There’s a chapter of my story I don’t tell often. I’m not still ashamed of it, though, because I’ve genuinely made peace with it. It’s a fantastic story about mercy and second chances, but it involves other people whose privacy matters to me. And some stories aren’t entirely yours to tell even when they’re about […]
There was a woman in my life a few years back who made it difficult to choose compassion over judgment when she spoke to me. She had a gift for saying the wrong thing at the wrong moment. I don’t believe she did it maliciously. She just had a consistency that made every interaction feel […]
Eight years ago, a close friend said something about me to someone else. Something that wasn’t true, that found its way back to me through the worst possible chain of people and in a season when I was already running low on reserves. Forgiving others was the last thing on my mind! I know she […]
For a lot of years of my adult life, receiving race did not come easily to me. Even today, I catch myself starting to brush it off. That’s when my mind goes back to when a friend showed up at my door once with dinner, flowers, and two hours of her time during a particularly […]
I am, by nature, a somewhat task-oriented person. I like lists. I like progress. I like the satisfaction of moving something from the undone column to the done column and knowing exactly where I stand. But lists don’t work so well when stewarding relationships. People don’t work like lists. They’re beautifully, sometimes exhaustingly, unpredictable. And […]
I had a picture in my mind of what God’s abundance would look like when it arrived. Margin in my schedule. Breathing room in the budget. A season where the demands slowed down enough that I could finally feel like I was getting ahead rather than just keeping up. I waited for that season for […]
A few years ago someone told me I was a good encourager. Not a writer, not a speaker. An encourager. Honestly, my first reaction was to brush it off. It didn’t feel like a gift in the way I understood gifts. And it certainly didn’t feel like something that would fall under my stewardship of […]
For a long time, I believed that God’s favor was something you earned. Not theologically, of course. I knew better than that. But the way I approached my work and my days held an undercurrent that said if I just did enough, showed up enough, produced enough, then maybe things would go smoothly. Maybe doors […]
I’ll be honest. When I first heard the word abundance, my brain went straight to more. More margin, more resources, more time, more of whatever felt scarce in that particular season. And I spent a fair amount of energy quietly wishing life looked a little fuller than it did. Then one ordinary afternoon I was […]
I had this idea for a long time that living free would just happen. Like one day I’d wake up and the doubt would be gone, the fear would be quiet, the anxious thoughts would have packed their bags and moved out permanently. Life would feel open and light and certain. That day hasn’t come […]
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