Dancing in the Rain

Happy Thanksgiving!!  Or, day after Thanksgiving, anyway. I hope you all had a wonderful, blessed day yesterday, whatever your celebrations may have looked like!!  Today's post is simply an unedited prayer that I wrote as a poem in March of 2018 and recently re-discovered when I was clearing out the notes on my phone. Since it fits so perfectly with what I've been talking about, I thought I'd give you a glimpse into the raw emotion that I often feel is best expressed with a little rhythm and rhyme. Enjoy!   Hello, Lord, it's me again,  Back in this old place again  Where it feels like all my dreams have come to die.  The life that I thought I would live,  With a godly husband and lots of kids,  Seems more and more impossible every day.  I want to be held in strong, gentle arms,  Be loved by a man who will shield me from harm,  Someone to snuggle besides just a teddy bear.  I want someone to walk through life with,  To laug...

 Yep. Buckle up, we're going there. This post might get a little uncomfortable, but it's a topic that can't exactly be ignored! And, as I said at the beginning of this little "series" earlier this year, "my goal is to be uncomfortably honest, vulnerable, real, raw." Besides, the world is talking about sex all the time , and if we as Jesus-followers don't talk about it from a Jesus-perspective, the world is going to shape the views and opinions of sex for an entire generation. Or two. Or more.  Let's start with some basic statements just for the sake of clarity: 1. Sex is God's idea, and it is good.  All through the Bible, from Adam & Eve being "naked & unashamed" in the garden of Eden (Genesis 2), to the graphic love poetry of Song of Solomon, to Paul exhorting husbands and wives to freely share their bodies with one another in 1 Corinthians 7, the Bible paints a picture of sex within marriage being good, beautiful, encourag...

To all my married friends: Please don't forget about me. I need you. Let me explain. I need to know I'm not half of a whole. I know that none of you consciously believe this, but sometimes it can seem like that's what you think. When only couples or families get invited to lunch after church, dinner, game nights, etc, it can make those of us who are "unattached" feel a little less-than. It makes it super easy to fall for the lie that I will only have value to offer the community once I have a partner. I need to know that marriage is not easy. I can sometimes get trapped in "the grass is greener" thinking, as if singleness is a hard season to be endured but once/if I get married it will all be great! I know better, of course; I know that neither singleness nor marriage is easier than the other, that each season has its own difficulties and joys. But sometimes I need to be reminded, and what better way to be reminded than to get to see YOUR marriage up c...