Category: Christianity

The Valentine’s Day Dinner

Posted on by Staci Mauney

My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. (John 15:12)

Years ago, I attended a small Baptist church in my hometown. When I say “small,” I mean that we had about fifteen to twenty regular attendees. I was by far the youngest attendee—by about twenty years.

One year, the women of the church decided to hold a Valentine’s Day dinner. They fixed lasagna, salad, and breadsticks—yum.

But I wasn’t going to go. I thought it wasn’t for me because I was recently divorced, and honestly, the last thing I wanted to do was celebrate love.

Eventually, I changed my mind. I don’t remember who convinced me. Maybe it was my mom, or maybe it was my aunt, who played the piano at church and helped organize the dinner. Both of them knew I didn’t need to be sitting around by myself, moping the night away. Continue reading “The Valentine’s Day Dinner” →

Fighting Burnout

Posted on by Staci Mauney

When Jesus saw the crowd around him, he gave orders to cross to the other side of the lake. (Matt. 8:18)

Merriam Webster’s defines burnout as “exhaustion of physical or emotional strength or motivation usually as a result of prolonged stress or frustration.” In January 2022, the American Psychological Association (APA) reported that burnout and stress were at all-time highs across all professions, and statistics show that just 51 percent of small businesses make it past five years.

None of these statistics are in my favor as a small business owner coming out of the pandemic. I’ve run Prestige Prose for almost eight years now. The good news is, my business has survived the pandemic while many others have not. Continue reading “Fighting Burnout” →

Details Matter

Posted on by Staci Mauney

So make yourself an ark of cypress wood; make rooms in it and coat it with pitch inside and out. This is how you are to build it . . . (Genesis 6:14–15)

As a writer and editor, I know that details matter. If a comma is out of place or missing, it can change the meaning of a sentence. When writing a scene for my cozy mystery, it’s important to include details so that the reader can “see” what’s happening in the story.

It can be tempting to think the details of our lives don’t matter to God—that he’s too busy running the universe and helping people with bigger problems than our own. Continue reading “Details Matter” →

New Year, New You

Posted on by Staci Mauney

Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! (2 Cor. 5:17)

The new year brings with it the promise of a clean slate, with greater things yet to come. Each year as the calendar turns over, we hear refrains of “new year, new you” echoing everywhere—in ads on TV, on the radio, and on social media. Bloggers write about ways you can make changes and make a fresh start as the new year rolls around.

The problem with this is that we don’t leave our problems behind just because the date on the calendar has changed. Difficult situations that we faced on December 31 are still there on January 1. Continue reading “New Year, New You” →

Looking through New Lenses

Posted on by Staci Mauney

We don’t yet see things clearly. We’re squinting in a fog, peering through a mist. But it won’t be long before the weather clears and the sun shines bright! We’ll see it all then, see it all as clearly as God sees us, knowing him directly just as he knows us! (1 Cor. 13:12 MSG)

In the last two years, it had become more and more difficult to wear my contact lenses, until finally I couldn’t wear them at all. I had purchased cheap glasses to wear at night, but I ended up wearing them all the time. Because my eyesight is how I make my living as an editor, I decided to invest in a nice pair of glasses with Neurolens. (This blog post isn’t a commercial for Neurolens, but I do want to mention how the lenses are designed to help realign your eyes, and they work well for people like me who are in front of a computer screen all day.)

A recent trip to the optometrist came with a surprise—I needed reading glasses. Why this came as a surprise, I don’t know. For several months prior, when I worked on editing projects, I would increase the size of the document on my screen so that I could catch all those pesky punctuation marks that were in the wrong place. The increase was gradual—first 110 percent, then 120, then 140. In fact, the funny thing is, things became blurry so gradually that it didn’t even register with me that it was happening. Continue reading “Looking through New Lenses” →