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Modern Witnesses: An Interview
Recently, I had the opportunity to be featured in an interview for Modern Witnesses, a blog dedicated to spreading the stories of God’s faithfulness and inspiring women to live extraordinary lives. As twenty-first century believers, we too are called to witness – to share who God is and what he has done.
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Overwhelmingly First | An Anthem for My Journal & Soul
I opened the floral cover and paused. It shouldn’t have been a hard question, but it was. A Verse to Pray Over This Journal is what caused such contemplation. Sounds simple, right? Just pick one of the 31,102 verses from the Bible. To a girl who has grown up in church, this should’ve been an easy thing and yet it gave me such hesitation that words did not come for weeks. Why did this challenge me so? Why didn’t I just write one of my favorites? (Hosea 6:3 is one of my favorites, by the way). I was waiting for a particular verse. For a verse that the Lord hadn’t…
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Girl, Jesus is Better
If I’m honest, it’s been a rough week for me. I’ve felt swallowed up by my feelings. And the worst part is – it felt good. It felt good to be angry, it felt good being “justified” in my emotions. Sometimes the hard part isn’t getting out of the pit. Sometimes the hard part is wanting out of the pit. The Lord has been so kind to me in my pursuit of him this year. And yet, sin still rears its ugly head, crouching at the doorstep of our souls. Yet, in the midst of my pride and justifications, my soul whispered: “Is Jesus better?” Is knowing him and being…
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Trailblazing Pioneers | How to Run When You Don’t Feel Like Running
I don’t like to run. I actually hate it. I hate it…with a passion. I overheat easily and my legs get red and itchy. It’s in fact a miserable experience. So when I read any type of metaphor about running in the Bible, I have to disassociate it with my full-hate relationship of running as a choice of exercise. And yet, I couldn’t seem to get Abraham out of my mind. Even after I turned the page on his death. I couldn’t shake the repeated phrases of him running to the visitors in Genesis 18 or how he rose early and saddled his donkey to obey God when God seemed…
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Rouse My Soul | Encounters with God on the Dusty Road
I jolt up out of bed fumbling to turn off the alarm. I woke earlier, but decided to rest my eyes for another fifteen minutes and must have fallen back to sleep. I quietly grab my glasses from the nightstand and slip into dining room. The notebook covered table makes me smile. This is my watch-tower – where I meet the Lord in the mornings. Long before the alarm clock ever goes off, he’s already there warming the chair for me. I squint my eyes against the light and rub the blur away. My eyes may be foggy and I may have had a sluggish start, but as I sit…
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Where Are Your Feet Taking You?
I get discouraged when I don’t feel like I’m being transformed, even though I’m trying to diligently study God’s word and desire fellowship with him. When I don’t feel different in the sense of experiencing this grand overarching mad-love for Jesus or when I don’t seem to feel him near, I slowly slide into the what-am-I-doing-wrong and why-do-I-feel-this-way mindset. After some time feeling this way, I picked up my pen and wrote in my journal to process my thoughts: I’ve been counting my experiences with God as successful and worth it when I get the supernatural feeling of closeness with him. I’ve been relying on a feeling to dictate whether…
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The Thing About New Year Resolutions, Word for 2019, and the Book that Revolutionized My Year
I once had a boss who would write reminders on her hands. We’d be in the middle of a meeting when something said would trigger a thought and she’d grab a pen and write a word on her palm. Toy – to reminder her to bring a toy to a birthday party for her friend’s son. Milk – remembering her toddler drank all of it that morning and she needed to go to the store to get more. It became somewhat of a joke between us – all those black and blue and red words on her hands. Whatever it was, if she didn’t write it down where she’d have…
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Pick Up Your Pen | The Treasured Work of a Heaven Scribe
I found out I was pregnant on Christmas. Well, sort of. The second pink line indicating a positive was ever so faint, I didn’t believe it. I swayed between hope and doubt so much so that I put the test in a bag early Christmas morning and stuck it under the tree only to have paralyzing doubt overtake, stuffing the bag deep behind the tree at the last minute until I could dispose of it without Hawk seeing. I’d already had months of hope being deferred and couldn’t allow myself to sit in the excitement without first being sure. Two days later I bought one of the digital tests –…
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Why Journaling Matters
It was my sixth Christmas when I got my first journal. It was green and had a praying angel on the cover. Even though the pages would be penned in my very large learning-to-write characters and the greatest climax it ever saw was the frustration to be getting a second brother instead of a long-awaited sister; it would spark in me a passion. I wouldn’t become part of God’s family for another year and I wouldn’t fully follow him for years after that – but that angel covered book, and the countless ones I filled after, would be a tool. A tool God gave me to harness the words within.…
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Rocking Chair Hymns
It’s 2:14am. I sit in the nursery rocking. Back and forth. Back and forth. The chair squeaks in cadence to the rhythmic movement. A half asleep son is in my arms. He slept so well during months two and three, but I’m finding myself having these middle of the night rocking sessions once again in month four. Thump. Thump. Thump. My hand pats his bottom as I rock. Back and forth. Back and forth. The room is dark, except for the illumination of a lone nightlight in the hall radiating shadows throughout the room. I peak down – his eyes blink heavy. Back and forth, I go. Back and forth.…
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When the Words Come
These pages have fallen silent the past few months. The words just haven’t come. Today the words came. The words came with intensity. They hit me with such urgency and surprise, it took all I had to not fill up post it notes at my desk. I counted down until my lunch break. I knew I needed that hour. I needed to write, to pray, to think, to focus, to process, to absorb, to just spill my heart, because the words came, and the words came with force. I love the quote by Flannery O’Connor: I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say…
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The Good Struggle | A Journal Entry
I feel like the Lord is taking me somewhere I’ve never been. I feel like He desires to grow my faith beyond any experience I’ve had with Him before. He’s at work, He’s doing something or He desires to do something, if I’ll cooperate. And I’m struggling – The Good Struggle, I call it. Ever since the Prayer of Jabez, I’ve felt a spiritual discontentment. It began stirring in my soul but it’s only been recently that I’ve been able to actually identify the emotions of my heart and formulate thought on them. I prayed for the Lord to do something so big in my life that it was obviously…
