Schooling

Homeschool, Public School, or Private School?

January 27, 2025January 26, 2025 Rebekah Matt1 Comment

If you’re looking at different schooling possibilities for your children, or if you’re wondering if the grass really is greener somewhere else, you’ve come to the right place to think through your different options.

Now, this doesn’t mean I’ll tell you what to do. There are lots of people who would love to tell you exactly what you should do—you may have run into them already. But I don’t believe there is only One Right Way to educate children. There are too many variables (among families, schools, children, circumstances) to make such a sweeping statement. What I will do here is to help you think through all of your options, honestly and hopefully without bias.

A Famous Poet, KFC, and Peace with My Past

January 13, 2025February 4, 2025 Rebekah Matt2 Comments

Nikki Giovanni—famous poet and winner of dozens of awards—died last month at age 81. We never met in person, so she’ll never know that one particularly interesting thing she did while eating lunch at a Kentucky Fried Chicken more than 25 years ago greatly touched my life.

By the time she was in her late fifties and eating that lunch at KFC, Nikki Giovanni was hugely famous, as poets go. In addition to her numerous literary awards, she was also a longtime professor of English literature at Virginia Tech, and by the time she reached old age, she had received 31 honorary doctorates. Despite having grown up in poverty in the 1940s and ’50s, she had risen to a high station in life due to her own tenacity and literary talents.

I have it on good authority that she was also a really nice, down-to-earth person. When she came to our city in the late 1990s as part of the library’s literary speakers series, my husband, who worked in the library’s marketing department, had the privilege of accompanying her where she needed or wanted to go. And where she wanted to go, after she was done speaking and on her way back to the airport, was Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Reading

My Year-End Favorite Book List – 2024

December 30, 2024February 6, 2025 Rebekah Matt2 Comments

I love all of the “favorite books” lists that abound at the end of each year. I’ll look at lists from just about anyone, no matter how much our reading tastes might (or might not) overlap, just because it’s interesting to me what people like to read.

I read a total of 25 fiction and 16 nonfiction books this year, with five abandoned (DNF) and a couple I merely skimmed. I hope you can find some new reading ideas among these favorite books I read in 2024. All books are listed simply in the order I read them during the year.

Reading

Encouraging Stories and Reflections for Every Mom

December 26, 2024January 13, 2025 Rebekah MattLeave a comment

Sometimes the title says it all, and sometimes it falls a little short. Here’s a book that’s much more than you might suspect from its title.

Devoted: Great Men and Their Godly Moms, by Tim Challies, is a mere 124 pages long but is packed with encouragement, wisdom, exhortation, and downright fascinating stories about eleven famous Christian men and their mothers. I’ve read books similar to this before (such as Lamplighter’s Mothers of Famous Men), and they’ve been about what I’ve expected: fairly interesting stories about strong and virtuous women who’ve raised children on to greatness, in a wise and godly manner. This one is so much more.

What makes Devoted different?

Faith

My Scripture Writing Tools

December 16, 2024July 9, 2025 Rebekah Matt2 Comments

Here’s everything I use for Scripture writing, all in one place—plus a new Scripture Writing Tracker you can download for free.

It gives me great joy that so many people have tried Scripture writing as a result of reading about it here on my blog. Whether they’ve chosen the three-year, topical approach (monthly themes and very short passages) or whether they’ve gone directly to writing out entire books of the Bible, many readers are doing this for the first time, and it’s made a difference in the quality of their time with the Word.

Reading

Phone-Free and Play-Full

November 25, 2024January 13, 2025 Rebekah MattLeave a comment

Phone-free and play-full. That’s what childhood used to be, and if you’re over a certain age (born before 1995, about), this probably describes your own childhood.

These two phrases—phone-free and play-full—are my big takeaways from Jonathan Haidt’s bestselling book The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. The copy I read is pictured above, with my many sticky notes still attached.

You might know Haidt as the co-author of the 2018 bestseller about college students, The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure, among other books. He’s an NYU professor and social psychologist who says in The Anxious Generation what has been obvious to many people just from observation and personal experience, and he’s got the data to back it up.

Faith

Let’s Talk About Envy

November 18, 2024January 13, 2025 Rebekah MattLeave a comment

All it takes is one little picture. One little comment. One fleeting glimpse of another person’s:

appearance

home

car

vacation

purchases

accomplishments

income

position

giftings

spouse

children

family

—any aspect of their life that appears to be better than yours. That knotted-up, burning feeling of envy might begin in your heart, your stomach, or your head … along with a familiar mantra of: look what they have that I don’t. Look what they have that I never will. Look at the multiple blessings they get from God when I do without so many.

I could pretend that this post came about because I observed envy in another person, or that someone came to me asking for counsel about it, or that I had been reading a book on it and wanted to share some new insight. But none of that is true. This post was written because I’ve fallen into the trap of envy many times in my life. I’m intimately familiar with what triggers it, what it feels like, how to wallow in it, and (thank you, God) the best ways to overcome it.

Can you relate?

Faith

Election Year Hymn

October 28, 2024January 13, 2025 Rebekah MattLeave a comment

Strange but true: I have a personal earworm tradition that’s tied to the U.S. election cycle. This earworm took up residence in my head in October of 2016 and lasted about a month; it repeated this exact time frame in 2020, and is back again in 2024. Thankfully, it’s a hymn I love and don’t mind it being on constant repeat inside my head. It’s also the hymn that gets me through a difficult and contentious election cycle—in one piece, spiritually, mentally, and emotionally—with friendships and family relationships intact, with neighbors and communities that I still love, and with hope and peace instead of anger and despair.

Faith

In Unfriendly Territory: The Bible on Social Media

October 14, 2024January 13, 2025 Rebekah Matt4 Comments

Recently I had an eye-opening experience as a result of a Facebook marketing error. I learned a few things from this glitch … about the worst parts of social media, about some people’s hatred for the Bible, and about the Christian bubble that I apparently live in, at least online.

I’ve written a couple of times about my practice of daily Scripture writing, and my first article on how to begin Scripture writing is still the most popular post on my blog. This brings me great joy, that many people have found a new way to interact with and respond to the Word of God by writing it out.

Last year, my first Scripture writing article went out on Facebook as a “sponsored post,” meaning that it was boosted to reach an entirely new audience beyond just the people who follow my page. It had such a positive outcome that I decided to boost my second post on Scripture writing, as well. I loved the idea of more people being exposed to the idea of this daily spiritual discipline that they might want to try.

And that’s when something went wrong. This time around, Meta (Facebook) seemed to have lost its ability to determine who might actually want to see Christian content in their newsfeed.

Faith

Getting the Most Out of Scripture Writing

September 23, 2024July 9, 2025 Rebekah Matt8 Comments

Six years this month. That’s how long I’ve been doing daily Scripture writing: copying out the Word of God by hand, passage by passage, book by book.

I began slowly, with just a few verses a day, following an easy, three-year plan that was organized by theme. When I finished that, I wanted more, so I started copying out entire books of the Bible—and I’m still at it. You can read how all of this developed (not only for me but for two of my friends) in Ready to Try Scripture Writing?, which is still the most-read post on this blog.

Even after six years of daily copying, one thing remains the same for me: Scripture writing has transformed my time with God’s Word more than anything else I’ve ever done.