Category: The Church

What you need to know if you’ve been hurt by the church

You went to church seeking hope, support, love, friendship, and truth. Instead you felt like a number, were told lies, saw hateful or scandalous behavior, and felt unwanted and judged. I know how you feel. I’ve been there. Church is supposed to be a place of refuge and encouragement. A gathering place for followers of Christ, people who are called to love like He loved, serve like He served, and speak truth and light into our wounded and broken hearts

Journey to Heal: It's time to live a better story

If you are a regular reader of my blog, then by now you probably know that I have a huge place in my heart for encouraging women who have been victims of childhood sexual abuse to speak their truth, find healing in God, and even restore broken relationships. My passion for this stems in large part from my own past, but even more so from my present. What I mean by that is the more I have shared my story,

I love you more: A Good Friday message and giveaway

The scariest question I can think of is one that I ask myself all too often: What if I love them more than they love me?

Finding protection against spiritual warfare

Humbling (verb) – 1. to make meek; ex. to humble one’s heart. 2. to destroy the independence, power or will of. Humbling. That’s the word that sums up the last three weeks of my life. The interesting thing about being humbled is it can be both a positive feeling and an unfavorable one. I’ve had both. God has done some amazingly big things in my life the last few weeks — guiding me through leading my first women’s retreat, my first

When love leads, truth follows

From the beginning my intent for this blog has been to spread hope, encouragement and love. Because of this, I have purposely chosen not to write about controversial topics. Believe me, it’s not that I don’t have my own opinions about wars and politicians and Duggars and SCOTUS rulings. In many cases I have very strong opinions; but I find that the thing that makes a topic controversial to begin with is its power to divide people, and where there is

The littlest evangelist

“And he said: “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” – Matthew 18:3 I read a story today about an early Twentieth-Century evangelist named Gypsy Smith. As the story goes, Gypsy came to know Jesus as a child, but he was worried about his uncle’s salvation. Being a child, he knew it would be seen as disrespectful to say this out-loud to his uncle, so he fervently

Why we do Halloween

As a general rule I have tried to avoid controversial topics on this blog because I want it to be a place of support and encouragement and not division. I find that, in general, we Christians can get too hung up on the little things and let them divide us, instead of coming together as a unified voice for spreading the good news. And I fully believe that the enemy uses our tendency to argue the little points to bring division

Why church?

If you haven’t picked up on it by now, this will be the blog post that assures you I fall short in my faithfulness in so many ways! True confession time. Prior to January, if you asked me if I thought that weekly church attendance was critical to my spiritual well-being I would have said “eh, not really.” Big moments of spiritual growth didn’t happen for me on Sunday morning; they happened at retreats, where intense focus, study and community for 48 hours straight set

Be still and let go of these things

This past Sunday my morning started like many Sunday mornings do for me. The alarm went off and I hit snooze because I was exhausted from the previous day’s activities. After sleeping a good 30 minutes later than I should have, I finally woke up and went to check on the kids. They were leaving right after church to spend a few days with my mom, so they had been given explicit instructions the night before that upon waking they

Children and worship: how do we create life-long church-goers?

I recently joined in on a debate on Facebook that was discussing the value of having children attend worship service with their parents instead of offering a separate service or Sunday school for kids during the same time. While, as a general rule, I try not to engage in debates of any kind on Facebook, in fairness it started more as just me commenting on a friend’s status about the topic and then seemed to snowball from there. I didn’t realize