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Creativity: One key prayer

Lynne Baab • Friday June 19 2020

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

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

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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Spiritual diary of sheltering in place: The lifeline of God’s distant future

Lynne Baab • Wednesday May 27 2020

I have always loved the passages in the Bible where the whole creation is encouraged to praise God. Psalm 96:11-12 is one example:

“Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice; let the sea roar, and all that fills it; let the field exult, and everything in it. Then shall all the trees of the forest sing for joy before the LORD.”

If I were writing these words at this time, I would add something like “because you, beautiful creation, have become a lifeline for so many people during this pandemic. You reflect God’s creativity and beauty. You speak to us of timelessness and of...

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