Inhoudsopgave van April 2016 - Guideposts

All in the Family National Siblings Day is April 10. Find out about famous siblings, from the slapstick (the Marx brothers) to the athletic (the Williams sisters, above), at guideposts.org/siblings. Brighten Your Day! If spring hasn’t sprung yet in your area, get in the seasonal spirit with our collection of photos. The beautiful blossoms will brighten up your day. guideposts.org/flowers Take a Hike Cory O’Neill, his wife, Julie, and their kids started hiking the rugged John Muir Trail in 2012 (page 26). Julie shares tips on how to get your family outside and tells why it’s good for you and your faith. guideposts.org/greatoutdoors Positive Thinking How did author Debbie Macomber (page 16) cope with rejection early in her career? Discover her secret to success at guideposts.org/macombernvp.…

The cupboards were empty. So were my parents’ bookshelves, their closets, their dressers. The garage was crammed with musty boxes of books and dusty CDs, racks of clothes and stacks of dishes. Everything was ready for tomorrow’s tag sale. The accumulation of a lifetime. My parents’ house would stay in the family—my brotherin-law had bought it—but it wouldn’t be the same without them there. I couldn’t help feeling sad. There’d be no more big-band music playing on the stereo and no more Chex mix baking in the oven. Chex mix. The one and only recipe Dad knew. I had nearly broken down the last time I was here, not long after his funeral, when I pulled a stale box of cereal from the cabinet to throw away. My dad was…

If you’re a family caregiver, chances are you will face difficult behavior and other challenges with your loved one, just as Carla Larson did with her client. Professional caregivers from Home Instead Senior Care shared their best advice for handling such challenges. Here are their tips: Don’t make your loved one feel incapable. “Be considerate about things that may be embarrassing to them, like helping them in and out of a wheelchair.” —Jeannie Be creative about engaging the mind and spirit as the body declines. “One woman I take care of likes crossword puzzles. I introduced her to Scrabble and play it with her. Each week, I ask her to solve a riddle and give clues for a couple of days. These brainteasers keep her involved and thinking, and they…

EIGHT HUNDRED MILES SEPArate Mt. Juliet, Tennessee, from Eastampton, New Jersey. But last year, the two towns came together in a surprising way. Thad Livingston, a New Jersey resident and retired Air Force colonel, had just wrapped up a day with his grandson when an e-mail popped up on his phone. “Welcome to the new school year!” the message said. “Our open house is this Friday. Hope you all can make it. Here’s to a wonderful year! Emily Lupton, Mt. Juliet Elementary, fifth grade teacher.” Thad didn’t know an Emily Lupton, and when he Googled Mt. Juliet Elementary, he discovered that it was in Tennessee. The e-mail had been sent to him by mistake. His wife, Kathy, is a teacher, so he knew how important it was to get the…

Hanna City, Illinois WHO ART IN HEAVEN Once a week I volunteered at a nursing home in Peoria. I was a Eucharistic minister, so I prayed with patients and gave them Communion. When I arrived one day I was met by Margaret, another volunteer. “Nancy, there’s a patient who’s near death,” she said. “She’s all alone. Would you pray with her?” “Of course.” Death was no stranger here, but I never got used to it. I was glad I didn’t have to go to this patient on my own. Once a month a priest visited the home with me to say Mass. As luck would have it, this was one of those weeks. He could pray with her too and give her Last Rites. It was good to know that…

Are you a fan of our new magazine Mysterious Ways? I know someone who is. Her name is Grace. And she devours every issue, as evidenced by the picture at left. Full disclosure: Grace is my 10-month-old golden retriever, also known as Gracie or Googoo, and she devours pretty much everything. But I believe she is particularly fond of Mysterious Ways. I don’t blame her. Mysterious Ways is quickly taking its place alongside Guideposts and Angels on Earth as one of our most popular publications. People can’t seem to get enough of these powerful true stories of God’s hidden hand at work in our lives, stories that nourish our sense of the divine and leave us breathless with wonder. Folks always ask where we find the great stories in our…

‘‘I’ve never determined my value based on my looks or anything physical. I’ve been through a lot in life, and what has gotten me through is strength of character and faith.” award-winning actress VIOLA DAVIS “Never doubt in the darkness what God has given us in the light.” FRANCINE RIVERS, from her novel A Voice in the Wind “Do not say no before you ask, ‘How can this be done?’” submitted by Guideposts reader JEANETTE GRONDA, of Grosse Ile, Michigan “The flower doesn’t dream of the bee. It blossoms and the bee comes.” poet and philosopher MARK NEPO “Age is inevitable, but growing old is optional.” submitted by Guideposts reader JAMES BARBER, of Montgomery, Alabama “Trust is built in very small moments.” BRENÉ BROWN, author SEND AN UPLIFTING QUOTE from…

