These past weeks have shown us – if we didn’t realize – what happens when fire comes sweeping through a community. For some, this is the first up-close and personal look of the power…and the cost…of fire. Fire is a big deal to me, ever since I watched our RV burn years ago, just after we scrambled out of it to the side of the freeway. It’s not just that fire and smoke destroyed it – and many things in it – it’s more what happened inside me as I responded to it. The pain and trauma of that moment has long gone, but during it I felt a sense of danger, harm and fear. Trauma can occur when we face a perceived threat or dangerous situation. It is an unconscious reaction to bad things that are happening or have happened. Depending on our different personal experiences, history, and personality, the same event can provoke different reactions within each of us. It could be loss, grief, numbness, fear, confusion, disorientation…or some combination of these things. And the intensity of these re...

The mouth speaks what the heart is full of. Anonymous When I was a kid, this little ditty – “Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt me” – was bandied around. It was just a sing-song rhyme that children repeated. However, years later I realized that this was incorrect. In fact, words sometimes can hurt us much more deeply than physical pain.  We use lots of words every day (20,000 for the average woman; 7,000 for the average man), so using words in harmful ways – or even committing sin through our speech – is virtually unavoidable. God, in his great wisdom, knows this about us, so He provides many Scriptures to highlight the battle we face in choosing to use our words wisely and well. More than 100 verses describe the verbal power we have to curse or to bless; to tear down or to build up.  Using our words properly does not always come easy. We don’t always instinctively make the right choice about what to say, when to say it, and ho...