Ron L. Deal's Blog (5)

Usually when people refer to "the morning after," they mean the morning after a drunken party, but in this case, it’s the morning after a different kind of party.



Yesterday, I boarded a plane to Little Rock so I could share in the marriage renewal ceremony of some dear friends of mine. After 18 years of marriage, they needed a fresh start to celebrate what the Lord had done in their hearts and marriage.



Like my wife and I, they have been through the refining fire of marriage… Continue

One of my most prized Christmas videos is also one of my saddest. Let me explain.

Christmas is the season of hope. The time of year when families find blocks of time to be together and the world is reminded of the Christ-child who built a bridge of redemption for those marred by sin. It’s a time when people of faith speak openly and unashamedly about their Savior and when a shared gift warms the heart with love. It’s a time ripe with tradition and ritual: traditions that guide our…

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“But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us”

(Romans 5:8 NIV).



Isn’t that an amazing truth? We didn’t earn God’s gift of grace (and couldn’t). We didn’t ask for his grace

(didn’t know we needed it). And we didn’t know the fullness of God’s love for us (how could we?) until

we came to see that God took the initiative to build a bridge to restore our relationship with Him, even

when we didn’t see the need for… Continue

Everyone wants to be normal. From the time we are very young we have an innate desire to fit in and not stand out as “weird” or “different”. Stepfamilies often fall into the same trap, even to their own demise.



Research consistently reveals that many adults in stepfamilies avoid labels such as stepmom, stepfather, or stepchild preferring less negative labels such as father, friend, or “my wife’s daughter”. Indeed, being called a “stepfamily” brings much irritation to a fair… Continue

Seven-year-old Kyron Horman has been missing from his home in Oregon for weeks and authorities are looking everywhere to find him. It must have been the stepmother, right?



Apparently authorities are now taking a closer look at Terri Horman, Kyron’s stepmom. Of course, I have no idea whether the stepmother is guilty in this case, but what is troubling is that society finds it easy to believe that a stepmother is the culprit. One post to an online news report said, “The stepmom was my… Continue