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Showing posts from November, 2016

A Home Filled With Treasure

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We're moving and I have found myself grieving as I pack. This was the first home we ever bought. We've lived here for over ten years. Our oldest daughter was a toddler when we moved in and the house was so empty back then. We'd moved here from a one bedroom apartment before that, so we didn't have much.  I can remember how her footsteps echoed through the empty spaces. We've had our two other daughters since then, and so we've really built our family in this place.  And now, we certainly have a lot more stuff! I was packing up our classroom today, where I spent a lot of my time, and I was tucking all my favorite things into a box, feeling joy over each thing, and remembering how I came by them, and these verses went through my mind: By wisdom a house is built, and through understanding it is established; through knowledge its rooms are filled with rare and beautiful treasures.  -Proverbs 24:3-4  I closed my eyes and agreed with the Spirit of God

Twelve Psalms to Memorize

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I have chosen twelve specific Psalms to memorize in the next few months. I have treasured each of these Psalms for one reason or another since I was a youth, so I know portions of them already. However, my goal now is to know every one of them  so well that I won't need any prompt at all to be able to say them to myself when I am without my Bible, like when I go hiking, or so that I won't need a Bible to be able to share them with others. I feel compelled to plant the word of deeper  than ever before.    Teaching my kids classically is showing me the value and usefulness of memorizing precious information.  And it is showing me that "knowing" something and really knowing  something are two very different things. I want to really know Scripture. When I consider the more distant future, when I imagine who I want to be and what I want to be capable of when I am old , I always imagine a wrinkled, but lively old woman who can tell her grandchildren Bible

Citations Like Breadcrumbs

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Take heed. Do not neglect to read those lowly in-text citations. They often appear useless and boring, but they can and do lead from good things to greater things, from mundane things to divine encounters with the living God.    See, I was reading Millstones and Stumbling Blocks by Bradley E. Heath, a scathing critique of modern education that I do not recommend, but that I will probably end up quoting extensively in every day life. (Even I found Heath's "preaching" too hard and I am a member of his proverbial choir. If you think John Taylor Gatto is controversial and/or offensive, well, "You ain't seen nothing yet!") Anyway, in Millstones and Stumbling Blocks , Heath quoted a guy I had never heard of named James V. Schall, saying that Schall said, "Why read?  Because we are given more than we are."  If I am not mistaken, that's the only Schall quote in that entire book, but that  one quote so intrigued me and captured my imaginati

First Things

God gives all earthly things significance, But commands us to order our lives aright. First things first. So then to His Immanence, We submit our mundane purposes. As if in judgement and with pitchfork thrown, Up, up! goes this corporal husk and Much is chaff, because so much is strewn! It falls... and all is sorted as it blows. What remains is faith, marriage, family, Home, friends, church, and then, only then, to work. Doing all unto God for His glory, Delight in the gifts He has given thee. We collect what's left after threshing to find It all joy! More than enough to satisfy!  -Veronica Boulden

A Season of Change

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We are preparing to move, so I have had to quit all my current fitness jobs. The gyms where I work now will just be too far away from our new home.  I teach at a few different locations, a few different days a week, a few different types of classes, so the good-bye process took a while to complete.   In the photo above, you can see me "passing the torch" to my friend Tina who will be taking over one of my Bodypump classes.  (I made her a torch from a toilet paper roll, duct tape, and wrapping tissue.) In the photo below, Christina, one of my faithful Bodypump participants at another location, presented me with yellow roses on my last day there. And I took the photo below after my last class at the Waterbury YMCA, where I have been teaching various group fitness classes on and off for over ten years! I usually don't walk out of that place alone, but my last class happened to be an early morning one, so I was able to say a quiet, tearful prayer of thanks a