Friendship, Listening, and Empathy: A Prayer GuideDraw Near: A Lenten Devotional Two Hands: Grief and Gratitude in the Christian LifeSabbath Keeping: Finding Freedom in the Rhythms of Rest Fasting: Spiritual Freedom Beyond our AppetitesA Renewed SpiritualityNurturing Hope: Christian Pastoral Care in the Twenty-First CenturyThe Power of ListeningJoy Together: Spiritual Practices for Your CongregationPrayers of the New TestamentPrayers of the Old TestamentPersonality Type in CongregationsSabbathA Garden of Living Water: Stories of Self-Discovery and Spiritual GrowthDead Sea: A NovelDeadly Murmurs: A NovelDeath in Dunedin: A NovelBeating Burnout in CongregationsReaching Out in a Networked WorldEmbracing MidlifeFriendingAdvent Devotional

Creativity though hidden art

Lynne Baab • Wednesday June 24 2020

Creativity though hidden art

Today I want to describe a book that changed my life in the area of creativity, a book that I don’t recommend reading. I wonder if I’m not recommending it because it’s old, a bit out of date, and perhaps too perfectionistic. Or, maybe I’m not recommending it because of a run-in I had with the author that perfectly illustrates some of the issues of creativity in the home.

Hidden Art by Edith Schaeffer was published the same year that I met Mrs. Schaeffer (I was 19), although I read it a year or two later. It was the first book I encountered...

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Creativity: One key prayer

Lynne Baab • Friday June 19 2020

Creativity: One key prayer

I became a committed Christian when I was nineteen and a half. Right before my twenty-second birthday, I attended the “Mark 2 Bible study dig-in,” offered at Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship summer camps. “Mark 1” allowed students to focus for five full days on the first half of the Gospel of Mark, and I had participated in that seminar the summer before. “Mark 2” enabled students to look at the second half of Mark for five days. That summer camp, held in the beautiful Santa Cruz mountains of California, forever merged in my mind the Gospel of Mark with stately live oak...

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First post in a new series on creativity: Feeling creativity-impaired

Lynne Baab • Friday June 12 2020

First post in a new series on creativity: Feeling creativity-impaired

I have felt creativity-impaired during the pandemic. Since the beginning of the pandemic, my husband Dave has been creating beautiful watercolor paintings hour after hour. My mother has been knitting for the first time in decades. My daughter-in-law and my granddaughter, cooped up in an 800-square-foot apartment in Brooklyn, New York, have been drawing, painting, and making a seemingly endless series of interesting things, such as woven bracelets, unbaked clay bowls, and paper from food scraps. Every time we zoom with them they have something creative to show us.

I just finished writing a long series of blog posts about coping strategies...

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Spiritual diary of sheltering in place: Acceptance

Lynne Baab • Thursday June 4 2020

Spiritual diary of sheltering in place: Acceptance

Something wonderful happened to me last Friday. I moved to the stage of grief called acceptance after 85 days of deep sadness about so many aspects of the virus. The timing of this acceptance is ironic and almost shaming. How can I stop my intense grieving and begin to feel better about life when my country is in such uproar? What’s wrong with me?

That’s been the theme of the past three months: What’s wrong with me?  Why for 85 days did I seem to feel sadder than almost anyone I know? I was also so, so tired. I know cognitively that...

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Featured books

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Meeting God in Grief and Gratitude

Lynne Baab • Wednesday January 22 2025

By Lynne M. Baab, author of Two Hands: Grief and Gratitude in the Christian Life

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Lynne Baab • Friday August 11 2023

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Yes, Jesus Told Us to Pray in Secret. But He Also Prayed with His Friends.

Lynne Baab • Saturday October 9 2021

By Lynne M. Baab. Originally published in Christianity Today, July 8, 2021