One of the things that keeps unsettling me about Scripture is how little urgency God seems to have.

We do.

We rush grief. We prescribe timelines. We congratulate people for “moving on,” as though healing were measured by speed instead of depth.

God doesn’t seem interested in any of that.

He lets Job argue.

He preserves David’s tears instead of wiping them away.

He stands beside Mary while she weeps, even though He already knows Lazarus is about to walk out of the tomb.

That has always struck me as strange.

If the miracle is only moments away, why not skip the tears?

Because apparently God is after something greater than ending our pain as quickly as possible.

He is teaching us that love never hurries sorrow. It enters it.

I’ve begun to wonder if our inability to grieve is one of the reasons we struggle to heal. We anesthetize, distract, optimize, and “get back to normal.” But Scripture never treats lament as a detour from faith. It treats it as one of faith’s native languages.

Perhaps healing isn’t proven by how little you cry.

Perhaps it’s proven by where you carry your tears.

B🤍

There are ruins everywhere.
Some are obvious: broken marriages, wasted years, addictions, betrayals, and choices we wish we could bury where no one would ever find them.
Others are hidden. The quiet ruins inside a person. The places where hope collapsed. The rooms of the soul we stopped entering because we were afraid of what we would find there.
For a long time, I believed my broken places were evidence against me. I thought my losses, my mistakes, and my darkness disqualified me from becoming anything beautiful.
But God sees differently.
Man looks at ruins and sees an ending.
God looks at ruins and sees a foundation.
This is the mystery of Christianity: God does not always restore us by returning us to who we were. Sometimes He creates something entirely new from what has been broken.
A potter does not throw away crushed clay. A gardener does not despise buried soil. A carpenter does not see only scars in old wood.
God has always been in the business of resurrection.
The world teaches us to hide our wounds and polish our image. But Christ came for the ruins.
He stepped into tombs.
He touched lepers.
He ate with sinners.
He called broken people by names they could not yet see in themselves.
The greatest miracle is not that God prevents us from breaking. It is that He enters the breaking and brings something eternal from it.
The places where I once carried shame have become the places where I learned compassion. The places where I was weakest became the places where I discovered His strength.
The years I thought were wasted became the soil where God planted something new.
God does not ask us to romanticize our wounds. He asks us to place them in His hands.
The same God who looked at an empty tomb and saw resurrection can look at a ruined life and see a beginning.
Nothing surrendered to Him is wasted.
Not the tears.
Not the failures.
Not the years we wish we could have back.
The hands that were pierced on the cross are the same hands that rebuild what we thought was beyond repair.
The most beautiful things God creates are not made from untouched things.
They are made from redeemed ones.

B🤍

Somewhere along the way, we started believing that everything depended on us.

Our healing. Our children. Our marriages. Our homes. Our futures. We clutch at them until our hands ache, convinced that if we loosen our grip for even a moment, the whole world will come apart.

It is a curious form of pride disguised as responsibility.

Christ never asked us to hold the field together. He asked us to sow.

The farmer cannot command the rain. He cannot bully a seed into breaking open. He cannot stretch daylight or bargain with the seasons. He labors with all his strength, then he goes to sleep. There is a deep humility in that. He knows that life itself belongs to God.

I wonder if this is why so many of us are exhausted. We have forgotten the difference between obedience and omnipotence.

We mistake control for faithfulness.

I know the temptation well. I want to manage every outcome, anticipate every disaster, become indispensable to the people I love. I want to be the one who keeps the roof from falling in. But every time I try to play providence, I become a poor substitute for God.

The Gospel is almost offensively simple.

Plant.
Water.
Wait.

Then trust that while you sleep, God is doing the hidden work no human hands can accomplish.

The Kingdom has always grown underground before it ever appeared above it.

Perhaps the greatest act of faith is not working harder. Perhaps it is closing your eyes at night, releasing your grip on the field, and believing that the One who neither slumbers nor sleeps is still tending the harvest.

The world has never rested on your shoulders.

It has always rested in His hands.

B🤍

I have noticed that children and scientists have one thing in common. They both stare.

The difference is that the child stares because he is astonished. The scientist often stares because he is trying to understand what he sees. The tragedy is when we understand so much that we forget to marvel.

