9XDH29XSFK

“The healing path plunges us into the depths of our doubt, where a new faith can be born. This faith, birthed in the desert and the valley, frees us to remember a past not only with loss, but with redemption. It leads us to a perspective that is full of God, therefore deepening our trust that redemption will dawn tomorrow as it did once before. First, however, this process often confronts us with who or what we really have been trusting rather than God.”

Dan Allender

The Healing Path: How the Hurts in Your Past Can Lead You Into a More Abundant Life (Waterbrook Press, 2000)

The Truth in Sinking

download

I think the reason I can’t seem to publish anything lately is because the truth of my life is brutal right now. And I want to be able to understand it myself first. Organize it in meaningful categories – each one with a cool, totally-makes-sense solution.

The fact is, my life right now makes no sense.

My Temptation to Self-Harm

My Temptation to Self Harm

Today I read Self Harmers in the Church by Sharon Dickens, and I remembered my close brush with becoming a cutter just 18 months ago. I’m not super excited to share this with you. It’s something I’d like to pretend I never thought about. But my experience gave me some personal insights into this subject, […]

What’s the Point of a Short Life?

What's the Point of a Short Life

What’s the purpose of that 22-year-old’s life cut from all his potential just as he was being launched from his parent’s nest? What’s the purpose of a young mother who doesn’t live to see her offspring grow up? What’s the purpose of the millions of tiny babies nobody knew? What’s the purpose of all the old people who will die in obscurity, never having made history?

How God’s Word to Everyone Becomes Personal to Me

God's Word Personal

I’ve found that when I am in a bad place, emotionally, and I just want to curl up into a ball and, well, bawl…I am not so interested in opening up God’s Word. I struggle with doubt. What good will it do anyway? What if I am disappointed, and God doesn’t meet me? I couldn’t bear that rejection right now. Better to ignore Him and avoid the crushing pain of being ignored by Him.

A Cry For Justice
April 3, 2014

He was betrayed by a man who was supposedly his close friend. An even closer friend promised to support him but fell asleep while he was agonizing, and later disowned him.  He was interrrogated and pushed from pillar to post by power-mongering men who had no fear of God. He was witnessed against by liars, was spat upon, punched, beaten, had his hair pulled, was whipped, scoffed at, ridiculed and insulted for telling the truth, taunted, stripped of his clothes and dignity, offered drugged wine, and killed by slow torture involving violent stabbing of his body, dislocation of his joints, blood loss, dehydration, asphyxiation, and eventually heart failure.

May we all flee to him, cling to him and rest in him — for he saves all who come to him with humble hearts, and he knows our griefs and pains, our weaknesses, our limping, our failures and our fears.

Read the rest of Betrayal – Our Lord Knows All About It

Wounded by Your Own

A Holy Experience
March 4, 2015

Can I just whisper? I know you must feel like people, the Church, have wanted you to go away. Sweep your scars under the proverbial rug. Erase you, avoid you, silence you.

Because it’s too uncomfortable for us, the neighbors, the church, the Body, to face our own culpability in scars. Face our own fallen disfigurement. Pollyanna wasn’t the only one who wore rose-colored glasses. Few like to admit that we come from a long line of Roman soldiers who have crucified our own.

I know and I’m sorry — When it comes to the bloodied and wounded, we suddenly all lose our thin, bare necks and become turtles, shirk back into our see-nothing shells.

Sometimes the church doesn’t want to know details or listen to wounds weep or wade into the bloody mess. Christ is the Truth — but too many of His people run from the Truth.

If Christ is The Truth — then where there isn’t Truth, there isn’t Christ. Why ever be afraid of the Truth? You only need fear the Truth of anything — if you think Christ isn’t capable of redeeming everything.

Read the rest HERE.

I am Angry

What do you think about anger? Some anger is destructive. It rages and revenges. But sometimes anger is just part of normal life experience. If you’ve ever grieved a loss, you know what I’m talking about. Here is one woman’s confession. There’s a lot packed in this short excerpt, and I’m hopeful that rather than […]