Devotionals

A Word of Encouragement from Elizabeth Handford Odd how reading a passage of Scripture can bring back old memories. This week, I came to Ecclesiastes 10:10 in my daily Bible reading: “Cutting logs with a dull ax makes you work harder. A wise man will sharpen his ax....

A Word of Encouragement from Elizabeth Rice Handford A supervisor burst into my husband’s office one morning, almost hysterical. “You’ve got to make those girls respect me!” she cried. “They don’t have any respect for me!” Walt was the CEO of my father’s publishing...

A Word of Encouragement from Elizabeth Rice Handford You remember those tedious lists of names scattered through the Bible, don’t you? Somebody “begat” somebody, or somebody belonged to some tribe or other. One day recently, the two chapters I was to read in my Bible...

A Word of Encouragement from Elizabeth Rice Handford One morning my child said to me, “Mother, please be tender with me today.” Unusual request. What was behind it, I wondered. “I will be tender, I promise,” I answered. “Do you want to talk about it?” “No.” That day I...

A Word of Encouragement from Elizabeth Rice Handford Friends invited several of families over for dinner one evening. We were congenial. The conversation was lively, important, and uninhibited. But suddenly one of the guests, a fourteen-year-old, interrupted. He...

A Word of Encouragement from Elizabeth Rice Handford “The universe has lost its soul of loveliness,” George Romanes wrote as he wept. Why? Because he came to believe Darwin’s evolutionary theory was true. And if Darwin was right, then the Bible was wrong, and that...

A Word of Encouragement from Elizabeth Rice Handford I’d never even seen a river birch until Walt and I moved to South Carolina. When I saw my first one, my heart was completely smitten! The patches of dusky pink bark that peeled off were big enough to write a love...

A Word of Encouragement from Elizabeth Rice Handford Why do good things happen to bad people? People more often ask, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” But it’s also important to find out why good things happen to bad people, because, obviously, they really...

A Word of Encouragement from Elizabeth Rice Handford Yesterday I decided to give my long-haired dachshund a bath. She needed a bath like any dog who rolls in the dust after sniffing at odd smells. I called her to come. But she’d seen signs of a bath coming, so she ran...

A Word of Encouragement with Elizabeth Rice Handford Why do thousands of refugees risk drowning in an unsafe boat or suffocating in a packed airless tractor trailer in an effort to get inside our borders? Why? Because, they see in America a treasure unmatched by any...