Here are the things that caught my attention this week:

First, from Brain, Mother, an essay about ice cream trucks and childhood and enjoying small pleasures. “But isn’t life richer for the dd, beautiful things that we experience?”

I found this exploration of the history of those who were against woman’s suffrage in Britain to be interesting and enlightening. While I am certainly grateful for my right to vote, the arguments raised were not what I learned in school – not by a long shot.

Addie Zierman writes from Armenia again, this time about how we don’t need to care about everything. As I’ve been settling more and more into this role of mother, I’ve realized that I just don’t have the time or energy to devote to many different causes, that though the information age has the potential to make somebody halfway around the world my neighbor, I am unable to love seven billion neighbors well. I’ve been working through this in my mind, this balance between focusing on the things in front of me and following Jesus’ command to care for the least of these (and may write a post or two about it in coming weeks). Addie’s post hits that balance well.

While we’re talking about changing the world, Billy Coffey has a post up about our actions making a difference without us even knowing it. I loved his conclusion, that “I realized what may be the biggest tragedy of all—that we can always see the effect of this world upon us, but rarely the effect of us upon the world.” How much would it change our behavior if we could see how we were helping or hurting others in our everyday lives?

Finally, Tsh Oxenreider writes beautifully about the art of noticing your three square feet, a topic that fits quite nicely with the idea of choosing this moment.

That’s it for me this week. How about you? Read anything worth sharing?