Happy Holidays from SevenPonds! - This Christmas, remember your loved ones with a growing memorial

In the spirit of spreading cheer, enjoy the lighter side of SevenPonds: Stars and Clover, the SevenPonds office foster kittens! Keep a smile on your face, and enjoy your friends, family, and loved ones this holiday season. Thank you for … Continue reading

Prayer In The Moment's Need

Prayer may be many more things than a Plea Requesting Assistance; a Yearning for Encouragement and Respite, but contained within the moment's need little truly matters more than divine provision of a safe house in the cold of night. In that moment of need, let us prove worthy of this sensibility: make the Plea Requesting Assistance; a Yearning for Encouragement and Respite, for the Lord will help.

“‘Tis The Season”

‘Tis the Season  It’s that time of year again, the time of year that bereaved parents struggle with all of the anxiety from the anticipation of what the Holidays will bring in the way of unwanted gifts, Holiday memories.  For some it’s the past Holiday memories that cause the pain while others, like me, it’s [...]

The Beauty Beyond Sackcloth and Ashes

The well-reasoned and due-in-season complaint - one of Job-like proportions - is one where we experience such grief worthy of sackcloth and ashes; an entire self-loathing in the Presence of God, despite thought for disobedience, regarding the apparent captivation by misfortune. Life is such a thing that compels us beyond belief for what sorrowful things are endured. Only something so real as life could do this.

Take Off Your Worry Coat - First, Take the Stones Out of the Pockets: (Caring for Elderly Parents)

Something in my friend's voice on the phone felt to me like she was drowning. A cold, damp image drifted into my body like smoke, sharpening into a scene of the writer Virginia Woolf, depressed beyond hope in 1941, her overcoat pockets heavy with stones, wading deeper and deeper into Sussex's River Ouse, to her watery grave. (The gentle Ouse flowed behind the rural home of my English parents-in-law, and her village, Rodmell, was only a few miles away. I used to think of her every time I gazed into the water.)

Do You Understand Life? Thoughts on the Purpose of Life Following the Death of a Child

Sometimes we feel bombarded by life as we work through one event after another, striving to reach the next one that's in the diary, being blown off course by unplanned events and struggling as the bills mount up. Life goes on. At times it can feel like it goes on and on and on and on... as if there is no end, no destination. We can feel this way following life events which don't make sense, such as the death of a child or the loss of a loved one. Life can lose its meaning and purpose and as we wake up we begin to question whether we have a clue as to what we are doing. What is life about?