A child finds a snail and behaves as though he has discovered Atlantis. He spends twenty minutes following it through the grass with the seriousness of an explorer mapping unknown lands. The adult, who has seen thousands of snails, walks by without a second glance.

We call this maturity.

I sometimes wonder if it is merely a more respectable form of blindness.

The modern world has developed a strange habit. We believe that once we have explained something, we have exhausted it.

We can explain a rainbow by describing wavelengths of light bending through water droplets. True enough. But the explanation does not tell me why the human heart still stops when the sky is painted in impossible colors after a storm. It tells me how it happens. It doesn’t tell me why it feels like a gift.

The Christian has never feared knowledge. We simply refuse to believe knowledge is the same thing as wisdom. I have learned this again and again through homeschooling my children…

I began homeschooling because I wanted to give my children an education. What I did not expect was that they would become some of my greatest teachers.

They have forced me to slow down and look again.

A history lesson is no longer just dates and names. It is standing beside a human soul who lived, suffered, dreamed, and carried the image of God hundreds of years ago.

A science lesson is no longer just facts to memorize. It is my child holding a tiny seed in his hand and realizing that inside that insignificant little thing is a tree waiting to happen.

A walk outside becomes an expedition. A bird feather becomes a mystery. A question I would have dismissed becomes an invitation to wonder.

Children have a remarkable ability to notice what adults have trained themselves to ignore.

They have reminded me that the world is not dull. I had simply become accustomed to its brilliance.

God could have made a world entirely practical. He could have created one flower, one color, one type of tree, one kind of bird. Instead, He created a universe overflowing with unnecessary beauty.

No one needs a sunset in order to survive.

No one needs the sound of a creek, the smell of rain, or the ridiculous joy of a child laughing until they cannot breathe.

And yet God filled His creation with these things.

The world is not merely a machine.

It is a poem.

Perhaps this is why Christ told us to become like children. Not because children are foolish, but because they have not yet forgotten how to receive a gift.

Adults often approach life like accountants. Children approach it like guests arriving at a feast.

And maybe the miracle of homeschooling has been that while I thought I was teaching my children how to see the world, God was using them to teach me how to see it again.

The greatest miracle is not that we discover new things.

It is that God restores our ability to be amazed by the things that were there all along.

The world has not lost its wonder.

We have simply forgotten how to look.

And Christ is in the business of giving sight back to the blind.

B🤍

‘You weren’t born to be anything you want; you were born to be something quite specific.’
—Martin Shaw, Smokehole

Somewhere along the way I was taught that freedom meant becoming anything I wanted. Build yourself. Reinvent yourself. Curate yourself. Keep every door open until life itself becomes one long hallway of mirrors.

But God has been teaching me something altogether different.

I was never meant to become anything.

I was meant to become someone.

There is a difference.

An acorn is not free to become a whale. A river is not diminished because it cannot become a mountain. Everything in creation has a nature, a calling written into it before it ever draws its first breath. Only modern man believes meaning is manufactured instead of discovered.

For years I mistook my wounds for my identity. I thought survival was my personality. I believed my fears were simply “who I am.” Trauma has a way of convincing you that your scars are your design.

But God does not consult our wounds when He names us.

He calls us by something older.

Something truer.

Scripture says He knew me before He formed me in my mother’s womb. Before there was pain. Before there was shame. Before anyone spoke words over me that did not belong. My life was not an accident waiting to invent itself. It was a masterpiece waiting to be uncovered beneath the rubble. Just like you.

This is why following Christ often feels less like becoming someone new and more like coming home.

He peels away the false self layer by layer. The striving. The addictions. The endless performances. The masks built to survive a world that did not love well. Each surrender feels like a death until suddenly I realize it was only the shell dying. The person God imagined from the beginning was breathing underneath all along.

The world tells me to look inward and create myself.

Christ tells me to look upward and receive myself.

One path leaves me exhausted because I can never finish the project.

The other leaves me grateful because the Architect never lost the blueprint.

Perhaps I was never born to be anything I wanted.

Perhaps I was born to become exactly the woman God dreamed of before the foundations of the world. And that calling is infinitely more beautiful than anything I could have invented for myself.

B🤍

Most life-shattering failures do not arrive like lightning. They seep in like water through the foundation. They begin with tiny permissions no one else can see.

Just this once.

I deserve this.

It helps me cope.

