By Davalynn Spencer @davalynnspencer The guide and I walked a rutted dirt road used by Forest Service vehicles. Pine, scrub oak, and aspen bordered the road on each side. All was quiet – blissfully absent of people, their machines, and their devices. As we moved deeper into the
By Davalynn Spencer @davalynnspencer She stood at the water dispenser in the market filling white one-gallon jugs and loading them into her shopping cart. A lot of them. Like fifteen or so. Wearing a worn jacket and knit cap against the day’s chilly temperature, she kept looking over
By Davalynn Spencer @davalynnspencer I’m still in the twenty-third Psalm, wondering why the Shepherd has to make me lie down in green (or golden) pastures. I think it’s because I don’t stop and rest on my own. I’m too busy. I have so much to do. I don’t
By Davalynn Spencer @davalynnspencer Would you follow someone you didn’t know down the path in this photo? Why not? My guess is that it’s all about trust. Lately, I can’t shake the twenty-third Psalm. It pops up in music from the radio. It’s referenced in social media or
By Davalynn Spencer @davalynnspencer I belong to a group of women who pray. Collectively, I see them as a river that surges out from our midst, coursing through our community, swirling around boulders of sickness, spreading through exposed tree roots, and washing over sun-drenched sandbars in praise. The
By Davalynn Spencer @davalynnspencer Several years ago in one of my digs through the past, courtesy of the Royal Gorge Regional Museum & History Center, I found an article about Texas Creek, Colorado. It wasn’t called Texas Creek in 1881, but rather, Ford Junction, a stage stop,
By Davalynn Spencer @davalynnspencer Most of us have heard someone say right before the disaster, “Don’t worry, I’ve got this …” How NOT to worry? Not doing something is often a non-event. Like dieting. NOT eating the wrong food leaves a vacuum that I want to fill with all the
By Davalynn Spencer @davalynnspencer This week marks the official turn of the seasonal clock to autumn, my favorite time of year. Crisp air, beyond-blue skies, migrating geese. Bugling elk (if you’re lucky enough to hear them) and outlandish aspen-gold draping the mountains. What a palette of sensory detail!
By Davalynn Spencer @davalynnspencer How valuable is a cup of cold water to someone who is hot, dry, and thirsty? Jesus told His disciples that when they gave so much as a cup of cold water to a child, their deed was worthy of reward (Matthew 10:42). Cold
By Davalynn Spencer @davalynnspencer This year, a national holiday celebrated in the United States and Canada, Labor Day, coincides with the Jewish New Year at sunset. Translated as the Head of the Year, Rosh Hashanah is the first of the high holy days, a day of considering the
By Davalynn Spencer @davalynnspencer I believe some miracles lie in the timing of our prayer because God has already supplied the answer. Maybe we just haven’t read far enough into the book. Maybe we paused in our reading one morning at the breakfast table and told God we
By Davalynn Spencer @davalynnspencer I have often heard preachers and teachers describe our temporal existence as a blip on a radar screen compared to unending eternity. I believe they are correct, based on several scriptures that support their line of thinking. Psalm 103:15-16 is one: As for man,
By Davalynn Spencer @davalynnspencer Tuesday mornings I can hear the garbage truck as it makes the corner down the road from my house. I’m on an every-other-week pick-up schedule, and this last “other week” was a doozy. Every time I walked past the big blue roller bin behind
By Davalynn Spencer @davalynnspencer Today is National Book Lover’s Day! I hope you will find opportunity to turn off the television, silence your smartphone, and escape into a good book. You could read a biography, a how-to, a mystery, or an action-packed adventure. And if you enjoy Western
By Davalynn Spencer @davalynnspencer At my last annual checkup, I told the doctor I thought I had a spider bite. The doctor told me spiders don’t bite. Clearly, he’d never seen the movie Spiderman. I’d been working in the yard a few days earlier and bore what I