There’s a moment in spring when you walk outside and something has shifted overnight. Growing happens whether or not you’re paying attention, but it’s best if you take an intentional moment to pay attention. You can’t point to the exact day it happened. The trees didn’t announce it. The ground didn’t send a notification. But […]
I kept a journal from my early twenties that I reread a few years ago. It was my way of measuring how well I’d been growing in my faith, in my spiritual walk, in life. I’m not sure what I was expecting. Maybe some nostalgic warmth, a few cringe-worthy fashion references, the general amusement of […]
I have in recent years become a bit more of a solitary grower. Other than a few rants out loud, I’ve mostly processed things internally. Maybe it’s spiritual growth, but lately, I’ve believed the deepest growth happens in private. In the quiet, in the pages of a journal, in the space between me and God […]
I once spent six months getting really good at something that wasn’t helping me with my growth at all. It was a system I’d built for managing my writing projects. Color-coded, cross-referenced, beautifully organized across three different apps that all talked to each other in ways that made me proud of what I’d accomplished. I […]
There was a Tulip Poplar tree in my backyard that I pretty much ignored for two years. But growth happened anyway. I didn’t plant it intentionally. It showed up in the corner of the yard the way most plants do. Uninvited, unplanned, easy to overlook. At first, the small sprout didn’t bother me. Just a […]
I didn’t expect the year I asked God to grow me to be one of the hardest years I can remember. Looking back, I’m not sure what I thought would happen. Maybe a quiet deepening. A gentle stretching. Some new insight arriving on a Tuesday morning with my coffee, leaving me wiser and largely undisturbed. […]
I have a friend who can quote movie lines the way some people quote Scripture. Her habits are genuinely impressive! It doesn’t matter the genre, the decade, the obscurity level. She has it. We’ll be mid-conversation about something completely unrelated, and suddenly she’s delivering a line from a film I barely remember seeing, perfectly timed, […]
There is a particular kind of discouragement that occurs when growth doesn’t look dramatic from the outside. You take the time to focus on improvement in some way, but the outward evidence isn’t showing yet. It’s not a crisis. It’s not a loss. It’s just the quiet suspicion that nothing is actually moving. You’ve been […]
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