How to Let God Redeem Your Pain
We all carry wounds — some fresh, some long scarred over but still tender. Places we believe are beyond redemption. But what if healing begins right there?
The Right Way Around
We all want to get better. But lasting change rarely comes through self-effort alone. The road that works — the only one that really heals — is the one that starts with humility and leads straight to Jesus. It’s where weakness isn’t a liability but the beginning of strength. Don’t wait until you’ve tried everything else. Start with the only way that actually works: the right way around.
When Life Becomes UNMANAGEABLE
We all have something — something we chase, something we can’t stop, something that’s making life unmanageable. So what do we do when willpower isn’t enough?
Gut-Wrenching Love: The ‘Good Samaritan’
The Good Samaritan isn’t just a feel-good story — it’s a radical challenge. Jesus describes a love so gut-wrenching it demands action, a love that sees, stops and sacrifices. It’s not about efficiency or obligation. It’s about breaking past barriers and loving beyond convenience. In a world obsessed with self-interest, what does this kind of love look like? And are we willing to live it?
Religious Pilgrimages Are Back In A Big Way
People are walking again. Not just down the street or through the park, but across countries, over mountains, into places thick with history and humming with the prayers of those who came before. The Camino. Mecca. Lourdes. The sacred routes that once defined devotion are alive again, drawing seekers from every corner of the world. What’s behind the resurgence? And what does it say about our hunger for something more?
The Intimacy and Mystery of ‘The Secret Place’
The secret place with God forms identity, heals wounds and deepens intimacy. It’s where heartbreak becomes transformation — where rejection refines, not defines.
Violence & Grace: The Enduring Voice of Flannery O’Connor
Flannery O’Connor’s fiction doesn’t flinch. Her stories — stark, unsettling and laced with dark humor — press into the tension between human depravity and divine grace. A master of the short story, O’Connor crafted worlds where redemption rarely arrives gently. Instead, it crashes in, disruptive and undeniable. For readers willing to wrestle with faith and fiction in its rawest form, her work remains as urgent and convicting as ever.
What Did You Want?
The morning air is cool on my face. The slick soles of my boots threaten to slip off the bike pedals with each spoke turn.
I cross the street, passing just one walker, his arms swinging quickly down the wide street. Then I make one right turn, one left turn, and another right. In three minutes, I am turning onto Main Street, the sidewalks filled with potted Christmas trees glistening with red and silver in the morning sun.
It rained earlier this week, and the air is still moist. I breathe through my nose, feeling the air expand my lungs. I turn onto the sidewalk outside a coffee shop and pull my bike up to a bike stand shaped like a red metal coffee mug. I can see Justin in the window, perched on a counter stool, laptop open. People press together in line for coffee, and I ease my way in, past the giant body of a Grand Pyrenees who also, perhaps, likes expresso. Its huge brown eyes look up at its owner, who is deep in conversation as she stands in line. I tell Justin I am tempted to burrow my face in the dog’s thick black and white fur.
Stand. See what I see.
Be My Companion
The drive is short—just five minutes—from my house.
On the way, I look at the Christmas decorations in front of the houses: poinsettias in ivory and crimson, lights in multicolor and white, a manger scene in the middle of a lawn, adult-sized toy soldiers heralding walkers on the sidewalk with stationary trumpets and bright, merry eyes.
I love it. It feels like goodness. Like possibility. Like hope.
The Depths and the Shallows
I delayed writing this because I feared my writing would masquerade as action. And action, not talk, is what is required of me now.
“Do not stay in the shallows,” He says, and I wonder if processing His words will help me do so: leave the shallows and go to the deeper place where my heart is one with His.
I am sitting at a window near the front of the house where I can see the giant rose bush through the glass. Up at the top, one rose opens to the December sun. Beneath its peach petals are thick flowerless branches armored with thorns. I study them, remembering the feeling of falling in a nest of rose bushes as a child—and the precarious dance I do as an adult in the spring and summer, deadheading stalks so more flowers can bloom.
Because Our Longing Is Ageless
Today, I am not at ease with myself, which is the opposite of what you hear people my age and older say.
