Breaking Free from Body Shame
Whether you struggle with illness, injury, or just insecurity: I believe God’s Word can be a balm for our souls and a pathway to freedom. It’s one thing to know in your head that you were created in the image of God. Yet it’s quite another to experience this belief in your body, against the cultural ideals of a woman’s worth. And between the two lies a world of frustration, disappointment, and the shame of somehow feeling both too much and never enough in your body.
Finding Grace in Singleness
I’ve learned that my desires don't define my life. His grace does. On the days when my heart wants to wage war on what I know to be true in my mind, God in His grace reminds me that being single is my relationship status and not an appraisal of my worth.
Stop Making Time for What Matters Most
In a world of two-hour delivery, on-demand movies, and online car buying, maybe we should ask ourselves, where is it that we find what matters most? Maybe it’s somewhere different than we thought. Maybe it is in the mundane tasks that make up life: the prescription pick-up, the water drawing, the aisle wandering. Maybe it’s time we walk to the well again.
How Did We Get Here? The Science of Faith
Humanity is the work of God’s own hands. If you think that life on Earth took four billion years or so to get where it is now, the Bible gives you room to hold this view. If you believe it took seven days, the Bible gives you a solid place to stand. What it does not yield to either camp is that we are a cosmic accident.
The Shape They Are
For these 2 hours, I could just surrender the impossibility of trying to recognize and categorize every worry in the world—as we grow and gray, we realize: they are the shape that they are.
Choosing “Through”
God never intended for us to be damsels rescued from distress, but for us to be His co-laborers in this beautiful world, which means he wants us to wake up to who we were created to be.
5 Things Not to Say to Someone Who Is Grieving
What are some unhelpful cliches that we can remove altogether from our lexicon of well-intentioned responses? The next time you find yourself across the table from a grieving friend, here are some phrases to avoid and some phrases to offer instead.
Where You’re Planted
I’ve long felt intimidated by the vast catalog of contemplative disciplines, viewing them as something else I’m supposed to do, follow in a particular order, using precise language, while journaling, as the sun rises, before checking my phone. What I’m finding my soul desperate for these days, though, is silence. Sometimes the most helpful something is a sacred nothing.
Eyes to See
I used to believe that on Earth, most of us received an equal distribution of pain; we all had a comparable storm to endure. But after two storms in my first quarter of a century—my dad’s suicide and a seventeen-hour brain surgery—I started to wonder if maybe this wasn’t true. Maybe pain didn’t play fair.
Redefining Communion
We can make our way through entire days and weeks without acknowledging the Beauty of our Creator. Without admiring His creation, or loving our neighbor. Without taking one long look in the mirror, and choosing to truly love what we see. To acknowledge the truth that the Image of God exists within me.
Faith By Hearing
We all want to be heard, to be known, to have someone/anyone validate that we are here, that our desires are worthy, our pain is not wasted, our life is seen. Often we transmit what we’ve been taught. Other times, we fashion new ways to be noticed. For thousands and thousands of years, humans have sent out our signals, hoping that there is someone on the other end who is listening.
Luxury Problems
None of us can control much, but we can control our response in life. Each unexpected moment presents us with that opportunity to focus on the bitterness or the blessing.
For What Didn’t Happen
He has permitted certain pains, but He has spared you from far more than you could ever begin to comprehend, neither as a punishment nor as a reward but as a means in which to more fully understand His grace.
What You Get When You Choose Gratitude
This rhythm of thanking God even in the loss of expectation begins to retrain our minds to recognize Him sometimes withholding not just the things we desire but blessedly, the things we most fear.
Naming the Good
It is our choice, perhaps our duty even, to see this good and to call it by name. We must tell each other the story, from the grandiose themes to the name of the smallest beloved one, and in so doing we make manifest the story of hope that is within us all, and it is good.
On Anniversaries
Every year as spring is reaching its zenith of new life, we’re forced to remember how Katherine nearly died, out of the clear blue. Despite her "resurrection" of sorts, many other things died that day. And yet, in a very sobering way, life is a series of these little deaths, calling us to really live.
The Final Question
Sometimes, the asking is more important than the answers, because it reminds us that we still have a voice and we are not alone, even in the midst of the great mysteries of our lives.
Waiting for the Second Advent
How could we, the fair-weather receivers of His gospel ever hope to emulate this commanding voice in the wilderness? How could we the broken parents, the disobedient children, the unwise and unrighteous ever wholeheartedly proclaim, “prepare ye the way of the Lord”? Well, we can because He already has.
The Thorns
Since we know the end of the story, we can confidently endure, moreover embrace, the depth of suffering guaranteed in our own days. It is impossible to live in the joy of new life if we don't first internalize just how far we've been taken away from death.
A Short Story of Hope
As life continues and with it struggles and with them hope, we find ourselves losing our grips on the things we don’t even know we are holding so tightly. And yet, we finally find our rest, secure in arms more capable, more loving, more alive than our own.