As a board member of The Sierra Schools Foundation, I recently helped coordinate efforts to bring social-emotional training to our small school district’s teachers. One term struck me: compassion fatigue. As teachers have doubled up duties to teach both in an in-person setting and in a distance learning model, they have also encountered countless cases of students and parents and peers who are in emotional distress, while these same teachers also try to manage their own famil

How can we figure out God’s calling on our lives? Earlier this week I wrote about the three times God laid a call on my life. Quickly they were these: 1. Writing (1986) 2. Teaching (1989) 3. Prayerwalking (1998) I experienced something different for each of those calls: – Actual words I understood inaudibly as I had taken time to quiet my thoughts and to listen for God’s direction to me. – A dramatic dream (nightmare, really) – A scene that played out in front of me while I w

The last two days I have shared two of the three callings I know that God has laid on me, as well as how they have played out in my life. The first was in 1986 when God called me to a ministry of writing. The second was in 1989 when God called me to the profession of teaching. The third occurred in the fall of 1998. We had just sent our first and second children off to college that September. It felt like a season of new beginnings, except that my health was failing–at my own

Yesterday I shared the first of three calls I know God put on my life. The first was this: “I want you to write for me” in 1986. Three years later God gave me a second calling . . . through the odd circumstance of a dream . . . or rather, a nightmare. Lest you think I’m weird, I just want to throw out there that Jesus’s earthly father, Joseph, was also directed to make dramatic changes in his and Mary’s lives because of dreams . . . THREE times, if I remember correctly. The f

What could a calling look like in your life? I know God has opened a calling for me at least three times. The first was to writing. The spring of 1986 I was attending a women’s retreat at Sierra Pines camp south of Lake Tahoe when the speaker said, “This afternoon I want you to go find a rock, sit on it, and wait until God speaks to you.” While I found that a bit weird and almost presumptuous to put that much pressure on God . . . or ME . . . I did go find a rock and sit on i

he greatest torture I could inflict on our gregarious daughter was to banish her to her room. She thrived on the company of others, so making her withdraw from others was the hardest discipline we could inflict when she disobeyed. The Lord God had to allow Israel to be taken captive into a foreign land. The people were going through motions with God. They would ask for God’s counsel, but then disregard any word they found objectionable. Just as a good parent will discipline t

Warnings. Words of advice. Gut feelings. Cautionary tales. Do we pay attention? Do I listen to others’ counsel and pay attention to their experiences? As an English teacher I heard students’ arguments against reading fiction: “But it’s not real, Mrs. McHenry. Why should I have to read it?” Here’s my thought: we can either read about others’ experiences and learn from them or we can experience them ourselves. Frankly, I’d rather do the reading. We can learn from Jeremiah’s sto