For about eighteen months I carried a decision I had made. One I couldn’t undo, one that had affected people I loved, one that I had genuinely repented of and made as right as I possibly could. And I kept picking it back up anyway, putting guilt and grace in the wrong order. Not consciously, […]
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 […]
I missed a deadline last spring. By four days. I had committed to the piece months earlier, for an editor I respected deeply. Unfortunately, I had let the chaos of a brutal homeschool project and three overlapping writing projects convince me I had more time than I did. And I thought I’d blown it. No […]
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 […]
There was a season in my life when I stopped praying. It wasn’t really a conscious decision. I just quietly withdrew, the way you might stop calling a friend after you’ve done something you’re too ashamed to explain. My guilt had me believing I was unforgivable. Knowing what I’d been told for years that mercy […]
I have a friend who knows me well enough to tell me hard things. The relationship we’ve built over years of showing up for each other has created a kind of trust where we feel safe with honesty and not threatened in any way. There’s a gentle encouragement that leads to action when either of […]
At the beginning of this month about God’s favor, I asked myself two questions that I wasn’t entirely sure I knew how to answer. How do I steward what God entrusts? And what does obedience in relationship look like? I’ve been sitting with both of those questions for the past several weeks. Through the writing, […]
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 […]
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