dark and being creepy or controlling?
How can we help our kids become social media users without losing our minds?
Because I parent a 13-year-old every day (plus her older and younger siblings), I think about questions like this pretty regularly.
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Around the Warren

Finding the Eyry

Tyler Leland writes about the importance of having a place.

In Howard Pyle’s coming of age book about a young squire named Myles Falworth, Pyle gives us a small glimpse into the power of a place. On a summer afternoon, Myles and his best friend, Gascoyne, find a hiding place of their very own. They call it their Eyry (a roosting-place of young hawks) and return to the tower frequently to retreat from the busyness of the world around them.
What’s interesting to me is that Howard Pyle wrote Men of Iron in 1891… over 120 years ago.
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Seven Steps To a Better Bedtime Story

Zach Franzen gives bedtime story advice.

There is a calico cat that treads about our backyard like a fancy hobo. He’s scrawny and haughty both. I did this picture after a conversation my wife and I had about him.
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