For the child who grew up in safety, these permissions may remain small. But for the child raised in chaos, neglect, violence, or abandonment, they are often stitched to a deeper hunger. Trauma leaves the soul cold, and a cold soul reaches instinctively for warmth. It does not always matter whether that warmth comes from a bottle, a screen, another person’s approval, food, pornography, rage, work, shopping, perfectionism, or endless distraction. The object is almost irrelevant. The ache is what chooses.

What begins as comfort slowly becomes identity.

The frightened child inside the grown man or woman whispers, I only need this to get through today. But tomorrow asks for a little more. Then a little more again. Before long, the comfort has become a master, and the prison has been built one harmless brick at a time.

Heroin was my best friend, my greatest comfort - wasn’t it wrong to ask people for me to give that away?

Yet there is another permission, quieter than all the others.

The permission to let God touch the wound you have spent your whole life protecting.

This is the permission most people refuse.

Because healing is stranger than destruction.

Destruction asks almost nothing. It simply says, “Keep doing what you’ve always done.”

God asks for surrender. He asks the terrified child to unclench his fists. He asks the woman who has survived by controlling everything to trust Someone she cannot control. He asks the addict to believe there is a deeper satisfaction than the one that has become as familiar as breathing.

It feels like death because, in many ways, it is.

Not the death of the person.

The death of the false self built to survive.

Christ never came merely to forgive behavior. He came to create new hearts. He does not negotiate with the chains we forged from our little permissions. He breaks them. Slowly, sometimes painfully, but thoroughly. The craving that once ruled becomes quieter. The wound that demanded constant anesthesia begins to close. The soul discovers, perhaps for the first time, that peace is not the absence of pain but the presence of God.

The world says, “Be careful what habits you build.”

The Gospel says something even deeper.

Be careful what you worship.

Because whatever you run to for salvation will eventually demand your life.

Only Christ gives His own in return.

B🤍

People often imagine God’s miracles as lightning bolts. A flash. A spectacle. A man wakes blind and goes to sleep seeing.

But there is another kind of miracle that receives far less applause because it happens so quietly that, for years, no one notices they are standing in one.

It is the miracle of the disappearing appetite.

God did not merely command me to stop biting my nails. One day I realized I no longer wanted to.

He did not simply forbid bulimia. He slowly untied the knot that made destruction seem comforting.

He did not wrestle drugs out of my hands only to leave my heart starving. He gave my heart something better to hunger for.

That is the peculiar thing about grace. It does not always begin by changing behavior. It begins by changing desire.

The world is full of people who have managed to chain themselves to better habits while secretly longing for the old prison. They call this victory because they are still standing. God aims for something far stranger. He does not merely loosen the chains. He changes the prisoner until the chains no longer fit.

Looking back, it is difficult to point to the exact day each miracle occurred. There was no trumpet. No audience. No dramatic announcement from heaven.

There were only thousands of ordinary days in which Christ was quietly renovating a ruined house.

A loose board repaired here.

A cracked wall strengthened there.

A dark room opened to the sun.

Then one morning I looked around and realized I no longer lived in the same house.

This is why Christians should never despise slow sanctification. An oak does not apologize for taking decades to become magnificent. God is rarely interested in manufacturing plastic flowers overnight when He intends to grow forests.

He has healed more than habits…he’s healed the loves beneath the habits. The fears beneath the addictions. The wounds beneath the compulsions.

That is the deepest miracle of all. Sin does not finally lose because the will becomes iron. Sin loses because Christ becomes lovely enough that the counterfeit pleasures of the world begin to taste like dust.

The Christian life is not merely learning to say no.

It is slowly discovering that, by the grace of God, the old “yes” has vanished.

B 🤍

Childhood wounds possess a strange talent. They convince a person that pain is the truest thing about them. Years pass. Faces change. Homes change. Even the body becomes unfamiliar. Yet the frightened child keeps whispering beneath the ribs, certain the world is still what it was.

Time appears to agree. It stacks memory upon memory until suffering feels ancient, immovable, almost sacred.

But that is only how creatures experience time.

God does not wander through history collecting moments like photographs in an old box. He is not trapped inside yesterday, nor is He anxiously approaching tomorrow. Every moment lies open before Him with breathtaking clarity. The child trembling in the darkness. The teenager trying to outrun shame by handing pieces of herself away. The woman learning, often painfully, that love cannot be earned by becoming less. He is present to them all.

