Monica J Butler

“The world conspires against our souls, keeping our lives superficial. ‘Superficiality,’ said Richard Foster, ‘is the curse of our age.’ The desperate need of the soul is not for intelligence, nor talent, nor yet excitement; just depth…My soul becomes shallow when my interests and thoughts go no further than myself. A person should be deep because life itself is deep. A deep soul has the capacity to understand and empathize deeply with other people–not just himself. A deep soul notices and questions and doesn’t just go through the motions. A deep soul lives in conscious awareness of eternity, not simply today. It notices and observes and reflects in surprising ways–we…

Last weekend, we took an impromptu stroll down memory lane. We dusted off a few of the good old VHS tapes full of precious memories, and sat down to enjoy reminiscing years gone by. Years of our family’s life flashed before our eyes…Christmases, birthdays, dance recitals, school programs. Amazing how surreal it feels to watch those images, and have the very real memories and emotion wash over one’s mind, as if it were happening at this very point in time! To watch those images of little ones (an era where ALL of our children were shorter than their less than 5-foot-tall mama), and recall with such clarity the joy (and…

I just finished week 5 in the Nehemiah study this weekend. Its focus was on Nehemiah 9, which has the longest recorded prayer in the Old Testament. It is a prayer of confession about Israel’s shortcomings and sin, and God’s faithfulness over the years. It’s such a beautiful reminder of God hearing the cries of His people and delivering them, over and over again, even when they were not walking in His ways and their troubles were directly related to their disobedience. Incredible. Over and over again we see throughout the Old Testament (and the New) that God responds to His people with faithfulness. He hears their cries and responds.…

One of our family values has been service. We have prayed that service would be in the very fiber/DNA of our family–that each of our children would grow to be servant-hearted individuals, who would seek to help others, in the name of Jesus. I learned in my early years as a young mother the practice of emphasizing family values by attaching the family name to the value….”We’re Jones’–we do not lie!”…”We’re Johnsons–we strive for excellence!” etc. And, we’ve done this often over the years with various character traits we wanted to be sure our daughters “got.” One such trait is service. We’ve made many purposeful decisions in serving together as…

This morning I had my routine dental appointment. These are usually pretty uneventful, but I have a confession to make–they are usually filled with discussions about proper oral priorities, namely proper toothbrushing and flossing habits and routines. Ouch. You see, flossing has never been a strongpoint for me, and somewhere in the busyness of mothering young children, I even lost the proper toothbrushing skills–namely length, and sometimes (blush) frequency. I am consistent in brushing my teeth each morning, at least hurriedly, and often later in the day, before leaving for a meeting or something, but more often than I care to admit, I put my tired body into bed with…

This weekend, our family tended to the flowerbeds which had gained their fair-share of weeds in the previous two weeks. It was wonderful to have the entire family chipping in, to have many hands making light work. And, it was also wonderful to have some unscripted chat time. That unscripted chat time often leads to teachable moments, and this time was no different, except that I keep smiling at the teachable moment my daughter had for me. We were weeding the marigold bed, next to the vegetable garden, a bed whose primary purpose is to help bring good bugs to the vegetables and help ward off bad bugs from the…