Table of contents for May 2018 in Guideposts

On behalf of the Guideposts organization, thank you for your strong response to our editorial series Overcoming Addiction. From the outset, we knew that addiction reached deep into the heart of America. Your stories and comments confirm how profoundly individuals, families, congregations and communities are affected by this seemingly intractable plague. Your stories also confirm that there is hope in recovery. As one reader put it, “I know there is hope for the addicted. I know because I once considered myself hopeless. If I can recover, anyone can.” I know that suffering all too well. There was a time in my life when I had given up on myself, when I had let go of any hope that I would ever overcome my obsession with alcohol and drugs. Once, I…

SWEET STORY “My literacy group could use some more volunteers,” a friend told me shortly after I retired from teaching prekindergarten. “Would you read to kindergarteners once a week?” Would I? I jumped at the chance. I still had a ton of children’s books. I also had a great sour-cream cookie recipe, handed down from my mom, that I thought would add a sweet note to the stories. I made cutout cookies to accompany each book. When I read the kids The Mitten, I made each child a mitten-shaped cookie with his or her initial on it. I told them about the white monogrammed mittens I had worn as a child. I covered bear-shaped cookies with chocolate icing for our reading of Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?…

FOR YEARS, MOM AND I HAD TALKED about writing a book together. A book about ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arranging. A big coffee table book with beautiful pictures of flowers, like the calla lily and fern she’d arranged at the alter for my wedding. Mom said calla lilies were a symbol of holiness, faith and purity. The book would have been full of the information she conveyed so well, as she did at the ikebana class she taught for my friends in California while we awaited the birth of my oldest daughter. But we never wrote that book. My mother has Alzheimer’s. She was diagnosed in 2011, though some signs appeared even before then. There is nothing good about Alzheimer’s. It’s not a disease where you can make…

Alice Eberhart-Wright is part of a trend. A 2016 Pew Research Center survey found that smartphone ownership and internet use among people ages 65 and older has risen significantly in the past few years. Still, 48 percent of seniors say they need help using new electronic devices and only 26 percent of those who go on the internet feel very confident using such devices to do what they need to do. Try these tips from Home Instead Senior Care to help your loved ones embrace technology: Ease into it. Start by expanding your senior’s use of the technology he’s already familiar with. If Dad uses his cell phone only for calls, teach him how to text. Once he’s comfortable with texting, talk to him about upgrading to a smartphone or…

I SAT IN THE NEONATAL INTENSIVE care unit beside my son Obadiah’s incubator, staring at all the tubes and wires attached to his tiny body, willing him to live. I went into labor when I was only six months pregnant. My husband, Destry, rushed me to the hospital. But my labor had progressed too far. Obadiah was born at 25 weeks—what’s considered extremely premature—weighing a mere 1 pound, 9 ounces. Each day since, doctors would debrief us on another medical crisis. This morning, they had told us Obadiah had developed a blood infection. He had a 50-50 chance of survival. The temperature, humidity and oxygen level in the incubator were carefully controlled to maximize his chances. But he looked so fragile, lying there in that small plastic box. I longed…

“YOU GUYS KNOW WHY YOU’RE here, right?” I strode across the wood floor and spread my arms. The kids in the room stood with their backs hunched, eyes downcast to avoid looking at the wall lined with mirrors. I could see their anxiety. It reminded me of how I’d felt as a little girl on Good Friday. I’d loved going to church. Except for Good Friday. The pre-Easter service filled me with dread. The sanctuary was dark, the cross in the center covered with a shroud. There was no singing or communal Eucharist. Everyone was solemn and silent. Kind of like the kids in front of me at the dance studio. Lord, help me show them the truth about who they are. I asked. Like you helped me with Chris.…

Phnesha Marchette (The Other Plan, page 14) still likes to make plans—and then give her and her daughters, Gabby and Gigi, time to be silly. “Our schedule is structured during the week, my closet is color-coordinated and we have a master calendar on the fridge,” Phnesha says. “But I have a little hippie in me too, so we have karaoke and dance parties.” The girls recently took up playing the cello in addition to swimming, doing gymnastics and going to Girl Scouts. “Like many children, mine love to try new things—and I encourage that!” Phnesha’s next project, “Heaven and Earth,” is an art exhibition based on men in the Bible: Daniel in the lion’s den; Joseph, the prince of dreams; and Jesus in the wilderness. “I pray before painting and…

