The slow days of summer are in the books. As evening temperatures begin to cool, hints of autumn are emerging. Alongside such whispers of fall come the gale-force winds of the family calendar: school, sports, and extracurricular activities. Excitement rises alongside tension as children settle into a new school year and parents try to piece together what often feels like an impossible jigsaw puzzle, schedule-wise.

I remember those days well, as I homeschooled four children involved in many activities. Between school, practice, lessons, and social events, autumn felt overwhelming. I am eternally grateful that my husband and I drew a firm line: church was non-negotiable. 

Dearest Little One,

I scribbled a note to myself last week, a reminder to order a Christmas stocking for your cousin, born last May. He is our third beloved grandbaby, and with each new sprout on our family tree, your Papa and I purchase a stocking with our little love’s name stitched at the top.

I smile, thinking that a year from this December, your stocking will lie bulging beneath our Christmas tree, and by then you will be crawling through piles of wrapping paper and ribbons, squealing with delight, entertained by all your cousins.

Where are the wise, older saints? she asked me as we visited, the pair of us sipping coffee and bearing each other’s burdens.

We are longtime friends, nearing our mid-fifties, and devastated by the stream of precious women waltzing away from Christianity, building sandcastles out of fool’s gold, falling for the promises of this world, as the crashing tide rushes in and levels.

The lack of mature Christian women willing to gently come alongside and equip younger women with the glorious truths of the Bible is astounding.

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A young Christian woman (one of many, it seems) has built an empire on social media. Her TikTok platform promotes non-toxic living— from cleaning products to makeup to clothing to furniture to food. Extravagant oils, organic meats, and cost-prohibitive protein powders are highly esteemed, with guilt-inducing videos pleading with women to replace all of their toxic furniture, clothing, bedding—pronto! pronto!—and on and on it goes. Hundreds of videos, thousands of hours spent heralding the duty of non-toxic shopping, alongside plenty of paid endorsements.

Our oldest grandson recently spent the weekend with us, a monthly event that my husband and I enjoy to the hilt. It is largely an unchanging routine: We load up the snack drawer and cookie jar, and before we know it, we are tossing the football, building Legos, driving matchboxes, designing train tracks for Thomas the Tank Engine, reading good books, singing, and playing Go Fish and I Spy. In the cooler months, we roast marshmallows over the fire pit and sip coffee-milk on the front porch. Regardless of weather, there is always ice cream.

It is a big time.

Come Sunday, we go to church.

It often feels serendipitous—the way people have appeared in the nick of time, illuminating my path.

Those lantern lights are gifts from the kind and providential hands of God, whose timing is exquisite, knowing exactly what his children require to become more like the Son. The Lord knows who are his, and orchestrates seasons of suffering to whittle away the sin clinging stubbornly to our frames, sins working to diminish what we ought to become. How gracious of him to send people to help.

Some of God’s lanterns I have known face to face: beloved family and beloved friends, while others died before my time, saints of old, discovered through Scripture and biography, men and women whose devotion to Christ still illuminates God’s path, posthumously.

Other lanterns have been lesser-known people, waking, walking, and working in quiet fidelity, largely unseen by most.

Today, I remember one.

Do you find yourself following your heart’s desires or God’s desires?

Are you awakened, brought alive by worldly things or heavenly things?  

As John Calvin so famously said, our hearts are idol-making factories, and isn’t that the truth?

Every idol is rooted in self adoration, broadly revealing itself in a mantra running rampant.

The slogan?

Last Mother’s Day, I made a bold request: Could we pretty please take our disheveled box of camcorder tapes and have them digitized?

And then I did the math.

Forget that idea. Too expensive.

My husband, however, did not forget the idea. He shipped the box.

He said yes.

In fifth grade, I left behind my public elementary school life and transitioned to a tiny Classical School in New England, where autumns burn gloriously, and scholarly minds are most prized.

After the first few weeks at this school, I accepted two cold facts: the headmaster regarded our studies as the be-all and end-all, and the brightest students were her charms.