Beauty on the Backroads

Stories of grace for life's unexpected turns

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What difference does it make?

My chance to vote for a candidate for president is still weeks away. (Wait, don’t go! I promise this isn’t a post just about politics.) I watch the news reports of the outcomes in states that seem to matter more than mine, and though I’m still not 100 percent certain about who I am voting for, I’ve started to wonder how I should vote.

Should I cast my vote for the person I think is best, even if it looks like they have no shot at winning the nomination? Or should I pick a person who has a better chance of beating the person I definitely don’t want as president?

Ultimately, I wonder, does my vote even matter? Will it be too late by the time I cast it?

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This is, unfortunately, how I look at my life, too. I want my life to matter. I want my actions to make a difference. I want to know I changed something or someone because I lived. I don’t ask for much, do I?

Read the rest of this post at Putting on the New, where I post on the 12th of each month.

What women want from the church: Sisters

I came to church in search of sisters, although I didn’t know it then.

Having grown up with family but not in the church, I was often jealous, in my early saved days, of people whose homes were, and always had been, Christian. Not only were they blood relatives but spiritual ones.

I yearned for connection. I loved my biological family. But I needed a spiritual one as well.

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We were four peas in a pod, my best friends in high school. We met in a gym class our freshman year, and in the years that followed we were inseparable. We watched Disney movies at sleepovers while our classmates partied on the weekends. We ate lunch together and welcomed the outcasts to our table. We arranged our schedules so we would share some classes throughout the day. We passed notes in the hallway and defended each other.

It was my first experience with sisterhood.

Read the rest on Preston Yancey’s blog here, part of a series, What Women Want from the Church, posting on Thursdays.