I’m so glad you’re here! My desire is to help fellow Christ followers have a closer walk with our Lord. I pray that you will find on our site encouragement for living the abundant life to which God has called us.

If you do not already have a relationship with Jesus Christ, I want you to have more information about how you can Know Jesus!  He changed my life, and I would love for you to meet the Savior who can give you a new life of peace and joy.

We’ve heard it for years. “Forty is the new thirty.” Maybe that’s true in some alternate, fanciful view of the universe, but as I sit here on the eve of the Big 4-0, I can already tell that forty is not really a new thirty. I have parts that ache that I didn’t even know existed when I turned thirty. At thirty, hair color at the salon was a fun luxury. I could be a red-head or a blonde or a brunette with interesting highlights. I could even choose to just enjoy my natural color. Enjoying my natural color at forty, however, requires regular salon visits that no longer seem like luxuries. I’ve also begun to notice that there are times when most everyone else is comfortable, and the actual thirty-year-olds may even need a sweater, but I am enjoying a personal, unscheduled visit from summer. And I’ll tell you, these private moments of heat are different from the summer heralded by the calendar. It is possible for air conditioning to alleviate some of the misery of the calendar’s summer, but the private summer is impervious to any and all climate-control tactics. In short, the new thirty is not really thirty, and in some admittedly superficial ways, this new thirty is simply not an improvement over the original.

Even on the brink of this new decade marker, though, there is good news to be found. “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!” (2 Corinthians 5:17, NIV) It is not just a revised version of the same old thing we’ve been living for the last ten years. It is a new life in which our desires are different; our motives become increasingly more reflective of God’s love and our actions less focused on ourselves. As we grow in this new life, more and more of the fruit of the spirit – love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control – will flow from our lives. (Galatians 5:22)

This does not mean we will live perfect lives. David, one of my very favorite people in all of scripture, was a very imperfect man who was also a man after God’s own heart. He was a man of successes and failures, with his most significant moral face-plant chronicled in 2 Samuel 11. This is the story of David’s adultery with Bathsheba and his murder of her husband. Though David had failed greatly, we see in 2 Samuel 12 that God loved David enough to seek him out. Our Lord God sent a prophet to draw David to a place where he could acknowledge his guilt and be forgiven.

David’s acknowledgment of his sin and cry to God are set forth beautifully in Psalm 51. The entire chapter is worth reading and praying when we are faced with the reality of our own sin and failure, but the verse I want to focus on here is verse 10. “Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit in me.” Only God can be the subject of the verb that is translated “create” in this verse. David is crying out to God to do something that only God can do. Furthermore, the Hebrew name used for God in this verse is Elohim, a reference to God as Creator. If we cry out to God as David did in Psalm 51:10, we are crying out to the Creator who was in the beginning, is now and always will be. If Elohim spoke this universe into existence and created the wonder of the human body, mind and soul, he can certainly answer the cry of his child to create a new and pure heart within us even when we have sinned.

As I am teetering on the transition from the thirties to the forties, I cannot honestly tell you that forty is the new thirty. In the physical world, forty is limited and changed by the events of the past. Gaining and losing weight with the birth of three children, for example, limits what forty looks like. In the spiritual realm, however, our Creator God is not limited by the events of our past. He used a murderer – Saul, who later became Paul – to reach so many for Christ and write much of the New Testament. He used the prostitute Rahab to deliver victory to his people in the battle at Jericho. And he has even used a sinner such as I to lead others to him and encourage fellow believers as they grow and follow our Lord. This is better than a new thirty; it is a new life and a new heart. (Visit the Know Jesus! link to learn more about beginning that new life in Christ.)

My Father God, my Creator, my Elohim, I confess my tendency to try to create and recreate myself through my own power. I let go of my vain attempts to do the thing only you can do and cry out to you to create in me a new heart, a pure heart, a heart that will beat for you throughout the ages.