I have to admit, I have a love-hate relationship with gratitude. Partly because of my religious upbringing, and partly because I struggle with taking on too much. When I hear the command, "Be grateful," I sometimes feel resentment or even anger creeping up in me. The question is, "how to do be ...
Staying Focused on What Matters Most
Throughout most of my adult life, I’ve struggled to set good boundaries. Raised in a religious group that subjugated my own sense of self, I failed to learn normal boundaries as many other well-adjusted adults seem to have learned naturally. ...
3 Steps to Honor God’s Vision in Our Lives
Often in our Christian walk, we catch a glimpse of a vision that gives us hope that we can impact others in some meaningful way. In the moment, we rarely have a clue how our vision will ever come to be. This vision eventually becomes our reality as we aim to accomplish it; it becomes a piece of our ...
The End of Elementary School
It's often said that parents try to live vicariously through their children. Our own dashed hopes and dreams can be relived and recreated anew through our offspring. This, as we know, often backfires. In my case, I hadn't given much thought to my personal negative experiences with elementary school ...
Leaving Christian Science [book launch]
Today my first book, Leaving Christian Science: 10 Stories of New Faith in Jesus Christ, releases. It's almost like I've been in labor for months and the baby has just been born! Thank you so much for your support, friendship, and love. I appreciate having the freedom of speech to write such a book ...
Writing My First Book
If ever there was a skill to obtain before attempting to write a book, it would be endurance. I've wanted to write a book for most of my life, but despite the desire, finding the time seemed implausible once I started my own public relations consulting business and began having kids. Several years ...
Debris [poem]
This poem was written on September 11, 2001 as I watched the news reports from work. I was shocked, alarmed, saddened, and yet I had a new hope in a God who could save and comfort us all. ...
How to Let Go of an Old Career and Start Fresh
Inertia, while important in physics, isn’t especially helpful when one wants to start a new career after, say 15 or 20 years or more doing the same thing. The concept of inertia, commonly referred to as Newton’s first law, says, “An object at rest stays at rest and an object in motion stays in ...
Freedom in Anger
After a quick breakfast, I helped my kids locate their shoes and backpacks, then herded everyone into the garage to load into the minivan. For this one year only, all four of my kids attended the same school. My oldest was in fifth grade, second born in third grade, the third child was in ...
The Best 20 Minutes
You could take a power nap. You could scoot over to Starbucks to get coffee. You could even get one more load of laundry started, or maybe do the breakfast dishes. You could check your email or watch a couple of YouTube videos . . . but it wouldn't be the best 20 minutes of your day. ...
Whatever it Takes [poem]
It's easy to put work first, to put our family first, and sometimes to put our friends, ministries, and even ourselves first. What doesn't come easy is doing whatever it takes to put our faith first. This poem was inspired by my pastor's sermon on pursuing God in the New Year. ...
How to Navigate Change in the New Year
I hadn’t considered the transition into a new decade as being that important until people started asking me, ‘did you know that we just experienced the last full moon of the decade?’ and ‘what life accomplishments did you experience in the last decade?’ I hadn't considered how to navigate change in ...