Regular Girl

On today's episode: "Your job is not to police bad behavior. Your job is not to school people on what they should and shouldn’t do. How they should act and yes, I’ll say it, when they decide to decorate for the holidays.  Your job is not to correct the wrongs of the world and go all vigilante world justice changer. Your job is simply to love people."

On today's episode: "And here’s the thing. I am a weirdo. I’m odd. Awkward. Intense. But, everyone else is too, in their own way. It’s part of what makes us so endearing. When God created man, He didn’t place some caveat on His creation that He’d make us all uniformly perfect and incapable of doing any of the weird stuff we do. He made us all unique little snowflakes on purpose. The thing...

On today's episode: "You know that little nugget of something within you that you sometimes feel like you’ll absolutely spin into orbit if you don’t share? The world needs you to share it. Because somewhere, someone is waiting on you to take that first step to pave the way for them. The same God who created an incredibly diverse and creative universe is the same God who created you."

On today's episode: "As humans, despite our greatest attempts, our creativity is still limited. We take a situation and if you’re at all like me, I believe that if only step 1 and 2 will happen, the natural consequence will be step 3. My prayers mirror that logic and I plead with God that the outcome will be such and such. When step 2 doesn’t at all look like the one I begged for, my knee...

On today's episode: "So often in our lives, we can only see the bad situation in front of us that we can’t see any way out of. But know this, God provides a way. Instead of seeing the impossible and vast body of water in front of you and the army of oppression behind you, remember every time God rescued you before and understand that He is a God that delights in showing His children His limitless...

On today's episode: "Walking through the front door, it all came charging back as he reached for me with panic in his stance. Suddenly, it was as if I was peering into the eyes of that same helpless 2-year-old that wanted answers as much as we did."

On today's episode: Today, there are a lot of opportunities for us to do the things that line up with what it “means to be a Christian.” But none of those outward things will ever do the incredible work of what happens when we really spend time with Jesus. The really intimate, soul-changing stuff is usually what’s happening in the dark and lonely hours when you don’t have to pretend. Don’t get...

On today's episode: When you find yourself in this place, you have to see it for what it is and fight tooth and nail to see that satan comes like a lion to kill, steal, and destroy. But he’s only like a lion. He tries his best to puff his chest and scare you. But, guess who is standing in front, beside, and behind you? That’s right. The real deal. The Real Lion! The One who fights our battles...

On today's episode: I felt a whisper. “It was then that I thought of you.” There was nothing, and He created everything. On this journey, sometimes walking, sometimes sprinting, sometimes (or a whole lot of the time) falling flat on my face and rolling, violently, down a hill, I’ve seen one truth come into focus more sharply than anything. God’s love for His children is unbreakable. In the dar...

On today's episode: Right now, there’s too much that we don’t know. There are labels we can throw around, to be sure, but at the end of the day, none of us know. This hope that sits in my heart and has become so much louder than the roar of fear or sadness, tells me that I can trust in God’s goodness in my life. And not goodness in a sense that I’ll get every prayer answered, but His goodness.

On today's episode: "Right now, our family has some dinosaur-sized worries. There are a lot of answers that we seek, but we don’t have and we don’t know when we’ll get them. It feels a lot like we just ran in circles, looking for the car in the crowded parking lot and we still can’t find it. The rain is coming soon, we can see the blackness of the sky, and we don’t know where we’ll take c...

On today's episode: "Knowing what’s coming and how things will turn out takes no faith at all. It takes zero trust in the One who gave us every reason to trust. Clarity puts the ball in our court and makes it about us. No, no. We don’t need clarity. We need more faith in a God that provides for our every need in a way that we’ll never understand. It’s not about you."

On today's episode: "The plan was always that she’d move in with us if the time ever came that her cancer returned. It wasn’t until one morning soon after the biopsy came back as I moved the small amount of my youngest son’s things into his big brother’s room that it hit me."

On today's episode: "Honestly, this next thought is what pushes me to my knees. I didn’t deserve it either. If we go around believing that the thing someone did to us is somehow worse than the things we’ve done, we missed it. In our sin, the Lord saw fit for us to be forgiven. The truth and beauty of the Gospel is that. He died for us while we were still sinners. Let that sink in."

On today's episode: "It’s going to take some time, but eventually, you’re going to realize that you spent the majority of your life parading around as someone you aren’t. And then, you’re going to get sick of it. You’re going to get tired. Something is going to snap and you’re finally going to open your eyes and your ears to see and hear the beautiful things that Jesus has always thought...

On today's episode: "I’ll be honest. When the news came that my Mother in Law had one to three months left to live, it hit me in the gut so hard, I actually gasped out loud “I can’t do this!” It’s not the caregiving or having her living in our home that’s hard. It’s the gut wrenching agony of the days leading up to and after losing someone that makes me fret."

On today's episode: "There is a promise that I cling to. A promise of what awaits us after we take our last breath here. Lately, I close my eyes and the tears come as I imagine the beauty that awaits us. To bask in His presence. Sit at His feet. Worship Him for all of eternity. To be whole. Gosh, what that must be like! And she’s right there on the edge of it. She knows. We know. And my h...

On today's episode: "But let me tell you something. I’m weak. I am not strong, by any means. I’m disciplined, for sure. Like building a muscle, I have learned to be obedient and through that, disciplined to follow Him. But strong, I am not."

On today's episode: "There was an end-of-life kit in my refrigerator. A collection of medicine to ease a loved one on into death when the time comes. Hospice delivered that along with other medicine to ease her suffering. And I’d been relatively fine all while caring for her, comforted by the knowledge of what was awaiting her. She was getting ready to meet Jesus, and that is everything t...

On today's episode: “is the way I’m living pleasing Jesus?” Because if we live our Christian lives in pursuit of doing the work of the Lord, really and truly pursuing Him, it’s going to get messy. You will be misunderstood far more often than understood.

On today's episode: "So often, we do the same thing, don’t we? We feel the pull of the Lord asking us to do something, and we dismiss it because we think who are we to do anything? We’re not anyone but a sinful, hot-tempered, barely Biblically literate, if at all, person that just wants to live a good life and be comfortable. What we’re forgetting is that it really doesn’t matter who we a...

On today's episode: "As I sat to reflect, my eyes grew wide with wonder. My heart thumped as I really sat for the first time and truly tried to imagine what it must be like to experience Heaven. No more cancer. No more pain. No more suffering. Can you even imagine what it must be like to open your eyes and rest them on Jesus? That thought alone is the one thing that always pulls me from t...

On today's episode: "Hospice picked up everything from our house. The oxygen. The hospital bed. The table. The wheelchair. The medications. The disposable gloves. I am putting away walkers and throwing away A&D ointment, Icy Hot, and Biofreeze, 3 smells I don’t care to smell anytime soon."

On today's episode: "But then, that bit about making the image of the calf they bowed down and sacrificed to....the forgetting...we do that same thing today. Pick anything that you run to for comfort. Pick anything that you can’t seem to put down and walk away from. Pick the thing that when you can’t have or do, you feel more than disappointed. Sin has a really subtle way of creeping in s...

On today's episode: "We pray for an answer, a solution, or a need. When that doesn’t come in the way we think it should, how often do we consider that prayer unanswered? As we see in this verse, God answered the prayer, but not at all the way they probably hoped and wanted. Given the track record of the Israelites, they needed something that would continue to bring them into the majesty o...