Heart Hope by Olga

Six year old Molly was flipping through the pages of a photo album. She reminded me of her mother as she carefully examined each person in every picture. For me it was like walking down memory lane seeing the photos from years gone by. When she came to a picture of me when I lived in Fort Worth she exclaimed, "You don't look anything like this picture!" Now I happened to think it was a pretty good picture so I probed a bit to see why it didn't look like me. Molly stated matter of factly three reasons: First my hair was much shorter (maybe 1 inch difference). Second I don't wear earrings now.  And third I didn't have wrinkles in the picture. Have I really changed that much in 15 years? I might not like to admit it, but Molly is probably right. Isn't it funny that Molly saw me as looking entirely different, but I thought I looked just about the same. It just goes to show that we might view ourselves one way, while oth...

The trail of animal crackers on the stairway was a mystery upon first glance. But upon further investigation, I saw Molly with the bag of cookies carefully placing one treat in the center of each step. What in the world was she doing? When I asked her, she revealed that she was trying to get her baby brother to follow her up the stairs. She didn’t know that what she was doing could be harmful if toddler, Griffin actually followed that bait and began climbing the steps. She didn’t want to hurt her brother, just get him to follow. God has the same desire that Molly had…He wants us to follow Him everywhere. Sometimes we think we know best and go our own way. Other times we allow people to sway us with the way that they want us to go. But I think we often aren’t paying attention to the signals that God is giving us that show us the way. The primary way that God reveals His path for us is through His Word. The Bible is filled with guidelines that our Father wants us to ...

A year or two ago, my granddaughter Molly's favorite word seemed to be NO. You would ask her just about anything and the answer was probably going to be no. It might be said in different ways, such as an emphatic NO. Or sometimes it was a whiny no. And oftentimes it was a musical noooooo. Whenever she was in that kind of mood, I would laughingly tell her that no must be her favorite word and that would always get a no answer. One morning I suggested that we count how many times she said the word in a day. We didn't have to count long, only about ten minutes to count 14. One, two, three....fourteen in only ten minutes. We both laughed as the number grew. The conversation would go a bit like this. Molly lets get dressed for school. No.  Do you want to wear pants or a skirt? No. Would you like a snack to take to school? No. Answering with the word no had become a habit for Molly. She didn't always mean it, but it was her way of expressing independence. I'm ...