Have you ever felt distant from a dear friend? Maybe you used to text each other every day but now it’s been weeks since you’ve heard from them. Or perhaps you used to have long, easy conversations with them over a glass of wine but now you simply exchange a quick “hello” and “how have you been” and “we need to get coffee sometime” when you happen to run into each other at the grocery store. Maybe your friendship has morphed into a pleasant but totally operational one – you know you can rely on each other and only reach out when you need something from each other. And you…
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In a little white house with a red door and blue shutters a little girl snuggles in her bed and, by the light of a pink lamp, finds patterns in the popcorn ceiling above her bunk. Anxieties about school, tornadoes, friends, and the possibility that Cruella de Vil could be real bounces around her head until her eyes grow heavy. And she worries herself to sleep. 20 years later, in another white house on the other side of town, a woman tosses anxiously in her bed. Anxieties about pandemics, politics, futures, past mistakes and the unknown bounce around her head – a pinball game of worry. Just as the ocean…
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In a world recently ravaged by the unexpected and life-altering pandemic, an intense and downright nasty political cycle, and brokenness upon brokenness, I find myself asking “Lord, where are you?” more often than I used to. This question rattles me to my core. As someone who’s greatest fear is abandonment, the sense that I (and we) are down here alone on this little blue planet full of so much tumult at the moment, is a heavy one. It is an uncomfortable, unsettling feeling that I couldn’t seem to shake for several months last year leading to a significant drought in my spiritual life. But God’s glory is real and His…
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“Well, have you prayed about it?” my mother asks as she gently rubs her thumb over my eyebrow. My long blonde hair rests in little nests on the pillows on my parents’ bed as I lay on my back staring intently at the ceiling. With the utterance of her question, I feel my teenage eyes start to roll and I can hear my frustration sizzle against the cool blue sheets. “Why do you always say that?” I snap. “That doesn’t help me at all. I don’t know what to do and now you’re just telling me to pray!?” I can feel the words sting my lips as they leave my…
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It’s a Tuesday morning and I’m in the drive-thru at my favorite coffee shop. I’m currently under caffeinated and overly anxious about the million and one things I have on my to-do list. The impatient tap-tap-tapping of my fingernails on my steering wheel compliments the song lowly humming in my car. The bright morning sun shines through my windshield, warming the spot between my eyebrows. I stare intently at the clock. It changes to 7:52 and I frown as I contemplate the audacity of the guy in the blue Ford Fusion in front of me. We’ve both been in line for the past 20 minutes and now that he’s finally…
