January 2020 – by heart and hand

January 25, 2020January 25, 2020

The first month isn’t January

If you are doing the “Our Daily Bread” Bible reading plan, you will see in today’s reading the words “this day is to be for you the first day of your year”. That day is not today and it isn’t January at all. The Hebrew calendar hinges completely from this verse and the hundreds of times scripture names a day of an event, also swings on this very verse. We mostly pay zero attention to these dates but if every word in there is ‘useful for teaching, rebuking, encouraging’ then the dates it pains to include are a part of that.

January 25, 2020January 25, 2020

Evidence

The blood on the doorposts marked the houses as those who believed and obeyed in order that they would be free from slavery.

January 21, 2020January 18, 2020

But clay

Not everything that we don’t get right is about sin or pride.

Sometimes it’s just that we’re not God. Sometimes it’s that ‘we are but clay’.

January 21, 2020January 26, 2020

After 25 years I finally asked…

I honestly feel as though I need to write to every single person I’ve ever had a conversation with on the topic of parenting and ask them to please please grapple with the question it took me 25 years (+) to ask, and to watch the 26 minute message that opened up the answer which is linked at the end of this post.

So this letter is my start point for that 🙂

January 20, 2020January 18, 2020

Discover my pages

Hey friends

Just a note to let you know there’s a new page called Mini Meditations, just added today over here. I know this is mostly followed as a blog but there is also a great deal more within the pages of BY HEART AND HAND . NET so I do hope you’ll spend some time looking around – and please let me know if there’s something you’d like me to include or write about.

Happy new year… I know I know – that’s so last week. 🙂

Bless ya!

Heather

January 19, 2020January 19, 2020

Boundaries!

I could honestly write my own book on Boundaries – but I’d be in trouble for plagiarism since most of it would come from these sources. So I guess won’t be writing that book. 🙂

I will however post some names and links of the authors/speakers I’ve gone to to learn. Basically if you go to Youtube and pop in any of the following names you will find material I consider to be reliable, Biblical and very very helpful.

January 18, 2020July 15, 2023

Let the fig leaves fall

A few days ago I began thinking on the imagery of the thought that we hold onto our wounds like a cloak or a safety blanket – there’s a kind of comfort in holding them close and nestling into their remembrance. We resist laying them down as though doing so exposes us to further pain. No one likes to feel naked except by choice and in utter.. complete… safety – just look at the universality of the dreams in which people wake in a cold sweat having seen themselves suddenly naked in public. Exposed, naked, vulnerable are all pretty synonymous.

January 12, 2020January 13, 2020

System: not solo

I’ve heard many a message on the words “train up a child in the way he should go” and “teach these words of mine to your children“, and Commandment number 5 which is: “honour your father and mother“. There has been much pontificating on the presumed promises and even on how adults are to honour their parents so that things will go well for them…for us… and I suspect in generations gone by, Commandment number 5 was fairly drilled into children… dare I recal – pretty sure I did a bit of that too.

:'(

But.

January 10, 2020January 10, 2020

Teens & Transitions #2

This is a bit of a cheats post I suppose. Instead of stories, examples or home-grown parables I’m just posting a list of questions and a couple of Scriptures to help parents of teens/young adults discern when to speak and when to keep silent in their young people’s lives.

Obviously there’s a great deal of difference between situations – and not all these questions are applicable to all scenarios, but maybe something will click and be of help…. a 12 year old, or a 22 year old living in the parents’ home, a 22 year old whose behaviour/choices are affecting younger siblings, a 22 year old living away from home or a 22 year old that is married.

January 7, 2020January 7, 2020

The curious relationship between being pickled and baptised

I was 23, married and waiting for babies to start arriving when I got serious with God and soon after, baptised. I was dunked in a line-up by a Pentecostal pastor in a hired main-line church in the city, on a hot airconditionless afternoon since the warehouse style Pentecostal building had no baptistry.

Family and friends of the 28 dunkees came along to watch. Some with joy, some with curiosity, some with bamboozlement and some with clouds of annoyance/compulsion/duty to said loved ones simmering over their heads.