Just this

July 28, 2015 by 6 Comments

Just this, fabs.

This is all you have to do right now.  Be. And sit. And rest. And wait.

You don’t have to do tomorrow yet. Just slow down and stop scrambling to get ahead of whatever might be around the corner.  There are hard things there for sure.  Tomorrow holds challenges and obstacles, but today has obstacles enough of its own: starting with the challenge to be in today and not tomorrow.

You don’t have to do yesterday, with all its bumps and bruises and pain and failure and frustrations – that is not what you have to do today.  You just have to do this moment. Maybe how you feel about yesterday is a part of this moment, but yesterday itself is gone.

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Filed Under: Fighting anxiety, Fighting craziness, Fighting discontentment, God's promises, Hard days

4 ways to be there for friends who are hurting

July 17, 2015 by 3 Comments

When I was in college I got a phone call in the middle of the night from one of my besties.  She was crying so hard it took me a few full minutes to untangle her words and realize that her mother had died suddenly of a Brain Aneurism.

I remember in the season that followed learning the incredible pain of caring for the grieving.  I remember the horrible feelings of being out of control, of watching someone you love hurt.  I remember thinking, perhaps naively, let me take this pain from her. 

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Filed Under: Hard days, Ministry

3 thoughts on grief

July 11, 2015 by 3 Comments

Four years ago I was learning what it feels like to wake up in a world without a dad.  I was learning about the deceptive strange ease of the first few days after loss.

Four years ago I wrote that I felt like I was “in a master class on grief”.  I read those words now with a fair amount of pity for ‘past me’: Oh sweet girl. You were in a toddler class on grief.  Fast forward four years, and I still have so much to learn about grief; it’s a slippery animal, always shifting on me.  But I’ve learned a little more than I knew then:

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Filed Under: Hard days

Don’t forget to remember

July 7, 2015 by 1 Comment

Take a deep breath.  Remember what is true.  Nothing has changed.  No matter what new trial rises on the horizon today, no matter the sin or suffering setting behind you – nothing has changed.  Your status has not shifted.  Your security remains unmoved.  God’s love for you is unaltered.

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Filed Under: God's promises, Hard days

Words I thought I’d never share

June 26, 2015 by 5 Comments

Every now and then, I click the ‘drafts’ tab on my “ALL POSTS” page out of a desire to diminish the disturbing number of posts begun and never completed.  

My drafts folder is a graveyard of thoughts.  Thoughts that I never had the time to flesh out or thoughts that I lacked the discipline to fully birth. And sometimes among the words that never made it – I find a draft that I don’t even remember writing, but that still feels so achingly familiar to me somehow.  

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Filed Under: Fighting apathy, Fighting discontentment, God's bigness, Hard days
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