A series looking at taming our tongues

I saw the look in his eyes and it cut me to the heart.

LB, my 3 year old I often affectionately call my “wild thing,” was being… a three year old boy. Such a three year old boy, in fact, that I was teetering on the edge of sanity, clinging to the end of a rapidly fraying rope.

I yelled in exasperation. I saw my reaction mirrored in his precious face and it made me want to weep – what he saw in his mother was not love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, self-control… what he saw and heard in me was irritation, anger, pride (because wasn’t what I was doing more important than tending to his three-year-old-ness at that moment?), impatience, harshness. The reflection wasn’t pretty.

For the rest of today’s post, join me over at the MOB Society (Mothers of Boys – but if you’re not a boy-mom come anyway!). All this week we’ll be looking at our words in parenting – it stings already!

“A blessed thing it is for any man or woman to have a friend; one human soul whom we can trust utterly; who knows the best and the worst of us, and who loves us in spite of all our faults; who will speak the honest truth to us, while the world flatters us to our face, and laughs at us behind our back.” – Charles Kingsley

I have an irreplaceable friend named Rachel.

We have been friends since sometime in junior high, and now we have hit our 30’s and are both wives and moms of young children. We roomed together during college. We have seen each other do some really stupid things – she has seen me at my worst, she has seen me at my best. We have prayed together about needs both big and small. We have wept together at times when it felt like our hearts would just shatter in grief. We have laughed until we thought our sides would literally split open. We live thousands of miles apart now, and she is the only far-away friend that I keep up with on the phone. Rachel knows things about me that no one else seems to understand.

The funny thing is, we really are nothing alike.

Come read more about her and how God has used her in my life over at Stephanie Shott’s blog!

Modesty. The word, for me, typically conjures up mental images of women wearing turtlenecks, floor length skirts (with no slit, of course), and knee length socks.

I’m kidding. Sort of.

While we might all differ slightly on our interpretation of what, exactly, modest dressing is, we all understand that there are certain things that are appropriate and inappropriate in various situations. I might not be wearing a floor length skirt with coordinating turtleneck to church, but I also am not going to wear my swimming suit.

I dress modestly because it is a protection for me, shows respect for the unique relationship I have with my husband, honors the God who made my body, and guards against inappropriate thoughts and behavior with others.

Lately I have been pondering an interesting phenomenon I see everywhere in the online world – facebook status updates, tweets, and blog posts are brimming with something I call “emotional immodesty.” These online venues have given us an uncensored outlet, a place to share things that often should not be said, with a veneer of privacy as we sit alone with our laptop or iphone and share our every thought with thousands of strangers. To make this even trickier, we often do it and call it “being real,” as though it was a virtue.

Click over to Gather inSpirit to read the rest of this post…

Today I’m guest posting over at a new blog for Christian bloggers called Gather in Spirit!  Sharing a post that was very convicting for me to write, as well -

When Blogging Becomes Your First Love.

It flows right out of our Revelation series with applications particularly meant for bloggers.