THERE’S STILL TIME TO PULL out, I thought desperately, stepping onto the sidewalk next to my father. I couldn’t even imagine how I looked to the people going by. I mean, it isn’t every day you see someone shuffling down the street in a furry white costume with floppy ears and a puffy cotton tail. Yet here I was, a woman in her early twenties, dressed in a giant Easter Bunny suit on a gray April day. “I can’t see very well in here,” I said to Dad, who helped guide me to the entrance of the library where I was about to greet two dozen children. What Dad couldn’t see was that I was trembling inside the costume. Kids had that effect on me. It wasn’t that I didn’t…

MY SUPERVISOR SMILED. I could tell she was trying to look encouraging. “This could be a difficult assignment,” she said. “Roger has had several caregivers, but they’ve all quit. He needs a lot of help with organization and cleaning. I think you’ll be a good fit.” I nodded. This was just my third week as a part-time caregiver for a senior-care organization. I appreciated her confidence in me. “Wear clothes you don’t mind getting dirty,” she told me. She reached into a drawer and pulled out a dust mask. “Make sure you take this.” I wasn’t worried. In my day job I worked full-time as a paralegal. I was a natural at organizing, and nothing made me feel better than a clean house. Roger would thank me. It was a…

THEY SAY EVERYTHING IS BIGGER IN Texas—including the people. We may not be the most overweight state in the nation, but in our town, Marshall, tucked near the Louisiana border, population 25,000, folks love their plates of fried chicken and buttery grits, washed down with tall glasses of sweet tea and topped off with a slab of pecan pie. Then there are all those doughnuts for breakfast. And Texas is cattle country. Steak is almost a birthright. Don’t get me wrong. I love good food as much as the next guy, but after several terms as mayor of this town, I became concerned when I heard our swath of the South referred to as “the stroke belt.” Hypertension and heart disease were uncommonly common, to say nothing of diabetes and…

THE THOUGHT HIT ME LIKE A blast of cold wind. I can’t go through with this! No way! What on earth had gotten me to agree to enter a beauty pageant? I was short, gray-haired and middle-aged. I preferred blue jeans to sequins. I was more comfortable in our Shenandoah Valley dairy-farm pastures with my husband, Jared, and our teenage sons than I ever could be parading in a spotlight before a panel of judges. But here I was fighting back tears while stylists worked on my hair and makeup. For years, my best friend, Marcella, and my sister-in-law, Patty, tried to persuade me to participate in the Pink Queens for Life—a cancer-research fund-raiser put on by Yolonda Weatherspoon, a breast-cancer survivor and mother of a pageant queen. Marcella and…

EVEN THOUGH I’M JEWISH, I didn’t grow up having the traditional Passover Seder—a combination holiday service and ceremonial dinner—at home. I’m the daughter of a Romanian mother and an Iraqi father who were both raised in Israel. They met in the Israeli Army and emigrated to the United States—to Los Angeles, where I was born and raised—for college and graduate school. We were thousands of miles from extended family, so there weren’t visits to Grandma’s house for Passover. And since my mother didn’t know how to cook when she got married and then was a busy student, we didn’t hold Seders at home. Mom taught herself to cook a lot of her family favorites based on her taste memories. On Tuesday and Thursday evenings, she had classes, so she left…

Cory O’Neill (The Wilderness Solution, page 26) met his wife, Julie, when they were in college. “I grew up in Chicago, so the mountains were all new to me until I met Cory,” Julie says. She now loves to spend summers outdoors. The couple always had music in common, though. In the early days of their relationship, they led worship together at church, Cory on the guitar and Julie on piano. Both give music lessons. They’ve also passed their talents on to their kids. “Our son, Cade, made his worship debut on the guitar in January,” Julie says. Their love of the outdoors gives Julie and Cory opportunities for personal pursuits. Julie wrote Living Without Walls, available as an e-book from Amazon. Cory’s landscape photography has been on the cover…

SIGNS OF CHRISTMAS A special thanks for the Christmas cheer in the December 2015 Guideposts. My husband, a pastor, and I both loved Dave Beckwith’s Who Stole My Joy? so much that we shared it with the hostess of our church’s Christmas party. She ended the night with a dramatic reading of the story. Though people were still talking when she started, it wasn’t long before they were hanging on every word as Dave, also a pastor, wonders who stole the Joy sign from his yard right before Christmas and a reluctant congregant offers to make him another one. At the moment the carpenter realizes that true joy only comes through the peace and love of God, there was spontaneous applause. What a great message to hear while celebrating the…