Fighting for Justice In our exclusive video, Justin Dillon (page 26) tells why he founded Slavery Footprint, a nonprofit working to end human trafficking and slavery. guideposts.org/jdillon Prayers for Moms What prayers does your mother need most? Guideposts.org prayer blogger Bob Hostetler asked moms what they hoped their children might pray for them and created a collection of prayers to say for moms. guideposts.org/7momprayers 5 Dangerous Addiction Myths Professional counselor Mary Spaulding (page 39) explains some common—and dangerous—misconceptions about addiction and how to overcome them. guideposts.org/addictionmyths Remembering Those Who Gave Their Lives In this moving Memorial Day devotion, Executive Editor Rick Hamlin reminds us to pause and remember those who have made the ultimate sacrifice for our country. guideposts.org/memorialdaydevotion…

A MOM SAT SOBBING IN MY counseling office. When she was able to compose herself, she whispered, “I started drinking heavily two days after my daughter’s funeral, and I just couldn’t stop.” Her daughter was in elementary school when she died of cancer. While working in the inpatient chemical dependency unit at a hospital in Oklahoma City, I met a man who’d been given an ultimatum by his boss and his wife: Either get help for his drinking or he’d be fired and divorced. The man insisted he didn’t have a problem. Another client was in a relapse prevention group I ran. She knew she had a problem. Her kids had been taken by social services and placed with their grandparents because of her drug abuse. She missed them desperately.…

LINDA LOEGEL Angier, North Carolina A PERFECT VIEW “Mom, you really need to find a new home,” my daughter Tammy Sue said. “Don’t wait until your lease runs out.” After we hung up, I started on the dishes, gazing out the window at my bird feeders. Moving was going to be harder than I thought. There was a lot I liked about my double-wide mobile home. No stairs. Room for an office. A front and back porch. A shower stall instead of a slippery bathtub. And best of all, my kitchen-window view of the trees and my beautiful bird feeders. Problem was, my home had a toxic mold issue. Everything had gone downhill since the new corporate owners took over the property, and they were raising the rent. Tammy Sue’s…

STRIKING A BALANCE In A Matter of the Heart, my story in the March 2016 issue, I wrote about how having a heart attack at age 49 showed me that serving God as a pastor shouldn’t mean having to burn myself out. My turnaround came when my wife, Kathy, and I went to see a counselor, Hud McWilliams. He helped me learn to balance my life so I could take care of my health and spend more time with Kathy and our two kids. Hud called recently to say he had just spent hours counseling another couple who worked in ministry. They’d hit their own breaking point and gone on sabbatical, their first in 30 years. Their host gave them an issue of GUIDEPOSTS—the one with my story. It resonated…

“‘Love thy neighbor’ is not a piece of advice. It’s a command.”BONO, U2 front man and activist “One reason people resist change is because they focus on what they have to give up, instead of what they have to gain.”LIZ JOSEFSBERG, author of Target 100: The World’s Simplest Weight-Loss Program in Six Easy Steps, via her Instagram “I don’t need God to be in charge of my life. I only need God to be at the center of it.”FATHER GREGORY BOYLE, founder of Homeboy Industries, the largest and most successful gang intervention program in the world, from his book Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship “Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious and adding the meaningful.”JOHN MAEDA, design, technology and business leader “In a world where you can…

I was searching for something, though I didn’t quite know what. I searched frantically, though I didn’t quite know why. “Lift the lid on the third box,” I heard a calm voice say. I did as I’d been directed. Inside was the thing I’d been looking for, though I still couldn’t see what it was. I awoke feeling incredibly relieved, my heart still pounding. What a crazy dream! I glanced at the clock beside me. Oh no! I was late for my shift at the restaurant. I jumped out of bed, rushed to get ready and dashed out the door. I was a recent high school grad and had just landed my first job—as a salad girl at a cafeteria-style restaurant. I ran through the front door and clocked in,…

For nearly 20 years, I indulged in the myths of addiction. Not long after I smoked marijuana for the first time, as a teenager in the suburbs of New York, I developed a baffling inability to “just say no” to drugs and alcohol. Today, as a man in long-term recovery, I know firsthand the damage caused by misunderstandings about this illness. Research has come a long way since 1974, when I first experimented with dangerous substances and discovered what I thought was the answer to my gnawing sense of inadequacy. Science shows that addiction is a brain disease. Psychological, social and spiritual emptiness fuel addiction, but they don’t cause it. Judging addicts or telling them to “shape up and just quit” accomplishes no more than saying the same thing to…