Overly Careful to Wisely Careless: A Journey Back
When trust is broken, pain can echo through every new relationship. Healing means learning to decode the white noise — those whispers that say everyone will leave. God invites us into something different: to risk love again, to let safe people stay. Healing happens in community, through presence and grace, until we finally believe what’s always been true — we are loved and never alone.
Pulling Up Roots: How Unhealed Hurt Becomes the Offense We Carry
I kept telling myself the meeting didn’t matter, but the dismissal burrowed in. Unhealed hurt does that — it throws vines over the heart until everything feels gray. Offense becomes our armor; it also becomes our cage. Jesus invites another way: name the wound, pull the root, abide in Love. With him, we can trade resentment for release, guardedness for grace and grow green again.
Courage to Be True: Moving From Shame to Wholeness
For years I hid behind a practiced smile. I longed to be loved but feared being known. Rejection felt deadly, so I performed, pleased and pretended. Shame taught me to hide. But God doesn’t heal who we pretend to be. He meets the real us — wounded, afraid, still in process — and calls us his own. Courage begins there: trusting our identity isn’t defined by our past, but secured in Christ alone.
Healing and Reverie
Sap clings to my feet. The morning breeze brushes my face. And something in me aches to be known — by God, by others, by me. Healing isn’t tidy or quick, but it’s worth every scar it asks us to touch. When we stop running from the shadows and let love move through us, even our hidden places can become holy ground.
How To Calm Anxiety and Find Peace
Anxiety may feel constant, but peace is still possible. Real peace — the kind that holds up under pressure — comes when we fix our eyes on Jesus and lift our hearts in praise. From sunrise to sunset, God invites us to marvel at his goodness, to trust him with our burdens and to let worship become the rhythm that calms our soul and clears our anxious mind.
When Memory Becomes Destination
The scent of almond blossoms stirs memory — of childhood barefoot in orchards, of both beauty and ache. Some moments return willingly, others resist. Yet in each, God’s presence threads through time. Even what we forget, he remembers. Our memories — blessing and burden — become places where the sacred and the familiar meet, calling us home to his love that transcends time, pain and even forgetting.
Bypass: Learn to Reroute To Avoid Stress
Stress can’t always be avoided, but peace can be pursued. Like a heart surgeon reroutes blood flow around a blockage, we can create pathways around stress.
Faith Can Help Heal Our Polarized Country
We are living in an era plagued by political, religious and social unrest. The barrage of headlines continually erodes our confidence in our national leadership and unravels the ties that bind our local communities together. Despite the tools we have to increase mutual engagement, our society is profoundly disconnected, and instead of promoting understanding, the isolation and competition these technologies seem to promote have affected our mental health.
What If God Was In Charge?
God doesn’t sort out the mess by pressing a button or pulling a lever upstairs. He comes down to the place of sorrow, shame, sickness and death and takes the worst of it upon himself.
The Slow, Sacred Work of Lament
Lament is a profoundly spiritual act because grief and loss are just as sacred as trust and celebration. It is freedom to express pain and allow love into our sorrows with us. It metabolizes grief, honoring our experiences as beings with bodies, souls and spirits.
Where the Road Climbs
Jesus loves us too much not to help us face our disordered attachments, our coping mechanisms and addictions. So, to stay at his side, to match his stride, we must begin to face our deep hurts.
How to Pray When Wrestling With Anxiety
According to the National Institute of Mental Health, 19.1% of U.S. adults have had an anxiety disorder in the past year—and 31.1% have had one at some point in their lives. This method of praying not a magic wand. It may not replace anti-anxiety medication. But boy, it does help. If you’re a fellow anxiety sufferer, try this. It can’t hurt you. It has no unpleasant side effects. It may do you great good.
Art: Encountering God and Great Truths
Good art, good poetry, and true mythology communicate, without our knowing it, that life is not just a series of insulated, unrelated events.
Confession: When Truth Demands a Witness
Confession is normal and necessary for followers of Jesus. It’s something many of us did spontaneously when we began following him. But it must be an ongoing thing for us, too.
Reconciliation: Peace With All People
Reconciliation is when two people come together to understand a past conflict or hurt. It matters to God, and he has given us the ministry of reconciliation.
What Suffering Prepares
Our sufferings are always preparation for callings—which are, at the highest level, to join Jesus in his work of healing, restoring, and redeeming this world.
The Relationship Between Christians and Freud
Jacob Lupfer believes the distance between psychoanalysis and faith is needlessly wide. Religious leaders and psychoanalytic practitioners, he says, should take a step toward each other.
An Interview with Desmond Tutu
In his penultimate book, The Book of Forgiving (co-authored with his daughter, Mpho Tutu), Archbishop Desmond Tutu offered four steps to forgiving and healing.
Beth Moore’s Memoir Tender and Gracious
In a tender, gracious, and heartbreaking new book, the beloved Bible teacher and former Southern Baptist recalls the people and the God who saved her from the chaos of her childhood.