What Did You Do With 2020?

2020 was quite the year for all of us. The word “unprecedented” seemed to describe the entire twelve months in a nutshell. For some, it meant doing church on Facebook Live, for others it included getting married on Zoom. Some folks suffered great loss being laid off from their jobs, or endured the death of a loved one from Covid-19, or both. When we rang in 2021, there seemed to be a glimmer of hope that 2020 was over and that everything would change as soon as the clock struck midnight.

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Whose Side Are You On?

I grew up singing a song in chapel at school entitled; “He Makes All Things Beautiful in His Time.” It’s a beautiful song giving me, and many others, hope to look beyond our present situations to have the courage in believing for a better turnout of events than our family of origin, our education, our own home churches and all the worldly wisdom and experiences we could set us up for.

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No Wasted Days

As a kid I loved stickers. Every single sticker I could get my hands on got a place of honor in my Lisa Frank sticker book. Mostly they were random “good work” stickers from school or a smiling tooth giving a thumb’s up from the dentist’s office. And 90s kids, remember the sticker boxes? They opened like a treasure chest to reveal several individual compartments filled with rolls and stacks of colorful, sparkly stickers.

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Following Easter

Dying eggs. Baking a ham and whipping up fluffy salads. Picking out the finest pastel dress from your closet and maybe a matching hat. Hiding those eggs for little kiddos to find (or maybe just your friends). Picking up some chocolate bunnies and sugar-coated marshmallow chickies to nibble on for weeks to come. Despite their fun and entertainment, the accessories of Easter can take a lot of work and attention. It is easy to get wrapped up in all of these activities and forget what Easter is.

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Another Look At Provision

I remember how cold it was that day: lower thirties, typical Chicago weather. Although it was November, snow had not yet kissed our city streets. “All you need to do is be cool. Just walk into that restaurant, smile and ask for an application. That’s it. Just ten minutes of bravery. The worst they’re going to say is no, and if they do, you can try Olive Garden next.”

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Waiting Patiently

When I was little, my neighbor had rows full of strawberry plants in her garden. At the time, I knew that people grew vegetables, but the idea that you could grow something as delicious as strawberries in your own backyard fascinated me. I would have been only slightly more excited to find out that you could grow chocolate.

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Choosing Lonely

Recently I was listening to Becoming Us: Joel and Moriah Smallbone. It’s a short, cinematic podcast about their relationship and marriage. For those who don’t know, Moriah Smallbone is an independent Christian artist and also part of an all-female band called Trala. Joel Smallbone is the lead singer of the band For King & Country. They both have stages and platforms - separately and now together. One of the interesting things they talked about was the process from engagement to marriage and how there were moments of loneliness for Moriah. This led me to a couple of thoughts I would love to share.

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Encountering The Game Changer

No other year has the message of Easter hit home like it did this year. A few weeks out from the holiday, my sister texted me the concerning news that my two-year-old niece was unwell. They had admitted her to the hospital for pneumonia. We prayed for her and believed that she would recover. A week later, unexpectedly, my niece’s health took a dramatic turn for the worse and within a few short hours, her life hung in the balance.

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Romans: Peace with God Through Faith

One of the questions that drives many people away from God is a variation of: “Why does God allow suffering?” Because our human mind doesn’t understand why a good God would allow bad things to happen, especially to those who are called His. The last few weeks, we’ve been talking about righteousness and justification. This week, we begin to dig deeper into the fruit of what it means to be justified before God and what type of character is produced through suffering.

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Boundaries For The Kingdom

True confession - I am 100% a Type 2 on the Enneagram. For those who don’t know, that means I’m a helper. At the age of 29, I’m running a non-profit, I’ve helped start a different one, and lead several ministries. Right now, I’m finally learning the gift of boundaries. God had to take me on a harrowing journey for a season to learn that importance, however!

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Hope Renewed

Many times in the course of my adulthood, I have quoted this familiar verse from Scripture. Before I go any further, I have to talk a little about why this verse says what it says—the context of this verse among the verses preceding and following. The portion of Scripture this is from has the title “Christian Liberty” and Paul, the writer, was talking about seeking the good of others. Most likely, he was speaking of the types of meat people of the Jewish religion could and could not eat, versus what the Greek unbelievers they were with were eating and he was telling them that whatever they did should be for God’s glory—not their own.

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Romans: Believe in Hope

My single season lasted for over a decade, so through my twenties, this passage is one that I came back to often when I needed to have my hope renewed. Because Abraham waited 25 years to see the fulfillment of God’s promise to him - as the years passed and his and Sarah’s bodies aged beyond child bearing, Abraham had to choose to believe against every type of impossibility. So, that’s what we’re going to study today: how to believe when all your hope is gone.

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Let Light Out

I would like to consider myself a woman reasonably gifted with words. I normally know how to string sentences together, but I also tend to talk way too much and too often (even making a career out of it!) so perhaps I’ve just had a lot of practice. My greatest God-moments, though, are when He is working in a way that I can’t explain or write down, and He gently whispers to me, “Rest in Me, instead of needing to define Me.”

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