grace

  • Decency Without Courage Is Useless

    There is a kind of person modern society praises endlessly. The agreeable person. The one who keeps the peace, who tries to understand every side, who smooths the air in a room the moment tension begins to gather. They are thoughtful. Careful. Generous with the benefit of the doubt. And yet I have come to…

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  • The Audit

    The Audit

    What exhilarates me about Christianity is not that it comforts me. It does. But more than that, it challenges me. Exposes me.  The scale is so high of what Christ demands. God does not come to me like a therapist with a clipboard or a consultant asking for my preferences. He comes as the one…

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  • Heart Work Comes First

    Heart Work Comes First

    Some mornings it feels like my heart is its own little plot of land, stubborn and overgrown. Not a polished garden, just soil that needs attention and a woman determined to show up anyway. That’s the real work: tending what you’d rather ignore. I’ve learned that resentment grows fast if you let it. Neglect does…

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  • Jewels, Gems & Gunpowder

    I would love to hear from you! A Jewel: I’m reading through the book of Isaiah right now. It’s a bit of a hard read but I understand fully what Isaiah was saying in his time. He was a “piercing poet, who understood the two-sided nature of God’s character; mercy and judgment, grace and discipline,…

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  • Grace in the Ashes

    When one’s family of origin is a nest of suffering, it is as if life begins in exile, cast out from the warmth that should cradle the soul. The walls are soaked with weeping; the air hums with the static of unspoken anguish. A child born into such a place grows not like a tender…

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  • Somewhere along the road, we were told that to matter, we had to harden. That softness was weakness. That to succeed, we had to compete like men, speak like men, perform like men. And in many ways, the world rewarded us when we did. But something sacred was lost. Womanhood is not a costume to…

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  • Jewels, Gems & Gunpowder

    I would love to hear from you! Sharing Saturday with you. A Jewel: King Solomon wrote Ecclesiastes, a book in the Old Testament, where he seeks to understand the purpose of life through wisdom, pleasure, and toil.  The chapter starts off with King Solomon talking to himself: “I said to myself, “Have fun and enjoy…

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  • In the turbulent waters of my heroin addiction, I was a sailor lost, my vessel breaking against the jagged shores of despair. Every needle was a desperate row, an attempt to steer away from the wreckage I was becoming. My oars, stained with the shadows of self-destruction, fought against the currents that whispered of a…

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  • Jewels, Gems & Gunpowder

    I would love to hear from you! Sharing Saturday with you. A Jewel: I love John Eldridge of Wild at Heart ministry. I want to share one of his daily readings with you, “I love feeling happy. Absolutely love it. Who doesn’t? But my pursuit of it has sometimes gotten me into trouble. I’m pretty…

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  • Jewels, Gems & Gunpowder

    I would love to hear from you! Sharing Saturday with you. A Jewel: Easter is tomorrow. It means a great deal to me because Father God left his residence to come into ours and meet us where we are. He took our shame, our guilt, our discouragement and lack of understanding and he wrapped it…

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