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 laugh and cry and fight with,  Not perfection but wh

 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

I’ve always been a dreamy romantic at heart. My mom likes to tell the story of when I was a little girl and she found pencil marks all over a door frame in our house. She questioned us kids, and we all insisted we had definitely not been drawing on the door frame. As she continued to press us, the story came out: I was a princess, locked in a tower, and the pencil had been my “key.” Yep, my special talent as a child was getting lost in my own little world. Fast forward a few years, to when I was about 11 years old. I was just beginning to think boys were more cute than annoying, the concept of dating just starting to appear on my (distant) horizon. And then my parents came home from a conference and excitedly told us about this “new” concept they had heard about: courtship. Now, if you don’t already know, the definitions of “courtship” range from glorified dating, to just shy of arranged marriage. My parents, having just discovered the idea, weren’t sure yet where our family

satisfied. Something about the word just stirs me deep in my soul. I see the world around me running at a frantic pace in search of satisfaction. Commercials tell us this thing or that thing will satisfy us, books tell us that this lifestyle or that diet will satisfy us, we reach for this job or that degree or those relationships to satisfy us. But every time we jump a fence we discover that the grass is not actually greener on the other side.  We remain unsatisfied. We even have a song all about how "I can't get no satisfaction." I can't sing that song. Not because it's a 1965 rock song, but because it isn't true for me. I  can  get satisfaction. I am, in fact,  satisfied . Deeply, securely, forever,  singularly satisfied . Why the focus on singularly ?  I'm so glad you asked! See, I got the idea for this blog post on Valentine's Day.  As a single person.  Again/still.  My social media was filled to overflowing with two basic t

Let's talk about dreams. And goals. After all, a little way in to the new year, that's what everyone is talking about, right? I am a dreamer. I always have been. As my parents will laughingly confirm, my ability to get completely lost in my own little dream world is pretty solid. Although I have outgrown the stage where this leads me to leave pencil marks on door frames (apparently, I was a princess locked in a tower and the pencil was my key) or spend 10 minutes washing one plate, I can still happily entertain myself for long periods of time with nothing but my own thoughts. I like my dream world. Everything works out just the way I want it to there! In real life...not so much. That doesn't stop me from having "in real life" dreams, though. I may have to wait longer than I planned or it may look different than I imagined, but I think dreams are important. Dreams keep us moving forward, keep us growing, give us purpose and hope. I believe dreams are somethin