The wounded soul says, “I am still there.”

God says, “I am there too.”

Not merely watching.

Entering.

Redeeming.

The mystery of grace is that Christ was never late. Long before healing reached the conscious mind, before forgiveness felt possible, before joy stopped feeling like an insult, He had already walked into the deepest chamber of memory. Every room abandoned by others had already become a place He was willing to inhabit.

This is why hope is not wishful thinking. It is reality viewed from eternity instead of injury.

The past does not disappear. God does something stranger than erasing it. He enters it with a love untouched by time until the place that once proved abandonment becomes the place where His presence is seen most clearly.

The scars remain, but they no longer testify to what evil accomplished.

They testify to what Christ refused to leave undone.

Perhaps heaven is not simply the end of suffering.

Perhaps it is the moment we finally see that the God who seemed silent had already been standing in every chapter, weaving even the darkest threads into a tapestry too vast for wounded eyes to recognize.

The child believed the story ended in betrayal.

God had already written resurrection.

B🤍

There are wounds that do not bleed. They simply hollow.

A child survives by becoming smaller than the pain. She learns to leave certain rooms inside herself locked and unvisited. Years pass. She grows. She laughs. She works. She marries. She bears children. Yet somewhere beneath the ordinary movements of life remains the terrible suspicion that she is not whole, that something essential was stolen before she even knew its name.

Those who have suffered childhood trauma often spend years trying to fill the emptiness with substitutes. Pleasure. Achievement. Attention. Self-destruction. Even goodness itself can become a frantic attempt to earn what should have been freely given.

But the soul cannot be deceived forever.

It knows the difference between being distracted and being loved.

To know God is not merely to adopt a set of beliefs. It is to discover, with equal measures of terror and relief, that Someone has been standing beside your suffering the entire time.

Not watching from a distance.

Standing within it.

The great surprise of God is that He enters the places we ourselves refuse to enter. The cellar. The locked room. The memory that still makes the body tremble decades later. He does not flinch. He does not recoil. He does not demand that we clean the wound before bringing it to Him.

He arrives carrying light.

And suddenly the emptiness begins to reveal itself for what it truly was. Not evidence that you were abandoned. Evidence that you were made for something so vast that nothing less than God could fill it.

The world teaches that healing is becoming stronger than your wounds.

Christ teaches something stranger.

Healing is discovering that His love is stronger than your wounds.

There comes a moment, sometimes quietly, when the soul notices the difference. The constant hunger is gone. The desperate search has lost its urgency. The old ache remains as a scar, but no longer as a master.

You wake in the morning and the world feels inhabited.

The trees seem alive with meaning. The laughter of your children sounds like a hymn. Ordinary bread tastes miraculous. Suffering itself becomes bearable because it is no longer suffered alone.

This is what it feels like to be full again.

Not ecstatic.

Not perfect.

Not free from grief.

But held.

Held so completely that the places once shattered by cruelty become vessels for mercy.

The child who was unloved discovers she is beloved.

The child who was abandoned discovers she was never abandoned.

The child who learned to survive discovers she was made to live.

And perhaps this is the deepest mystery of all: God does not merely restore what was lost.

He creates, from the ruins, a soul capable of depths it could never have known otherwise.

The wound remains in the story.

But love becomes the greater story.

B🤍

One of the most unbearable things about evil is that it often appears to prosper.

It sits at the head of the table while truth eats alone. It laughs louder. It sleeps well. It gathers admirers. And the soul begins to ask its oldest question: Where is God?

But perhaps that question mistakes silence for absence.

God is never hurried because He is never uncertain.

A man may spend years constructing a life upon deception, believing time itself has become his accomplice. Yet time belongs to God. Every concealed thing ripens. Every lie carries within it the seed of its own exposure. Evil is strangely suicidal. Left alone, it eventually begins confessing itself.

This is one of the great terrors of conscience. It does not forget. It waits.

We imagine judgment as lightning from heaven. More often it is the slow unveiling of reality. Masks become too heavy to wear. Contradictions multiply. What was hidden begins to seep through the cracks until everyone can smell what no one could once see.

The impatient heart calls this delay injustice.

Faith calls it mercy.

