Regular Girl

On today's episode: "Those smaller chutes will never grow to their full capacity, if the older, almost dead parts aren’t cut off from the root of the plant. You literally have to get in there with scissors and cut them off, so they can no longer rob the inner parts of a chance at full life. Even though those older and outer leaves are dead, they’ll still pull important, life giving things...

On today's episode: "It felt like a slap in the face. How could her life be cut so short? But then, The Holy Spirit reminded me that every single one of us is terminal. Each day is borrowed and no matter how soon any of us is called Home, we’re never guaranteed another. We all have a finite number of days on this Earth. Sure, putting a label on it makes the clock tick a bit louder, but ea...

On today's episode: "Could anyone take a small peak at your life and walk away knowing you must be associated with Jesus? Could anyone take your conversations, your habits, your entertainment, what you’re pursuing, and walk away in confidence that you’re the one they can bring their questions about faith if they don’t yet know Jesus?"

On today's episode: "Wherever you are on the spectrum of struggle, let me encourage you that the outcome that will soon be revealed already exists in some way. Your knowing about it doesn’t somehow quicken your ability to control it. You have no control. One of the healthiest attitudes we can adopt is a surrender of our control and full recognition of who does hold the wheel."

On today's episode: "We can’t seem to just exist for all the striving to become something more. Apart from this message that society feeds us, on our own, we have always had a deep longing for more. We ate the fruit of the tree, despite being told not to, and we built towers to get us closer to Heaven. Somewhere in our broken humanity, we have forgotten that we don’t need to become God. G...

On today's episode: "But what if they did? What if the worst possible scenario did come true? What then? What if instead of fighting against the unknown that you began to meet it, accept it as a possibility and then turned your perspective to inject hope that maybe there is just as much probability that things could turn out completely opposite of your worst fear."

On today's episode: "When my boys started understanding more about the English language, I was so excited to hear what they had to say. As they’ve gotten older, I can’t wait till they get home from school to tell me about their day. When they are struggling or upset or happy, I want to be the one they talk to. I want to hear from them because if it matters to them, it matters to me. Did y...

On today's episode: "Basically, the stance of your legs will determine how stable you are before proceeding with the next step. Same goes for taking a punch. A stable or unstable foundation can be the difference maker in how you respond, whether you block, counter, or fall. No matter the physical prowess of the fighter, without a strong and stable foundation, you can’t stand up against an...

On today's episode: "Wouldn’t it be a shame if this situation you’re in was nothing more than just a hard place to be? Wouldn’t it be terrible if you walked away never learning anything more about yourself, how strong and compassionate you can be, or it didn’t bring you any closer to the people in your life you hold so dear? Wouldn’t it be a tragedy, more than anything, if you walked into...

On today's episode: "My kids have grown up trusting that their needs will be met. They’ve never had room to doubt. It’s become instinctual for them to seek me out, despite their knowledge that they are capable. How sweet! Every surface level “needy” request, is actually a deeper expression of “I trust you”."

On today's episode: "We way over complicate the process and think if we don’t get ourselves clean enough to come into the presence of the church and the Lord, then we aren’t fit for the cleaning. But here’s the good news. None of us will ever be clean enough or holy enough or righteous enough. Ever. It is only through the blood of Jesus that we are able to come before Him."

On today's episode: "Hanging onto this reality, the truth of our wretchedness, certainly puts into perspective that none of us is more superior than any other. I don’t mean we need to wallow in self-pity for our wrongdoings, but we can never forget what we’ve done if it means we start to compare another person’s list of failures and wrongdoings to our own elevating ourselves above them.&q...

On today's episode: "When we are suffering, we may have a tendency to ask God why. With anger and sadness in our hearts, we shake our fist because we demand to know why our plans didn’t pan out. I can think of too many people I know personally or heard about that their terrible news is all a head scratcher. But I keep going back to a reminder that we don’t know and aren’t meant to. We’re...

On today's episode: "It’s been a long time since I wrote those letters and dreamt of owning a bank, but some things never change. Here I am all these years later, still writing letters and praying for change. That legacy I was so concerned with has shifted to a desperation that people will know the Gospel. As an adult, I have learned it really is the only thing that matters."

On today's episode: "It’s a different lens to look at people and the world when you realize how much you have to learn. The facts about a situation lend themselves to more questions, so it’s hard to establish an opinion when you simply need more information about it all before you arrive at any conclusions."

On today's episode: "Listen, if God closes a door, you really don’t want what’s on the other side of it. If He closed it, there is nothing on the other side that’s for us. We try to sit at tables and with people we’ve been rejected from and consider it a loss, but if God shut that door because that’s a table Jesus would’ve flipped, is it actually a loss?"

On today's episode: "Who wins when we decide that our story is not good enough or our past is too tarnished to qualify us for Kingdom work?"

On today's episode: "One month after, her youngest brother very unexpectedly passed away. One month after that I got the first initial headache that would end up staying with me 24 hours of every day for the next 2 years. That headache would be just one of many awful life altering symptoms. It felt like we couldn’t exhale for fear that the moment we let the breath out something else might...

On today's episode: "As followers of Christ, we’ve been commanded to look different than the world. We live different for the promise of the coming of an upside down Kingdom marked with love, generosity, forgiveness, grace, and mercy. We have our part to play in this, but unlike our goals we aren’t on our own to solely do the work."

On today's episode: "There should always be a sense of urgency when it comes to getting our stories out, but the panic that we’re not doing enough has no place. That panic is not a far reach to me putting all the work and all of the burden on me alone, as if I could ever have enough power or influence to do any of that on my own. No, it’s Jesus. It’s all Jesus."

On today's episode: "After three years, I heard the words from a doctor that I’d longed to hear. “You’ve had this your entire life.” This was the final answer to the long list of questions that plagued us while I suffered from a mystery illness for nearly two years. We had a diagnosis, but even in that diagnosis it opened Pandora’s box of wanting to understand so deeply the root cause as...

On today's episode: "The last set of text messages they’d sent to me over two years ago had been awful, abusive and unrelenting, at a time when I was at my lowest. Text messages that came out of nowhere and for no reason other than to hurt me. But now, they were hurting, deeply, and sometimes kind, supportive words with a whisper of “you’re not alone” can be just the thing we need when we hurt the...

On today's episode: "Each time one of these trials rendered a verdict of suspicious or unbelievable, I found myself beginning to doubt my own experience. Was I making it up? Was there some part of me that wanted to be sick? Maybe I was just anxious and this was a manifestation of some deep-seated mental illness. But then at the root of everything I knew myself well enough to know that none of that...

On today's episode: "Over and over he cried and wedged himself into a corner making it all but impossible to pull him out to wrap him in a hug so he could feel the depths of our love and security. All pleading was met with deaf ears as he continued to cry and speak the anxious and panicked thoughts racing through his head. “How do I know it will hurt less than an ant bite? How do I know it will on...

On today's episode: "But God. He’s just different. He is not like us and even on our best day, on our own, we cannot love like this. Maybe we get close, but even still, I just don’t think we really have it in us to love like this. I know people who’ve gone their whole lives never really knowing what it must be like to be loved in a faithful way, and so can any of us even begin to unlock what this...