This blog has moved on

It was time to "repot" this blog. You'll find it at theflourishingtree.com.

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You've heard the expression, "Bloom where you're planted." While I believe it's a good saying to encourage us to make the best of our circumstances, I also think it's true that sometimes we simply need to move out of particular situations to improve our lives.

If you're like me, you're already looking around your garden preparing for Spring and planning what plants you might need to repot or move to a different part of the garden. Repotting or transplanting plants can be essential to those plants' survival. Maybe the pots are too small for their roots to thrive. Maybe their spot in the garden has become too shady for them to grow and bloom and flourish the way they should.

The same may be true of your own life. Sometimes staying put and making the best of a situation is simply not the best strategy. Maybe it's a destructive relationship that we need to leave behind. Or an untenable work environment. Or an addiction to something unhealthy. Or simply a lazy habit.

In last week's post, I gave you 29 reasons to stop procrastinating and make whatever leap you've been considering. And I promised a leap of my own: "repotting" this blog from Blogspot to WordPress.

So voila! If you have my blog bookmarked, please take a moment to update your bookmark. You might also like to follow me by email (look for the email subscription link at the top right). Subscribing this way means you get every new post delivered directly to your inbox, so you'll never miss a message from me. For those of you very dear readers who follow me here at blogspot, please feel free to unfollow me here and follow me at the new blog: theflourishingtree.com.

I look forward to seeing you there and hearing what you think of the blog's new "pot."

Fig season is a long way off

From the archives ... my very first post on this blog. As I edit to make the big move mentioned in Wednesday's post, this post somehow decided it wanted to be first in the list again. So here it is. Enjoy, and look for a new post from me next week -- announcing a new home for the blog.

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My minister, Ned Hill, spoke this last Sunday about his love of figs ... and his inability to turn down the offer of some fresh figs from a stranger on a park bench in DC. The two of them conversed for a bit, and then, seemingly out of the blue, the stranger said, "My God, you're a preacher!" Turns out the stranger was a Rabbi, and he could recognize one of his own kind.

Well, all of this made me crave figs, and we're still dealing with a frigidly cold winter and the forecast for more of the white stuff coming our way. Dried figs aren't really going to satisfy the craving, and so I'll just have to wait patiently and, instead, fill myself up with stories about fig trees from the Bible.

There are two main reasons I'm talking about craving figs here. One is to tout a great new book by Lysa TerKeurst called Made to Crave, where she invites women (and men, too) to hold on to the truth that "we were made to crave ... God, not food." So while I'll have to wait a few months to satisfy my craving for fresh figs, I can satisfy my need for fig stories and what they say about God's truth for my life by turning to the Bible.

That's the second reason I'm writing about figs in the middle of winter. I want to introduce you to this new blog: Flourishing Tree. I hope you'll read along as I share my journey through the Bible to explore the ways trees spring up as metaphors for how we should live our lives.  Along with Biblical encounters, I'll share with you some other ways my life is flourishing: through writing, running, reading, art, music and more. And I hope you'll do the same -- the seeds you share here may be just what another reader needs to transform into a flourishing tree, too!

Blessings,
Hope