Entries by Janice Palko

Maybe I’m Amazed

By Janice Lane Palko Do you collect anything? Aside from the occasional Christmas ornament I pick up whenever I travel to a new destination, I don’t collect anything material. However, I do have a collection of intangible treasures that I regard as priceless. One gem is the first time I saw a shooting star. I […]

It’s Perfect – Not!

By Janice Lane Palko It was Father’s Day weekend thirty-one years ago. Married only a couple of years, my husband and I had moved into our first house that previous January. We’d spent that spring painting, wallpapering—the things you do to get a home into shape. On Saturday of that weekend, I’d cleaned the whole […]

When Picking up Your Pen Is Picking up Your Cross

By Janice Lane Palko How do you regard your writing career? Perhaps you’re like me. I’ve been putting words on paper for more than 20 years, and I’ve always regarded my propensity to write as a being a blessing and as a calling of sorts. I wrote last month how God and, to a lesser […]

What Was Intended for Harm

By Janice Lane Palko Several years ago, my family and I were seated in lawn chairs in a shopping center parking lot that overlooked Pittsburgh’s skyline. As darkness descended, we gazed at the sky awaiting the city’s Fourth of July fireworks when my soon-to-be son-in-law bolted from his chair and made a beeline to a […]

Who Do You Say That I Am?

By Janice Lane Palko You’ve seen those Ancestry commercials about people who believe they are one race or nationality and then take a DNA test and find out they are not who they thought they were. My husband could be featured in one of those commercials. This past Christmas, I bought him a DNA test […]

Pick up the Orange

By Janice Lane Palko Some people receive profound promptings from the Holy Spirit. Me? I get messages like “pick up the orange.” A few weeks ago, I walked into my local grocery store and saw a woman select some oranges and put them in a plastic bag. As she walked away out of the corner […]