I read 101 books in 2021. I wasn’t sure how I could choose a “top ten” list out of all those titles. But as I began looking at my “year in books” on Goodreads, I realized it was relatively easy to choose a list of the top ten titles I read in 2021: they were…
In honor of Grandpa Mann’s birthday, I’m sharing a tribute I wrote after he went home to Heaven this summer…
Snow is drifting down outside. A warm fire is burning in our woodstove. Christmas music is streaming through our speakers. It’s the time of year when I want to spend all my time curled up under a fuzzy blanket, with a mug of hot tea in one hand and a Christmas book in the other….
I would never have guessed I would be buying graphic novels for my children. But that’s because I mistakenly equated graphic novels with comics. I now know graphic novels aren’t just collections of comic strips like Peanuts or Family Circus (though our whole family loves the works of Bil Keane and Charles Schulz!); graphic novels…
When I got married, my aunt Margie gave me an aloe vera and four cactus starts–two Thanksgiving cactus, a Christmas cactus, and a traditional prickly cactus. The Thanksgiving cactuses were cuttings from a plant that belonged to Mrs. Maysel Lyon, my dad’s and my aunt’s beloved first grade teacher. (We heard many stories about this…
There’s a reason Jesus used parables: sometimes a story makes a lesson more memorable and easier to understand. “Each person has their own story.” My friend Natasha’s stories have made many truths tangible for me through the years. Her non-fiction is raw and real and filled with the thread of God’s redemption; her fiction is…
Changing from one theme framework to another is different than just swapping out one Genesis child theme for another. When you activate Kadence or a Kadence child theme, you’ll lose any hooks, scripts, or custom functions associated with your Genesis theme settings or files.
Moving from Genesis to Kadence and need to replace some of your Genesis functions? Want to add a disclosure statement before your posts but don’t have the Elements available with Kadence Pro? Install the Code Snippets plugin, if you haven’t already, and try these snippets that use Kadence Theme hooks to recreate what you were…
If you’re an Amazon Associate using self-hosted WordPress, you have many options for displaying your disclosure automatically. You can include the disclosure on every post and page, selectively based on post tags, or insert it manually using a shortcode or reusable block.
Someday we should open a bookstore… We’ve said it to each other for years, from our first dates (siblings in tow!) at The Book Bin, to our honeymoon when we found every used bookstore in each town we visited (and came home with a stack of children’s books). We repeat it when we leave the…
At the beginning of 2020, I set my Goodreads Reading Challenge goal for 75 books. I didn’t want to set the bar too high and get discouraged. But I spent much of January with a nasty cold, and made great progress toward my reading goal the first month of the year. The month of April…
I don’t know who said it first, but my daddy always quoted J. Vernon McGee as saying, “We should always be ready to preach, pray, or die.” But growing up going to church, I found that there was more to being a pastor than preaching a sermon: A pastor must not only teach God’s Word,…
The End.
The End.