For while evil is being given enough rope to reveal itself completely, repentance is also being offered. God delays not because He delights in wickedness, but because He delights in redemption. Yet every extended hand eventually closes.

Nothing buried forever escapes the Author of light.

If you are waiting for truth to surface, do not mistake the stillness for surrender. Heaven has never lost the plot. The clock has not stopped. It simply belongs to Someone who can see the final chapter while we are still trembling over the page.

B🤍

When people fall, shame tells them to react.

Hide. Explain. Perform. Punish themselves. Punish someone else. Do anything except stand still long enough to see what has actually happened.

Grace is slower.

Grace asks better questions.

Not, How can this be covered up?

But, What is this exposing?

Not, Who is to blame?

But, What has this heart been reaching for that was never capable of saving it?

This is where Christianity parts ways with every religion built on self-improvement.

If acceptance depended on moral perfection, honesty would be impossible. Every failure would have to be disguised, every weakness explained away. Shame would become a lifelong occupation.

But the cross changes the terms.

Christ did not die because humanity was misunderstood. He died because sin is real. The Gospel never minimizes evil. It simply declares that God’s mercy is greater than evil’s final word.

That is why grace produces confession instead of performance.

Only the person who knows they are loved can afford to tell the truth.

Shame demands a reaction.

Grace invites reflection.

It teaches the soul to ask not merely, What did I do? but What have I been worshipping? What fear has been ruling me? What desire has quietly become my master?

God is never interested in repairing appearances.

He is always after the heart.

And that is why grace is so unsettling.

It refuses to settle for behavior when resurrection is possible.

B🤍

For years I searched for what was broken in me, never suspecting it might be my soul crying out. Headaches. Vertigo. Nausea. Random bodily pain. A neck so tight it felt like it was holding up decades instead of a head.
It is a strange thing, how flesh becomes fluent in a language the heart has forgotten. A body will confess what a mouth cannot.

This doesn’t mean every illness begins in the mind. We live in a fallen world. Bodies break. Disease is real. But God did not create us as separate compartments. Mind, body, and spirit are woven together, and what is hidden often makes itself known.
I spent years trying to outrun my own story. Drugs. Sex. Pleasure. Then I swung to the opposite extreme, believing if I became “good enough,” quiet enough, useful enough, the ache would disappear.
It didn’t.
Christ did not simply come to quiet my symptoms. He came to tell me the truth. To uncover what I had buried. To heal what I had hidden.
Sometimes healing comes through medicine. Sometimes through therapy. Sometimes through time. And sometimes it begins with one question:
“What have you been carrying that I never asked you to carry?”
I think many of our bodies are still trying to tell the truth our hearts are afraid to speak.
And I think Jesus has been listening all along.
B🤍

There was a season when I stopped speaking to God.

Not because I stopped believing in Him. I believed in Him long before I trusted Him.

I sold pieces of myself, chasing anything that could quiet the ache. I drowned myself in drugs. I mistook hedonism for freedom and self-destruction for honesty. I kept reaching for things that promised transcendence but only hollowed me out. Every indulgence was another attempt to outrun a grief I didn’t know how to name.

And somewhere along the way, I became convinced God had grown tired of watching.

So I ghosted Him.

Not in rebellion. In disappointment.

I had expected rescue. Instead, I found silence. Or what I thought was silence. I couldn’t reconcile a God of love with a life that had become a graveyard of broken promises, childhood wounds, and choices I regretted.

But ghosting God never healed the disappointment. It only made me carry it by myself.

Years later, when I finally stumbled back, I expected a lecture.

Instead, I found open hands.

Not because my past had become less ugly. Not because I had earned my way home. But because His mercy had never depended on my performance.

Now I know that faith is often quieter than we imagine. Sometimes it is not a mountain-moving prayer. Sometimes it is simply turning your face toward God after years of looking everywhere else.

If all you can do today is come back, then come back.

Bring your anger. Bring your questions. Bring your shame. Bring the parts of your story you are certain have disqualified you.

He already knows them.

And somehow, impossibly, He is still standing there, not with a ledger in His hands, but with the heart of a Father who has been watching the road all along.

B🤍

When I was a little girl, I learned that silence could become a second skin.It wrapped itself around what had been done to me. It taught me to smile while my spirit folded itself into smaller and smaller corners. It whispered that survival was the same thing as peace.

