Author: Michelle Van Loon
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Review: Eat With Joy
My mom was a diet afficionado. It seemed that she tried on for size every fad diet that came during my childhood. The Cottage Cheese Diet. The Grapefruit Diet. A few rounds of Weight Watchers. A leaning tower of Lean Cuisines stashed in the freezer. An always-uneasy relationship with “starch”, or as we like to…
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Hung over after Holy Week, Church Leader?
Dear Church Leader, Are you hung over today? No matter what your church tradition, you’re coming off the most intense worship schedule of your Church calendar. [read more]
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Pilgrim’s Road Trip #11: Moses, Not To Be Confused With Charlton Heston
Talk about an identity crisis. The three-month old baby fished out of the reeds by one of Pharaoh’s daughter’s could never be mistaken for just another child member of the ruler’s household. His circumcision, prescribed by God as a permanent reminder to children of Abraham that they were not like all the other nation-kids in the…
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Review: The Hardest Thing To Do
If anyone but my friend Carole had handed me a book series like Penelope Wilcock’sThe Hawk and The Dove, I would have found a way to smile politely, tumble together a sloppy “thanks but no thanks; too busy” and pass them back to the giver as if I were playing Hot Potato. Carole, a brilliant friend…
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A Plea: Listen To The Voice Of Grief
Last Friday, Christianity Today’s Her.meneutics blog ran my post entitled “Like Valerie Harper, We’re All Terminal“. In it, I contended that we in the Church talk a lot about eternal life, but we stink at helping each other deal with death. After I wrote the Valerie Harper post, but prior to it being published, I received a series…
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Out To The Margins: Ginnie Lange
I used to go over to my friend Ginnie Lange’s home and wonder at the amount of family photos she’d grouped on many of the walls of her home or clustered in frames on shelves, a sideboard or atop the piano. There were, as I recall, a few of those happy-police-line-up-style Olan Mills/Sears-type portraits of…