March is Women’s History Month or should I say Women’s Her-story Month.  The Tuesday and Friday posts this month will feature women who lead lives that could serve as models for us in our Christian walk. It was difficult to narrow the list for the few dates in March but I did try to find some women you may not know very well and women writers.  Enjoy!Catherine Marshall was my favorite writer as a child.  As a teen I devoured her books like Something More, The Helper, and Beyond Ourselves. I loved her honesty in her writing and how she shared her intimately struggles to walk with Christ. She was always seeking Him.  Multiple times I thought, “I want to be like her. I want to write like her.”  She is a major reason why I am a Christian writer today.Catherine, originally from Johnson City, Tennessee, was married to Presbyterian minister and Chaplain of the U.S. Senate, Peter Marshall. When Marshall died of a heart attack in 1949. Mrs. Marshall wrote a biography of her late husband, A Man … [Read more...]

March is Women’s History Month or should I say Women’s Her-story Month.  The Tuesday and Friday posts this month will feature women who lead lives that could serve as models for us in our Christian walk. It was difficult to narrow the list for the few dates in March but I did try to find some women you may not know very well and women writers.  Enjoy!I wrinkled my nose and shook my head in disbelief as I read the life of Dorothy Day. This is going to be a very long two years studying the life of this woman so different from me. Maybe I should switch to another inspirational spiritual person.In the first year of my two-year program to learn to be a spiritual director, each of us chose someone from history to be our spiritual mentor. We studied their lives. Read books about them. Gave presentations about how they discerned God in their moments and how walking with someone of faith changed our own spiritual journey.My instructor suggested Dorothy Day to me. I recently found information … [Read more...]

Anne Frank wrote one of the world’s most famous diaries.  Since I keep a journal, she, of course, has to be one of the women I mention during Women’s History Month.  On a sad note, March is also the month of her death from typhus while in a concentration camp in 1945.Many of us know her story:      Born on June 12, 1929, Anne Frank was a German-Jewish teenager who was forced to go into hiding during the Holocaust. She and her family, along with four others, spent 25 months during World War II in an annex of rooms above her father’s office in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. After being betrayed to the Nazis, Anne, her family, and the others living with them were arrested and deported to Nazi concentration camps.  She died in March 1945, just a few weeks before the camp was liberated.On Anne’s 13th birthday, her father gave her a small cloth covered book with a lock on the front. It was meant to be an autograph book, but Anne decided to use it as a diary. Three weeks after her birthday, the … [Read more...]

March is Women’s History Month or should I say Women’s Her-story Month.  The Tuesday and Friday posts this month will feature women who lead lives that could serve as models for us in our Christian walk. It was difficult to narrow the list for the few dates in March but I did try to find some women you may not know very well and women writers.  Enjoy! Feisty is a word to describe Sojourner Truth.  I had to admit I didn’t know much about her, but my world is richer now that I have read her story.Sojourner was born a slave in New York state in about 1797 and was named Isabella Baumfree. At the age of nine she was auctioned off to another owner and over the next few years she was sold several other times. She later said that her first owner once whipped her with "a bundle of rods, prepared in the embers, and bound together with cords." It was during this time that she began to find refuge in religion -- beginning the habit of praying aloud when scared or hurt. Between 1810 and 1827 she … [Read more...]

March is Women’s History Month or should I say Women’s Her-story Month.  The Tuesday and Friday posts this month will feature women who lead lives that could serve as models for us in our Christian walk. It was difficult to narrow the list for the few dates in March but I did try to find some women you may not know very well and women writers.  Enjoy!Hannah More was an English author, poet, playwright, and philanthropist who lived in both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.At the age of sixteen, Hannah composed a drama, “The Search After Happiness”, which was later published and widely read. She continued to write plays and poetry. Around 1779, she felt God called her away from the stage and she increasingly turned to more distinctly Christian work. With Pastor John Newton, author of the hymn “Amazing Grace”, as her spiritual mentor, she went on to pen such works as “Sacred Dramas”, a satirical tale, “Florio”, and “Religion of the Fashionable World”. All of Hannah’s writings were … [Read more...]

March is Women’s History Month or should I say Women’s Her-story Month.  The Tuesday and Friday posts this month will feature women who lead lives that could serve as models for us in our Christian walk. It was difficult to narrow the list for the few dates in March but I did try to find some women you may not know very well and women writers.  Enjoy! This coming Sunday many church we commemorate Perpetua and FelicityWho?  That was my reaction.  I didn’t know anything about these two women!No saints were more honored in the early Christian era than Perpetua and Felicity. The two women were arrested and imprisoned Carthage in 203 A.D. Perpetua was 22-year-old noblewoman with a son a few months old; Felicity a slave with a child not yet born. Their crime was defying Emperor’s prohibition of conversions to Christianity.They were taken to prison where Felicity gave birth. Fellow Christians adopted her child.At their trail, they bravely announced their belief in Christ – a certain death … [Read more...]

   March is Women’s History Month or should I say Women’s Her-story Month.  The Tuesday and Friday posts this month will feature women who led lives that could serve as models for us in our Christian walk. It was difficult to narrow the list for the few dates in March but I did try to find some women you may not know very well and women writers.  Enjoy!      We start Women’s History Month featuring a remarkable woman from the Middle Ages.   Hildegard of Bingen was born in 1098. The tenth child of a noble family, she was dedicated at birth to the church as was the custom of the day.    At age eight she was sent to live with Jutta, an anchoress so she could get her religious education. An anchoress is like a religious recluse who spent most of her days in prayer in her tiny private cell.    When Jutta died years later, Hildegard became prioress of the Benedictine convent.     In 1141 Hildegard began to have vivid visions of God that blessed her with an understanding of the meaning of … [Read more...]