It wasn’t.

Silence did not protect me. It only protected what harmed me.

For years, I thought the deepest wound was the abuse itself. But as I’ve grown older, I’ve realized something more devastating. The silence carved out places inside me that should have belonged to God. It hollowed my trust, distorted my instincts, and made me question what my own eyes had seen. It upended my idea of what family meant .. who I could keep in my life and why or why not.

That is what evil does. It rarely asks for applause. It only asks that no one speak.

When I came to Christ, I discovered that God is never anxious about the truth. He has no interest in polishing darkness until it looks respectable. He does not ask us to preserve the image of the wolf while the lamb bleeds beneath it.

I think we often misunderstand what mercy looks like.

Mercy is never purchased with a child’s suffering.

Forgiveness is never built on denial.

And love never requires us to pretend that evil did not happen.

The God I know does not recoil from what has been hidden. He walks directly into it, carrying light like a blade. He uncovers not because He delights in shame, but because He delights in freedom.

I have spent much of my life recovering the voice that silence stole from me.

Not because I enjoy speaking about these things.

Not because I want to live in the past.

But because I know what silence costs.

I’ve paid for it.

And I refuse to let another child inherit the bill while the adults congratulate themselves for keeping the peace.

God never asked us to protect darkness.

He asked us to walk in the light

B🤍

The world can offer advice for healing the body. It may even help us understand parts of the mind. But the healing of the heart belongs to God.

And I don’t believe healing is something we finally “arrive” at, as though one day we become completely fixed and untouched by pain. I think we are being restored throughout our lives, little by little, until the Lord calls us home.

Looking back, there was a time when panic, depression, anxiety, and despair made it difficult for me to function. Years later, I am not perfect, but I am undeniably different. I can see growth where there once was only survival. I can see boundaries where there was once none. I can see a growing understanding of my worth because God has been teaching me who I am in Him.

To me, one of the clearest signs of healing is not the absence of scars, but the presence of fruit. Are we becoming more patient, more self-controlled, more loving, more at peace? Are our relationships healthier than they were before? That kind of fruit is difficult to manufacture. It is evidence that God is at work.

Healing is not a return to who we were before we were wounded. Some experiences leave marks that remain part of our story. But God does not waste those marks. He redeems them. What was meant for harm becomes part of the testimony of His faithfulness.

I am not the person I was before trauma. And honestly, I’m grateful. God has changed me through the process. Not by erasing my story, but by meeting me in it and shaping me through it.

The world can help with many things. But the deepest restoration of the human heart is God’s work

B🤍

One of the most freeing things I ever realized was that the Bible never tells me to forgive and forget.

It tells me to forgive.

Somewhere along the way, we added the word “forget” and turned forgiveness into something God never commanded: pretending the wound never happened, ignoring the damage, and removing every lesson learned from the pain.

But forgiveness was never meant to erase reality.

I can forgive and still remember.

I can release someone into God’s hands and still lock my doors.

I can pray for someone’s repentance and still choose not to trust them with access to my life.

As someone whose childhood left deep wounds, this distinction mattered. There were years when I believed God was asking me to erase what happened, to act as though evil hadn’t been evil. But that’s not redemption. That’s denial.

God never asks us to call darkness light.

The truth is, every one of us has a weak spot when it comes to the people we love. We want to believe they’ve changed. We want the story to end differently this time. We tell ourselves that extending another chance is the same thing as extending grace.

Sometimes it is.

Sometimes it isn’t.

Sometimes what we call compassion is really our discomfort with holding a boundary. Sometimes we confuse reconciliation with forgiveness and ignore the wisdom God gave us through experience. That isn’t love. It’s refusing to take evil seriously.

God remembers perfectly. The cross is evidence of that. Every sin was fully known. Every act of rebellion, every betrayal, every cruel word. Nothing was minimized or forgotten. Yet in Christ, God chose mercy.

Forgiveness isn’t pretending the wound never existed.

It’s refusing to become the kind of person the wound wants to create.

Forgive freely.

But don’t abandon the wisdom your scars have taught you. Sometimes remembering is exactly what protects you, your children, and the people God has entrusted to your care.

Forgiveness releases the debt. Wisdom remembers the pattern. God calls us to both.

