“If you don’t have good roots, you won’t have good fruit.” I heard my father in law say to my husband as the sat eating breakfast in my kitchen one morning. They were discussing the process of growing quality plants in the greenhouse…

As we wrap up this series, A Broken Hallelujah, it’s my joy to introduce to you our Guest Writer for this week, Wendy VanWingerden. Wendy’s life demonstrates what it means to live a life that is a broken hallelujah. In the summer of 2009…

I would not be completely honest if I did not share some of the anger and frustration I have felt along our journey losing our daughter, Promise, through late-term miscarriage. I used my journal to pour out those feelings and try to process them through the grid of my faith. From my journal…

In my journal I wrote: It has been ONE month since we said hello and goodbye to Promise - our baby girl who was born through a miscarriage at nearly twenty-two weeks..

My mom arrived just a few moments after the intense labor and miscarriage of our daughter. She had been on the phone with my husband Jason for the past hour or so, trying to help him know how to help me, as she made her way to the hospital…

After receiving the news that the baby growing inside me no longer had a heartbeat, and after confirming next steps with our doctor, Jason and I got a flight from my parents’ home in Delaware to our home in Florida that same night…

The news about our little girl came just as we were finishing up a wonderful summer vacation so we were not at our home in Florida. Though that made our circumstances more difficult on some levels, we felt…

Today was the day!  I was nearly 22 weeks pregnant with our second child and my husband, Jason, and I couldn’t wait to find out the gender of our baby. The ultrasound tech took a few quick pictures and then said..

Over the next two weeks you will hear from two women whose broken hallelujahs will encourage and inspire you though you may not have experienced the shattered hearts they describe. I love each of them deeply and have had the privilege of walking in some of their dark places with them…

Forever etched in my soul is the sound of the congregation opening Mark’s Coronation service with O the Deep, Deep Love of Jesus. All the lights were on but I felt wrapped in a blanket of darkness. Over twelve hundred men…

As a child, I sat with my parents and grandmother in our tiny Presbyterian church and gustily sang the old hymns. I especially loved Sunday night services when the preacher asked for favorites. My cousins and I eagerly…

The covenantal promises of God formed a grid through which I learned to live life in the crucible of suffering. When I struggled to understand my purpose as an empty nester far sooner than I expected, God gave me comfort…

The prophet Habakkuk’s heart broke as he watched Babylon, the enemy of Israel, break the backs of God’s people by enslaving them.  Why didn’t God do something? These are God’s precious people yet once more they suffered the consequences of their own sinful abandonment of worship..

Paul and Silas could sing a broken hallelujah because they believed in the promises of God, one of which is the promise of restoration. Their greatest example of that restoration was the day Jesus died. Everything went black…

Paul and Silas sang at midnight because they believed the promises of God. They believed His promises because God cannot lie. They believed God’s promises because God kept the mother of all promises when He sent Jesus to live as a man, to experience every temptation known to man, to die on a cross for our sins and then to conquer death by rising again.

“Is God really sovereign? Can I trust Him now…even in this?” The steady, virulent progress of the malignant brain tumor gave real urgency to these questions for David. The disease had progressed relentlessly; a cure seemed unlikely. David knew he didn’t have much time.

What happened in that prison cell? Lots of miracles! Pitch dark. No natural light. It’s midnight. Two men imprisoned on trumped up charges. Severely beaten, stripped of their clothing, put in stocks…

Let’s go back to that prison cell where Paul and Silas sang and praised God at midnight. What do you think they hoped to accomplish with their singing? Some people teach that if we have enough faith God is obligated…

Jesus uses events in our lives to show us new things about ourselves. Within a year after our son Mark’s death, our daughter Heidi married Greg, our son Dan started college, and our oldest son, Chuck, married Melanie…

What is your purpose in life? Many of us think our purpose is to recapture the Garden of Eden and our pursuit of that goal starts with our births. Think about it. Newborn babies come into this world with their own agendas…