Who’s going to pay for the gas?
The messy and beautiful parts of living in community.
Read MoreExploring faith + Resiliency
The messy and beautiful parts of living in community.
Read MoreWhen church is no longer home * This post was originally published on Substack in May 2022. To receive this content early and join a community of people discussing issues around faith and community candidly, subscribe to Courage & Candor here. I never loved the term “orphaned believer” used by writer, Sara Billups. It is […]
Read MoreWhen prayer is hard and you wonder – am I doing this right? I get it and I have a few things to say about believing I suck at prayer and to learning to love it.
Read MoreFind out what’s next on the blog, plus a few things that are saving my life right now!
Read MoreShame happens; in this journey and frankly, throughout our lives. We can’t completely eliminate shame; it will somehow find a way to get to us because shame is what happens to us and not about our own sinful nature. However, we can become resilient to it. I have adapted this teaching from Brene Brown’s audio teaching “Men, Women, and Worthiness”. You can buy the full teaching on iTunes, Amazon, or Audible. I highly recommend it. Here is a short summary of Brown’s shame resiliency steps.
Read MoreI am not the best at reflection. I am more of a plunge forward continually until I exhaust myself and find myself crying for no apparent reason, kind of person. I have watched Emily P. Freeman do a quarterly reflection blog for every season for quite some time now, and I thought I would give this a go. Here are 7 things I have learned this summer in no particular order.
Read Moreer of negative test results, is it more cost-efficient to buy the big pack or just too painful? I grab a 2 pack and head for the door. Only being 7 days late, the expectations come flooding into my heart and the self-talk starts…
Read MoreI can’t tell you how many times I show up to a blank document and find myself already wishing for a final draft to magically appear. This is one of my biggest mental blocks when it comes to writing and my creative life. Just the sight of a blank page, and I am instantly in panic over the foreseeable rough draft: the run-on sentences, the bad grammar, the unformed thesis and my tendency to overuse the word “that”.
Read MoreI’m feeling the length of Lent this year.
It seems to stretch into a nebulous ending, even with Holy Week in close view.
The drudgery of these past months, of this past year, drudged up my own shades of beige that seem to color my world with seamless patterns of commonness and neutrality. Perhaps it’s just all too much and my soul has gone into hibernation…
Read MoreWhen it comes to fitting on the spectrum of the Christian community, I often feel like a spectator looking in and asking “What the hell is happening!?” But I don’t often believe this comes from ignorance, though I admit it does at times. Instead, it comes from a place of disconnection, of wonder and curiosity. On the conservative side of the spectrum which seems to have a death grip on the megaphone of female Christian culture in America, I don’t fit in with the pinterest perfect looking faith that often feels too shallow with it’s recycled message of “Jesus changes everything!”. What does that even mean?! But on the progressive side which has deconstructed their faith to the point the word “deconstruct” has become jargon, I don’t relate to their experience of not being allowed to question their faith. I often feel like a lost puppy wandering around my local churches, Instagram and Christian media looking for a home but there doesn’t seem to be one for the person who doesn’t have it all together and who also questions everything.
Read More