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A Broken Hallelujah
It’s “Joy” week in the season of Advent. There’s a cognitive dissonance there, right? The world doesn’t feel very joyful. It hasn’t been in a long time. Christmas is supposed to be the happiest time of the year, but pain doesn’t cease to be pain just because we drape it in lights and bows. I can deck the long, dark […]
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Thanksgiving for the Weary Soul
This time of year has been one filled with tension for several years now. From 2019-2021, I was sick in one way or another and unable to eat more than a few bites. It took me a year to recover from my MALS surgery–so I spent that Thanksgiving in pain as well. I guess in […]
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What it Really Means to Have Courage
We all need courage to face the world around us, it just might require letting go of what we think courage is and taking up the ways He leads us down.
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Dear Me: Lines to the Person I Want To Be
the only you that you need to be is the you that is found in Him.
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Finding Jesus When You’ve Been Hurt by the Church
What do you do when you’ve been hurt by a church and those within it?
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Clinging to the Cross
When I open my eyes I see blurry, fluorescent lights above me. My room is quiet and cold. I sit up and look around, panic building in my chest. I don’t know where I am. I don’t know why I’m here. And I don’t know where anyone I know is. I’m hooked to machines and […]
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When Your Dreams Fall Apart
There is pain in giveness, an ache in surrender. To give up what we desperately long for, and hand it over to the One who longs for us.
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The Space In between
For though we are facing a world of endless tribulation, it is a world overcome, a world overtaken, a world ever-conquered
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Take This Cup
Perhaps the goal is not to convince God through tear-filled pleas to remove our burdens. Perhaps the goal is to find God in those burdens.
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Paper Prayers
These paper prayers, though inscribed on delicate paper, are anything but fragile. They are the tools I use to reinforce the foundations of my peace. They are faith in physical form.
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I Am With You Always
Don’t you feel it? Behind the Christmas lights and carols and decking of halls. Don’t you feel the longing in your soul for the night to finally be pierced?
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The Valley
You know when you almost have a wreck? You slam on the brakes or swerve into the other lane, narrowly avoiding a vehicular disaster. In a flash you can see the possibilities of how that scenario could have unfolded. Your heart skips and your seatbelt locks. For a few moments after, you heart rate remains elevated as you remain shaken, and your seat belt remains locked. That is how those late nights sometimes feel. It feels like my seatbelt is locked.
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Uprooted
Jesus—scoffed at, betrayed, hurt by those closest to Him. Jesus—far from a stranger to suffering and shame. He reminded me of His broken body, of His tears, of His shame. Because we do not have a Savior unable to sympathize with our pain. He took on our pain.
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An Unexpected Healing
Physical healing wasn’t the only kind of healing to happen over my year of recovery.
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Above All Else
I want to be more worried about how I treat the people I disagree with than I am about how much I disagree with them.
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Driveway Lament
Lamenting is different than complaining. Lamenting is grief voiced aloud. Where in complaining there is no hope found, in lamenting there is. Lamenting is an admission of inadequacy and inability to be okay on our own. Lamenting is how we rely on God alone in the darkest places. It’s knowing who you are in Christ, and knowing that He takes you at your weakest and most broken. So I lament in my car.
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Redeemed
Something has to be broken to be fixed. Something has to be unworthy to be given grace. That’s what makes redemption so glorious. That’s what makes His grace so overwhelming. The idea that something that feels so, so unlikely to prove to be anything but painful, can be turned around.