jamie y. watkins

Tag: faith

  • Marriage: An Exercise in Faith

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    jywatkins
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    Today is our fifth wedding anniversary. Five years ago, Chad and I had the most beautiful wedding ceremony at a gorgeous park. The day was bright and warm, even at 10 a.m. Our wedding guests were seated around a large round pond and my dad walked me down a grassy walkway to stand with Chad.…

  • Anxiety That Flies High

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    jywatkins
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    I love traveling. I mean I LOVE traveling. My family did not travel much when I was growing up. The longest distance we ever went as a family was a cross-country trip from New Jersey out West to Arizona, where my uncle lives. But I was eighteen months old, so I don’t remember a mile…

  • Bugs in the Garden

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    jywatkins
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    I find myself often thinking about God when we’re doing yard work. There’s obviously a natural connection between God and the outdoors, nature. Plus, working in the yard is often quiet work. Even if Chad and I are working on the same project– which we often aren’t– we don’t talk the whole time, leaving lots…

  • Subduing the Yard

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    jywatkins
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    When Chad and I moved into our house a year and a half ago, the front and back yards were completely overgrown. We had walls of evergreen bushes that blocked off whole sections of the yard in the back. We had pachysandra running rampant. We had a jungle of poison ivy, thorny plants and more…

  • Receiving Help

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    jywatkins
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    I recently read a post from Joy Bennett over at Joy in this Journey called Independence: The False Gospel Destroying American Christianity and it resonated with me because I learned about asking for help about a year and a half ago and it’s been on my mind ever since. I completely agree with her that asking…

  • The Feminist I Became

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    jywatkins
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    My husband and I are approaching our fifth wedding anniversary. I read an article a while back from Candace over at The Thoughts I Think about her five year anniversary, and she wrote these words that I found so true: We think differently about life and God and politics than we did five years ago.…

  • I Hope They’d Be Proud

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    jywatkins
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    I became a Christian in high school. I met my friend, Laura, who invited me to a bible study at her house and I loved it, and I became a Christian. It wasn’t some big, transformative moment or decision for me. It felt pretty natural and easy, for the most part. The thing was, outside of…

  • Grief

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    jywatkins
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    I have a strange fascination with grief, probably coming from death being my biggest fear– death of someone I love, death of my husband, death for me. It’s somewhat unreasonable how afraid I am of death, considering I am a person who believes that this life is not the end, that there is more, and that it…

  • Confronting Faith at Work

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    jywatkins
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    I am an evangelical Christian who, like many, works in a secular field. The non-profit organization I work for is focused on developing leadership in girls. A little more specifically, I work in the public relations and marketing department for this organization (which I am not going to name because I am not, in this blog, speaking…

  • Appreciating “Noah”

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    jywatkins
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    I remember seeing the “coming soon” poster for the movie “Noah” months ago in a theater. I remember looking at it with my husband, seeing it was not a “Christian” movie, and thinking, is this going to be okay? Is this going to be okay for Christians? And then the previews started and the marketing…