Terribly Interesting

 Hey y'all, I've been stripping paint for about 5 or 6 hours a day. I am about halfway through the back of the house. It's quite a challenge. It's a huge mess. It's a huge mess! I'm hoping to finish scraping by the end of next week so that we can open the pool. We need to change out the liner after a beloved guest accidentally ripped it. How are y'all doing at social isolating? I read a post by Makoto Fujimura about how artists are inherently self-distancing and it is easier for us to cope right now. He is amazing. Watch this. Nihonga Slow Art from Windrider Productions on Vimeo . The part of this that is breaking my heart is seeing all of the people losing jobs, the sickness, the homeless going without food, The beauty is seeing people be kind and intentional. People are finding each other again. I am praying that the hurt, the pain, the loss, and the beauty lead people safely to the arms of Jesus.  I am working on a personalized, guided prayer ...

This may be my favorite of Marie Kondo's books. It may be because it met me right where I am at or the fact that it goes far beyond the act of tidying. Marie quietly leads us to not only honor ourselves and our spaces, but also how to honor others. Instead of going into work with cluttered hearts and minds, we can bring clear thoughts, and even, you guessed it, joy. I appreciate Marie. Her words have helped me release a lot of clutter and get to know what I actually love. It seems that our external clutter is often tied to things we need to release internally. She tackles, desks, offices, work hours, and meetings. Our responsibility in these things greatly needs to be addressed. Her co-writer also helps us tidy our digital life. This has been a huge challenge to me to learn how to tackle things daily and store things properly. Marie shared how she was afraid of going into television because people can be so cruel. Someone told her that she should do what she felt led to do ...

View this post on Instagram Painter’s Quarantine: Day 2 This place is big! I am scraping and painting. I ordered a new tool to help strip the paint safely ($500!). It will be here Monday. I have no idea how I’m going to get up high, but I’m going to try. There’s a third floor up there as well that can’t be seen in the photo. Send painting prayers. #remodel #fixxerupper #quarantine #socialdistancing #missionhouse A post shared by Steph Cherry (@heystephcherry) on Mar 18, 2020 at 8:16am PDT View this post on Instagram If you’re bored and want to social distance together, I’m painting our 105-year-old 3 story mission house. We can wear these cool masks and stand 6 feet apart. Only ten at a time, so don’t you all rush over at once. A post shared by Steph Cherry (@heystephcherry) on Mar 17, 2020 at 8:23am PDT Hey y'all,  we are using this quarantin...

I feel like I walked this journey right along with Jennie. The enemy loves to pound the inside of my head until I can’t think straight anymore. I wasn’t sure that this was going to be a book I could enjoy. I wonder every time I pick up a Christian book if it is going to be full of nice Christian words or if it is going to tell me how to trust Jesus to fight back hell for me. I much prefer to be trained for warfare.  This book did not disappoint. I don’t want to cause any spoilers, but Jennie was up to her eyeballs in demonic oppression and could not see it. Her rescue came in the form of community and the book of Philippians. Read it. This is a book for all of us who hear those negative voices in our heads. There is a plan in place for our deliverance and redemption.  She quotes one of my top ten favorite books quite a bit. Humility by Andrew Murray. I fell in love with it about 14 years ago. I can still tell you where I was when I read the forward. It was deeply convic...

Isaiah's Legacy by Mesu Andrews My rating: 4 of 5 stars The story of Manasseh has always gotten to me. How could a man raised in Hezekiah's household and tutored by the prophet Isaiah turn so far into evil? Reading this made think of the ways the enemy has turned my own head as well as the heads of those I loved. We live in a day of sacrificing babies, a culture bent of worshipping sexuality and self. It seems shocking to read it in the context of the Old Testament kings, but we are also living it. I really enjoyed this book as a whole. I had a hard time getting into it because of what seemed like an overuse of cutesy nicknames to me. It made the gravity of the telling seem less. About halfway through I was able to begin ignoring it and get into the story. There are gaps filled in and historical narrative that fills in blanks for you. Some, of course, is made up for the sake of story. It gives you a whole picture of the events that unfolded and led to Manasseh turning awa...

We must teach others empathy for all humanity. View this post on Instagram I read The Diary of a Young Girl and the Hiding Place in eighth grade. I can vividly recall the shock I felt sitting in my desk as our class read the books aloud. I had seen much of the underbelly of humanity at that age, but it was still so shocking. In fact, I am still processing it nearly thirty years later. Over a decade ago, I received a box of my great grandmother’s books. In it was a copy of Corrie ten Boom’s book entitled In My Father’s House. It was my favorite of her works. Do you know that she wrote nearly 50 books as she traveled the world and shared the gospel? One year, I read as many as I could find still in print. I’m still finding them. 20 or so that I’ve read. Her books on her life before the Holocaust are so rich. She talks about how her Papa ten Boom instilled a deep love of Jewish people. She learned how to simply teach the gospel by ...

I've Seen the End of You: A Neurosurgeon's Look at Faith, Doubt, and the Things We Think We Know by W. Lee Warren My rating: 5 of 5 stars I thought this book was going to be more about diseases of the brain. I thought it could help me to understand things going on within the minds of my family members. What I found was something I could barely put down. This is a book about a neurosurgeon who struggled with faith and prayer as he performed surgery on tumors that were almost always fatal. His honesty is compelling. Let me be honest. If you like nerdy scientific information about the brain and your heart being ripped out by story, this is the book for you. This is about a man who started writing as a way to deal with the horrors of war that he saw as a surgeon of war in Iraq. He then kept writing as a way to deal with his feelings on faith as he operated on Glioblastoma, treated trauma victims, tried to save brains ravaged by suicide. Then he used it as a way to sheph...