The Real Deal with Wilkes

 If you have ever met me or spent any amount of time with me, you've heard me say that I am not a 'kid person'.  I do best with middle school and high school aged kids and to be perfectly honest, I don't really do all that great with adults either.  I grew up an only child and was always more comfortable around older kids and adults and as I got older it just stopped with older kids and I became the adult.  I love MY kids and I do pretty well with my close friends' children. But do I ever want to do puppet shows and read at storytime? No. Do I want to do crafts with groups of kids? No. Do I want to teach roomfuls of kids with their weird questions and interjections? No.   So imagine my surprise a few weeks ago when during my prayer time, God told me to help with Vacation Bible School. I was sitting at my kitchen table, reading my Bible and praying, and I heard God as clear as day telling me to call up the children's minister at our church and volunteer. So,...

This past week in my community, two middle school age girls were laid to rest after moving on from this life to the next due to a car accident.  They, along with their grandfather, left a family and a lot of friends completely devastated and mourning.  The young girls were the same age as my son.  When I look at him and I think about it all, I get extremely emotional. What good is to come from death at a young age? Why does this kind of thing happen at all to innocent young people and just anyone? And then I was reminded.  Back in 1997 (don't even start...I'm old), I remember waking up to my Mom sitting on the end of my bed.  She had just hung up the phone and it was the early hours of the morning.  She told me that my friend had died in a car accident.  There was an age gap between us but we were very close. She was in high school, her senior year, and just a few days short of graduating. She was killed along with three other high school seniors and o...

 It's summer time!  Vacations to the beach, family trips, lots of sun, unbearable heat, and ice cream and fireworks and all the things come to mind.  For me growing up, summer was usually a mix of shelling peas and watching The Price is Right with the OG Bob Barker (remember to spay and neuter your pets) with my grandparents.  Because home internet wasn't a thing, there wasn't a way for me to compare my summers with my friends except when we got back to school.  Things were so chill back then.  We had our problems but comparison and coveting wasn't really a big deal. Flash forward to today and it's nothing but Instagram pics of everyone getting together at someone's house, going out to eat with tons of people and pictures of their food, and enough pics of toes in the sand where we want to scream, "WE GET IT!  YOU ARE AT THE BEACH!!!!"   But I think that with those postings comes a lot of other stuff too that we don't want to admit we are also...

  I've been reading through the book of Proverbs lately.   SIDENOTE HISTORY LESSON: Proverbs was written more than likely by Solomon, who was the wisest king in the Bible.  Solomon was the son of David and Bathsheba and you probably remember their relationship because of the whole bathtub thing.  David saw her in the bathtub on the roof of her home (because that's what they did back then? I think that's weird but whatever) and he started a no-no affair with her, had her husband killed in battle, then she got pregnant and God took their first born son as a punishment to David for not listening. So, after all that sadness and redemption, they got together and had Solomon who would become super smart king and write a lot of wisdom.  Which was a long history lesson to get to the point but.... Proverbs has so much wisdom and so many quotes that I love.  It's truly a guide for how to live a righteous life and how to avoid a ton of drama.  Bascially keep...

 For years now, I have always felt as if God was pushing me in the direction of using my skills at writing to glorify Him.  I have dillied and I have dallied but after a good build up of time, I usually watch my ethusiasm turn into something else and I move on, never fulfilling whatever purpose I was called to take on.   Flash forward to this summer and I have all this free time, I am encouraged and I look up to several of my friends from church doing this same thing: writing to help others come closer to the Lord.  They write for CRNA Moms (that's a fancy medical term for anesthisiolgist I think), everyday women, and adults in general.  But my expertise has always been talking to teenagers.   I love middle school and high school students and their zest for life. Where they run ethusiastically into life and I remember my run and it was more like a dead sprint into some of the worst habits and terrible evils that I could line myself up with.  ...