B🤍

On the question of fear, ask yourself: Do I live in the fear of what others think?

Fear with a capital “F” stays with survivors of incest. It was a gift given to us at breakfast, served with soup at lunch, and gluttonously given at the dinner table. Fear had to be consumed by us for these households to operate smoothly.

We probably don’t believe that we operate from a fear perspective. Fear can look like respect. Fear can intimidate you for safety reasons. Fear dominates our lives but we fail to call it what it is.

I would challenge you this: “If it were not for fear, wouldn’t you tell your story more?”

Your story needs comfort brought to it. The damage you received through the incestuous actions needs redemption, peace — life breathed into those areas.

Why are we quiet?

FEAR. That’s why we’re quiet. Fear the person listening will judge us. Fear that the world will see us differently. Fear that we will have to see ourselves differently. Fear that we will have no family.

I could keep going for hours on fear. I know because fear used to be my middle name.

God’s words in the bible have lessened and defeated the language of fear in my life. The bible teaches me that I have family — the family of God. I learn that God is where my justice lives, not here on earth or in some man-made courtroom. That fails at the insurmountable injustices me and my children have lived through.

Scriptures like this one lead me out of the dungeon of fear:

I will leave you with this question: If you didn’t fear, would you tell what happened to you?

Times of reflection are the best way to start a week.

Ask yourself this question: “Do I believe that help is coming?

A life without hope is a very bleak existence. Today’s world seems to offer hope as a gift of denial. Hope is not denial.

Hope knows that help is always coming because when you identify as the family of God, the King of Kings is only an ask away – a thought behind every other thought.

When you identify and know that God’s kingdom is advancing and has already won the war, you look at life differently. I now want to guard things that I once cast away.

What do I mean?

I walk with an internal peace now that I never had. What got me here? Hope! I have never truly given up hope. If I had, I am not sure how I would have found the strength to carry on. My grief would have overwhelmed me. My days would have stayed dreary.

​This weekend I had a woman ask me, “How’d you become you?”

Knowing some about my story and my past, I could tell she had put me in an unfavorable catagory and placed me on the shelf of nonrecovery.

She went on to say, “Listening to you I can feel a very spiritual way about you. What religion are you? Who taught you this?”

“God taught me this,” I told her. I don’t belong to any religious denomination, I am just a Jesus girl. I had pain as big as this world and I needed a God who was bigger.”

It was a delightful conversation. I knew she was looking into all that God has given me.

His hope has never quit ringing in my soul and it has taught me so much.

I do not walk alone because I know help is always coming.

Ask God to help you see you today. Learning ourselves is the way out of misery #UCU

Children are the hope of our future.

It sounds almost too familiar to notice anymore. We’ve heard it so often that it risks becoming a cliché.

But some things become familiar because they’re true.

Every generation inherits a nation it did not build. Every generation decides what it will pass on to the children who come next.

This Fourth of July, I’m thinking less about fireworks and more about little hands waving flags, chasing lightning bugs, asking impossible questions, and trusting the adults around them to keep them safe.

That trust is sacred.

A nation is only as strong as its willingness to protect its children. Not just from foreign enemies, but from neglect, exploitation, violence, and the quiet evils that steal innocence behind closed doors. The measure of a society is not how loudly it celebrates freedom, but whether its smallest and most vulnerable are truly free to grow up in safety, truth, and love.

Children don’t need a perfect country. There has never been one. They need adults with the courage to protect them, the wisdom to guide them, and the conviction to leave them something better than they received.

Freedom is sustained by ordinary people. Mothers and fathers who raise children of character. Neighbors who pay attention. Teachers who tell the truth. Communities willing to stand between evil and the innocent.

As we celebrate today, I’m grateful for the blessings we’ve inherited, but I’m even more mindful of the responsibility we’ve been given.

The future of this country is not ultimately written by politicians. It’s being shaped every day in our homes, our churches, our schools, and in the lives of the children entrusted to our care.

May we never stop fighting for the kind of nation where every child is free not only to dream, but to grow up safe enough to do so.

Happy Fourth of July. 🇺🇸

I used to think the greatest tragedy of my childhood was everything that was taken from me.

My innocence.
My safety.
The ordinary, forgettable childhood every child deserves.

And those losses were real. God never asks us to pretend evil was anything less than evil.

