Empowering Daughters of God

Another year has gone by!  It is Christmas once again!  December 18th marks the end of all of my Christmas parties, performances and recitals!  It's sort of a relief.  Now there's just Christmas, and this year I will work on Christmas again.  I prefer not to work this holiday, of course, and I haven't had to work on it too many times in all of my working years.  I started working at the age of eleven.  I didn't have an official job, but it was no joke.  I started babysitting regularly at eleven, and did until I got an official job at age seventeen.  What I do like about working Christmas is that it keeps me grounded.  It keeps me home, and it reminds me of what is really important.  When I'm not working on the holiday, it's all too easy to get caught up in the hype, fun, commercialism, and excitement of it all.  There's nothing wrong with that really, but I can get lost in it all.  When I work, I have the time to really in...

To adapt means to modify something to make it useful for a new purpose.  Adaptation refers to the process of adapting or being adapted.  In biological terms, adaptation is the process of change in an organism or species to become better suited to its environment.  I personally believe that this process of change is an ongoing one for most organisms.  Environments change, so organisms do too.  Can you think of a time in your life when you had to adapt to a new environment?  Maybe you moved to a new house or a new apartment.  Maybe you lost something or someone that meant a great deal to you.  Maybe you developed a disease, or maybe something happened to you that was out of your control.  Would any of these situations cause the person, or human, to no longer be human, as in human species?  No.  No matter what happens to us, or what changes we go through, we would still be human.   We don't just suddenly change species becaus...

 Fahrenheit 451 is one of my favorite books of all time!  I know, I have a lot of those!  Of all the dystopian novels out there that people like to compare to the current day, this one might just be the most accurate to our day.  Animal Farm, 1984, Alas Babylon, Hunger Games, Matched, Brave New World, Lord of the Flies, The Giver, and many others all have parallels to our current time and can be said to have accurate truths.  After listening to Fahrenheit 451 again in preparation to teach my teen literature class: Seeing Society Through Classic Literature, I think we are living in Ray Bradbury's world. We may not have firefighters that start fires rather than put them out, but everything else in this book is our world today.  Bradbury describes a world where no one talks to anyone, no one thinks anything, and no one really does anything meaningful.  Bradbury loved literature and with the rising technology in the 1950s he was worried a great deal about ...

Just like 9/11, most of us probably remember where we were and what we were doing when we heard the news of Charlie Kirk.  If you did not know Charlie Kirk before, you do now.  On 9/11 I was a Sophomore in high school.  I was in band class 1st period.  I was wearing a blue sweatshirt with big thick letters that spelled ROXY and black leggings.  I did not know what the World Trade Center was when I saw the 1st tower fall on the TV.  I remember my band teacher coming in and turning on the TV without a word.  We all just watched.  As I went to every class that day, it was more news and more news.  All we did was watch the news in every class.  I knew something big had just taken place that I didn't even understand.  I knew it was somber, I knew it was sad, but I didn't quite know the whys and the hows of it all.  In the days following I found out.   On September 10th I was doing reading school with my son on his bed when...