when god (and your daughter) turn your life upside down
It would appear God is preparing to stretch me in ways I wasn’t quite prepared to be stretched. The writing thing? Yep. Was prepared for THAT stretching. Knew it would be uncomfortable. Knew it would be hard. And time-consuming. And eeeeeeennnndlessssssssss. But these newest helpings on my plate? I don’t know where they came from. I just looked down and they were suddenly there, touching the other food on my plate and overwhelming me a bit with their portion size. Both of these big scoops of faith-stretching goodness have to do with my middle...
Read Moreyou tell me: turning points
What do you sense God might be prompting you to turn from? To? What most gets in the way of doing this? What can you do about that? What will you do?
Read Moretransformative trust
(This post is dedicated with my deepest sympathy and hope to Nicolle Bompart of Eyes Wide Open International) If you know me well, or if you’ve spent any time at all on my couch, you’ve heard me mention, at least once, Hannah Hurnard’s spiritual allegory, Hind’s Feet on High Places. On my Top Five Books of All Time list, its impact on my life, and on many others who have read it, has been profound. (You can read more about my own experience with “Much Afraid” here.) Hind’s Feet on High Places tells the story of little Much Afraid, a crippled and disfigured young...
Read Moreyou tell me: how easily do you trust?
Many of us have experienced having the ability to trust God in some situations, but not in others, or to trust God’s concern for other people, but not for them personally. In what situations do you have difficulty trusting God? Where does this difficulty arise from, for you? Have you experienced God’s love and goodness toward you as REAL? If so, what facilitated that? If not, what do you think has prevented...
Read Moretrusting when we don’t understand
This trusting God thing is not easy. It requires a tenacious, bull-dog kind of faith—especially when it is tested. We moved to Columbus in the fall of 2000. A year later, we entered one of those seasons of testing. My husband got laid off in the seventh round of post- 9/11 layoffs from the job we’d moved away from my family and private practice for. We’d bought our first house just the month before. A week later, without health insurance, we found out I was pregnant with our second child. We learned at our 16 week ultrasound appointment I was, as I’d suspected, expecting...
Read Morebecoming a better me: trust
Here we are in week three of our quest to become BETTER—to be conformed into the image of Christ and become bearers of his likeness—and we have discussed, so far, our need to BEGIN by overcoming inertia-causing fear and to EMBRACE the life-changing grace of God. The next item on our biblical resolution list: TRUST. To become better, we must trust in God’s goodness and sovereignty. Trust is a tricky subject—it’s difficult when we’re talking about trusting other people, let alone talking about trusting God. It can be hard, sometimes, to trust in someone you can neither...
Read Morethe best laid plans…
So if the first problem we encounter when trying to become “re-newed” is our tendency to force renewal by our own strength and frantic efforts, the second most frequent problem would have to be our tendency to create a grand, elaborate plan for renewal in the first place. Many of us approach a new year, a new season of life, a new habit, or a new adventure with resources in hand and paper handy to create a master road-map to get us to where we want to go. The problem? There are two problems, as I see it. The first is that we can have a tendency to over-do it. The more elaborate the...
Read Morelaying tracks
I have been absent here over the last few weeks as I’ve worked literally night and day to prepare for SheSpeaks, my first official writer’s conference, where I will be pitching More: My Search for That Which Really Satisfies, my manuscript about the struggles outline here on this blog. The proposal has been professionally critiqued not once but twice, my promotional materials look AWESOME, and I’m working today on my pitch speech. It has been a whirlwind, to say the least. As I’ve thought about this conference, I’ve vacillated between confidence and...
Read Moremy night is not my own
It’s been another one of those days. After an angsty week of desperately trying to get to the computer to get some much-needed work done, I was going to spend a few hours this morning working on my proposal and putting up a few new posts. Breakfast with a friend, then pick up my daughter from the youth car wash, then home by 11:00. Three hours to write before getting ready and going out with my husband for the afternoon/evening. Great. Breakfast is pushed back. No problem. I roll with it, and am actually thankful for the extra sleep. (Never mind that my dedicated friend I...
Read More(not) living in denial
*sigh* I’ve done it again. I was losing weight, slowly but surely. Pants I’d not been able to wiggle into were now sliding over my rear-end and some were even fastening around the middle. Shirts weren’t as clingy and curve-revealing. People were commenting that I looked like I’d lost weight. I didn’t feel like wrapping my arms around my waist or hiding underneath large, shapeless sweaters. I felt a glimmer of hope, like the first ray of golden yellow that spreads across the horizon at sunrise. Until. Until my daughter’s birthday, when I decided...
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