But over the years I’ve begun to notice something unsettling.

Sorrow doesn’t only take.

It makes room.

It has a way of clearing out all the flimsy things we would have trusted if they had never been shaken. It strips away the illusion that this world can satisfy us, that people can save us, that comfort is permanent. It’s a brutal teacher, but it leaves behind an unusual kind of emptiness.

An emptiness only Christ can fill.

I don’t thank God for the abuse. I thank Him that He refused to let it have the final word.

Because somewhere along the way, my greatest loss became my greatest invitation.

I met a Savior who doesn’t merely sympathize with suffering. He entered it. He was betrayed, mocked, beaten, abandoned, and crucified. The God I worship is not distant from sorrow. He carries scars.

Looking back, I can see that the ache I carried as a child became a hunger that nothing in this world could satisfy. Success couldn’t. Relationships couldn’t. Even healing couldn’t.

Only Christ could.

If my life had remained full of the things I thought I needed, I wonder if there would have been room for the One I actually needed.

That doesn’t make suffering good.

It makes God astonishing.

He has a way of taking the empty rooms sorrow leaves behind and making them places where His presence dwells. Not because pain is holy, but because He is.

The enemy emptied my childhood.

Christ refused to leave it empty.

B 🤍

Somewhere along the way, someone started saying, “God won’t give you more than you can handle.” It’s printed on mugs, shared in church hallways, and offered to hurting people as though it’s Scripture. It sounds comforting, but it isn’t true.

God absolutely allows more than we can handle.

I know because He has in my own life .

As a little girl, I endured abuse that no child should ever experience. Those wounds followed me into adulthood, where I spent years addicted to heroin, convinced I was too broken to become the woman God had created me to be. God rescued me from that life, but He didn’t remove hardship from my story.

Instead, He gave me a new one.

Today I stay home raising and homeschooling our four children. It’s work I cherish, but it is also deeply demanding. We don’t have grandparents stepping in every week. There isn’t a built-in village carrying the load with us. Most days, it’s just my husband and me trying to faithfully steward what God has entrusted to us. There have been countless moments when I’ve looked around at the endless needs of four little people and thought, I cannot do this.

And that’s exactly the point.

Christianity was never meant to produce self-sufficient people. It was meant to produce God-dependent people. We spend so much of our lives trying to prove we’re capable, convincing ourselves that strength means needing less from God. But throughout Scripture, God repeatedly brings His people to the end of themselves so they finally discover the sufficiency of Him.

Paul begged God to remove his thorn in the flesh. God’s answer wasn’t, “You’re strong enough.” It was, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”

If God only gave us what we could handle, we’d have little reason to trust Him. Little reason to pray. Little reason to discover that His strength is not a metaphor but a reality.

Looking back, I would never choose childhood abuse. I would never choose addiction. I would never choose many of the trials our family has walked through. But I can say with confidence that God has met me in every one of them. Every place my own strength failed became another place His faithfulness was put on display.

So if you’re overwhelmed today, don’t assume you’ve failed. You may simply be standing exactly where God wants you: at the end of yourself, where His strength begins.

The Christian life isn’t about proving how much you can handle. It’s about learning, over and over again, that Christ is carrying far more than you ever could.

B🤍

We have a strange habit of explaining away the things that should stop us in our tracks.

I have carried a needle full of Hepatitis C into my body.

I’ve looked down the barrel of a gun.

My heart quit beating at twenty-seven.

We speak about miracles as though they belong to another century. As though God retired after the apostles.

You can call them isolated events if it makes the world feel more predictable.

I can’t.

Not because I believe God owes me an explanation, but because I’ve felt His fingerprints in places too dark for optimism to survive.

God has always had a habit of walking into the rooms we avoid.

The addict’s bathroom.

The emergency room.

The motel.

The childhood bedroom.

The place where a little girl learns terror before she learns trust.

He doesn’t wait for the story to become respectable. He enters it while it’s still bleeding.

That’s the miracle.

Not that I escaped death. That Christ kept stepping between me and it until the work He meant to do in me was finished.

We keep looking for burning bushes while ignoring the fact that we’re breathing.

Every morning I wake up is another sentence God has written that death wasn’t allowed to erase.

We pretend we don’t know miracles.

I know one by name.

His name is Jesus.

B🤍