Stories of trauma, pain, abuse, church hurt, organizational dysfunction, mental health struggles, overwhelming fear, unnecessary backlash, sickness or sudden chaos… there is tremendous pain in each of these stories and so few who know how to hold a story. Often, it isn’t just one story. It’s a layered story built up over time coming from…
As I begin writing again, I can’t help but recognize the books that have impacted me this year and share my book list with you. It has been a year of growth, introspection, counseling, truth-telling and learning to simply have compassion on myself. I’ve learned that the lessons of just keep going have truly kept…
I was sitting at my desk, on a call with a friend, and she asked, “Where have you been?” I wasn’t sure exactly what she meant… South Africa? Working? Homeschooling my girls? She said, “Well, another friend at church was asking about you because we don’t see you online much anymore. We see brief updates…
Last year, I took some time to gather the posts that I’d written through the year and put them in one place. It’s amazing how much of a journey, a story is told through listing one writing after another, seeing God at work in the different months and moments of a year. As I sit…
It must have been a verse that was used in our overseas training or in a long ago chapel service as we prepared to begin our overseas career. I don’t remember the speaker or the moment I first heard this version of it. I’m not sure who I was sitting with or what I wore…
If someone had sat me down in January 2020 and told me what the year would hold, I would not have believed them. It would have seemed so incredibly out there that I would have laughed and wondered what bad pizza they ate the night before. A worldwide pandemic? Closed borders? Frantic embassy emails warning…
I wrote about stepping outside your comfort zone a few years ago and it was originally published on Grit & Virtue for International Women’s Day. This year, I thought I’d republish here for you. Learning to keep a soft strength while also learning to step outside your comfort zone, do big things for God and…
Coming to the end of me has been a long, beautiful, terrible, difficult journey. Overseas life continues to bring me to this place of surrender, laying down the me I thought I was and allowing Jesus a chance to mold a new creation. I wrote a post called “The End of Me” for Velvet Ashes….
In a world that’s changing moment by moment, sadness and fear looming above us and around us, there is this sense of feeling upended, shifted, and knocked over. It’s a feeling that hurts and digs deep. The feeling that life has knocked you down and the fall has taken your breath away. Sometimes it’s something…
End of content
End of content