A CAREER IS LAUNCHED!

Back in 2005, my daughter invited her friend, Justin, to join her at youth group.  Surprisingly, he looked her square in the face and said, “How do you even know He’s real?” She had no idea how to respond to that question, and to be honest, neither did I. It haunted me. That is the universal question isn’t it?  How do we know Christ is real? To many people, Jesus is just a legend, a wise and kind man, a prophet. I wondered, what would convince people like Justin that following Jesus is worth a try? I embarked on a journey to prove that Christ is real. In a moment […]

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THE WONDERS OF WATER

  I sold yellow pages advertising for twelve years, eleven of those years as an outside sales consultant dealing with major accounts. While it was a great way to make a living, it was definitely NOT glamorous. Most of my clients weren’t in luxurious offices with mahogany furniture; they were plumbers, remodelers, and roofers working out of a van. As long as I live, I’ll never forget meeting with a mechanic at his auto repair shop in a suburb of St. Paul. I pulled up to the dilapidated shop in my yuppie sedan and clicked up to the front door wearing three-inch heals and a designer suit. I swallowed hard when I […]

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MY LIFE AS A WRITER

Many of you are aware that I am a writer, but you have no idea what kind of work I do. Well, it is time to remedy that. Writing is not a hobby for me, it is my profession. After spending more than twenty years in corporate sales and marketing, I made a huge career U-turn and wrote a book. It was an insane idea; I had never had a word published. In fact, If you would have told me back in 2005 that I would be wearing pajama pants to work instead of suits and pantyhose, I would have recommended a good therapist. Yet here I am interviewing the […]

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WACKY WORDS OF THE DAY RECAP – Week of January 6

If you are a friend or fan of mine on a social networking site, you already know about my WACKY WORD OF THE DAY posts. In a tongue-in-cheek attempt to improve our vocabularies, I post a fun word every day (well, I do miss a few) along with its definition and pronunciation if it’s a toughie. If you don’t get a chance to see them on Facebook, Twitter, or Linkedin during the week, you can check out the recaps here each Saturday. Now, this is more than just a fun linguistic exercise; you can actually win something! Every time you leave a comment using the word in a sentence (either […]

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A Slippery Slope

Last night I enjoyed an abbreviated game of Bunco with a group of friends. Unfortunately the aura of an impending migraine came on and I had to pop an Imitrex and leave early. I felt pretty sorry for myself; I had been looking forward to getting together with the ladies for a long time. It was a dismal night of freezing drizzle in rural Minnesota. As I headed out to my car, head pounding and stomach lurching, I steadied myself against the vehicles lining the driveway to prevent myself from taking a flop on the ice. The drive home wasn’t too precarious until I reached our township where the roads are poorly […]

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To Everything There is a Season

“Every blade in the field – Every leaf in the forest – lays down its life in its season as beautifully as it was taken up.“ ~ Henry David Thoreau Autumn is my favorite season. The cool, crisp air of September is a welcome respite from the sweltering dog days of summer. The woods surrounding our lakeside home pop in stunning crimson, gold, and bronze and I stand in awe of God’s masterpiece. How did He conceive something so majestic? He must have been very cheerful that day. This is a photo of my favorite tree on our property. Although we live amid a canopy of magnificent sugar maples, it’s […]

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The Wonder of God’s Creation

In 2005, I wrote and released two books in my “How Do You Know He’s Real” series. They both feature incredible testimonies by celebrities from the worlds of sports and entertainment. Of course, personal experience is the best way to recognize God’s hand, but we also see His divinity in nature. For a moment, picture yourself walking in a forest of pine trees in the north woods. Do you see the cardinals and the blue jays, the eagles and the hawks? Do you see the little chipmunks, rabbits, and squirrels scampering around on the ground? How about the majestic blue sky filled with billowy clouds and rays of sunshine. Then […]

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The Beauty of Brownies

There is no doubt in my mind that God was having a pretty good day when He invented chocolate. Technically speaking, human beings can live on manna, but in His infinite wisdom, the Creator must have mused, “Man (and woman) cannot live by bread alone, so how about a little chocolate to mix things up?” Okay, perhaps those weren’t His exact words, but I’m sure that was the basic idea. It’s hard to conceive that something as delectable as chocolate could originate from the bitter cacao seed. It’s even more difficult to comprehend that one day somebody looked at that seed and thought it would be a good idea to […]

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Comedienne Susan Isaacs on GOD UNPLUGGED

Susan E. Isaacs is a writer and performer with credits in TV, film, stage, and radio. She has appeared in films such as Planes, Trains, and Automobiles and Scrooged and on TV shows such as Seinfeld, The Drew Carey Show, My Name is Earl, and many others. Despite all those accomplishments, Susan managed to screw up every lucky break she ever had, and by age forty was jobless, loveless and living over a garage. Her rocky relationship with God needed professional help, so she took Him to couples counseling.  She chronicles her “middle class white girl’s dark night of the soul” in Angry Conversations with God:  A Snarky but Authentic […]

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unChristian-How Christians are Failing the Church

A generation of young Americans is rejecting a Christianity they perceive to be antihomosexual, too political, and hypocritical, according to a new study from the Barna Group. The findings, presented in a new book, reveal what Christianity looks like to people ages 16-29 outside the church. unChristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks about Christianity…and Why It Matters is a portrait of a faith and its followers perceived to be anything but Christlike. A huge chunk of a new generation has concluded they want nothing to do with Christianity. The title of the book, unChristian, reflects their most common reaction to the faith: they think Christians are no longer what […]

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