Devotionals

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...

A word of encouragement from Elizabeth Rice Handford The Israeli King Ahab in Bible times wasn’t doing what a good king was supposed to do: helping people do right and punishing evil doers. (The story is told in First Kings, chapter 20.) Instead, King Ahab was “doing...

A Word of Encouragement from Elizabeth Rice Handford Life throws a lot of choices at us, and sometimes they are more important than we realize. I remember one late evening when I suddenly had to make a life-altering decision by 8:00 o’clock the next morning. I was 18...

A Word of Encouragement from Elizabeth Rice Handford We talked our last time together about how comforting God’s merciful forgiveness of our failures is, and how His loving kindness will endure throughout eternity. I remember another time when God extended His mercy...