I am supposed to say, “I’ve never felt more like myself. I have settled into a newfound freedom as I care less about what people think of me and am less tied down by the attitude of striving.” And I usually feel that way.
But I resonate with both mindsets: I care less about what people think of me and feel good about balancing work, rest and play. But still, I feel listless and confused. There is an edge I think I am missing.
Perhaps I have become complacent? Where has my desperation for God gone?
Perspective in the Wandering
The lights have gone out in the cafe.
The wind gusts the leaves outside, orange and yellow fluttering in tufts, and the November light shines through the windows. My shadow on the wall outlines me dimly. I see it on the cream-colored paint beneath stains from coffee splatters and gray scratches where furniture was scraped.
Justin was gone for a few days last week, and I was lonely. It made me think of Berta, my former neighbor, 86 years old, who used to live next door. And Meg, our neighbor on the other side of our house, who also lived alone. After having a houseful of kids—and a dog—collectively requiring my energy and attention for two decades, I thought the quiet would be welcome. But it was strange. I wonder if I like quiet better when I choose it rather than when it happens to me.
Because Iron Sharpens Iron
The maple tree in our backyard was blazing red last week, its brilliant leaves hanging like delicate, tired flames.
Now, as they fall, the garden floor bears a circle of red. It is gorgeous, though uncomfortable to witness, the bright dying of beauty to make even more.
Love is like that—hanging on and letting go, dedicating oneself to believing there is good coming, even if something has to die first for beauty to be born again.
What Jesus Does With Our Collective Mess
I don’t know what to say to her. What are the magic words to a person’s heart?
My story is not hers–we each carry different burdens and wounds. But yet, in our pain, we are somewhat the same, aren’t we?
Isn’t pain pain? Isn’t sorrow sorrow? Isn’t fear fear? Or does one person’s burden weigh more than another’s? And, if so, does this make them more or less able to carry it?
Breaking Our Own Hearts
Sometimes, there just aren’t words. It is not that life isn’t happening, that there isn’t meaning in the day-to-day.
It is that a part of us needs to quiet.
There is no big problem to solve, no hard pain to treat.
We are in a space with all possibility and hope, yet claiming this space feels distant somehow.
Unless we slow.
Will you let my quiet fill you? Will you let my tenderness pull you under?
What Voice Will You Listen to?
The voices come in the quiet moments. The ones that tell you you’re not enough, not wanted, not worthy. They slither in when you’re overwhelmed, when you fail, when you feel alone. But there’s another voice — the one that speaks mercy instead of shame, love instead of contempt. The one that calls you by name. The question is: Which voice will you listen to?
When You Let the Gift Go
For the last month, when his back legs got wobbly, and he started to lose weight–and when he got too weak to climb the stairs–I carried him up and down, his lanky body leveraged awkwardly against my left hip, his breath heavy and hot in my ear. Every night at bedtime, he nuzzled his nose into my arm before curling up on the floor. Then, in the morning, he’d lie splayed out near Justin on the other side of the bed. We have become experts at maneuvering over his warm, furry body in the darkest rooms. We walk carefully, always just assuming he is there.
Endearments of Morning
I sit on my bed, thinking about light and how I can describe hope in words.
Another gift, how morning comes. The house still, birds chirping outside, swooping to drink and dunk their beaks in the water bowl. September air in northern California—crisp, with a hint of cold on my skin when I push out the windows.
The sun's light blankets one tree branch in the backyard, the other in shade from a taller tree’s branches overhead. Sunlight and shadow. Undulations of light in stillness. The light moves, and the earth rotates.
What if You Don’t Need a Net?
I don’t know what to hold onto.
Long ago, in grad school, a friend shared how taking risks and setting out on any adventure where you don’t see the outcome is like being out on a trapeze, swinging through the air, with no net beneath you. She described the feeling of the air against her face as she let go–and her body, tethered to nothing, stretching out to be caught by hands stronger than her own.
I am stretching out. I am untethered. I have let go.
What Mothers Us Now
The laundry room walls are close on both sides, a tucked away room off the hall adjacent to my daughter’s where I can hear her singing. She is packing for her freshmen year in college, and the world I’ve known for 18 years feels shaky around me. Father, whom have I been, and what am I becoming?