Reckless Love

       I don't know about you, but I find friendship hard as an adult.  It's not that I don't want friends, but it takes time, effort, energy, and sacrifice to make a friend and be a good friend.  As a mom, I often put so much effort into ensuring my kids are afforded the opportunities to make friends and connect with them that typically I don't feel like I have a whole lot of time leftover for myself.  Besides my kids, there is my spouse who deserves my energy, love, and time so we can connect and continue to grow in our relationship in this busy season of parenting teens (who don't yet drive themselves anywhere).      I previously shared about how I encountered the Holy Spirit and felt the invitation to friendship with God.  It was a monumental moment in my faith journey and helped me see that friendship isn't with people alone, but that God is a perfect friend.  I am not saying that we shouldn't have friends and making an excuse for my lack of effort in f

      This past November the Lord met me.  I didn't know I was missing something and that I wasn't living free until I found freedom. But because I asked Jesus to be the Lord of my life, He has never stopped transforming me into the woman He made me to be.  It was a year and a half ago that my family came to our new church home in Ephrata, and it has been a steady introduction to the person of the Holy Spirit.            Jesus said in John 16:7, Nevertheless I tell you the truth.  It is to your advantage that I go away; for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you; but if I depart, I will send Him to you. These words were not unfamiliar to me, and I had read about the Holy Spirit, learned about Pentecost, and known about how the early disciples of Jesus were filled with the Spirit and empowered to bring the Good News to the ends of the earth.  But knowing about , and knowing Holy Spirit personally aren't the same.     God knew this about me, and I can't hel

  “And this is what God has testified: He has given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have God’s Son does not have life.” 1 John‬ ‭5‬:‭11‬-‭12‬ ‭NLT‬‬      I can remember the moment nearly 15 years ago when I realized eternal life doesn’t begin when I die. I had lived my life believing that if I say “yes” to Jesus I am then supposed to do my best to be a good person, try not to sin (or at least not do anything too bad) and when I die I would go to heaven and be with God forever. Thankfully God provided someone who came alongside me when I was a young mom. She took time with me each week while my daughter napped and read the word with me, showed me the importance of memorizing and understanding what the Bible says, and showed me how I can read the Bible for myself and apply it to my everyday life.        2 Corinthians 5:17 says, “This means that anyone who belongs to Christ has become a new person. The old life is gone; a ne

    I have come to see the immense value of a shared story.  It is interesting to me how social media has created story features and we no longer share a post, but a story.  We all know the facade of our highlight reels with our social media friends so let's not pretend that what we post there is our story.  But we all have one because our lives tell a story.      Can you recall a moment in your own life where your story intersected with another?  That time when you were walking through something hard, feeling alone and like you were the only one experiencing this, but then either you shared your story or encountered someone on a similar path and suddenly you were no longer alone.   Right now I am doing my best to raise teenagers, and it is not for the faint of heart.  But each time I hear a story from another parent I breathe a sigh of relief that my home is not Crazy Town because others know what this season of life is like and get it.      This isn't going to be a long post

     We all have those times in our lives where something happens and the trajectory of our life changes and does not go back to the way it was before.  It could be something momentous like graduation, marriage, or children or something uninvited like divorce, sickness, or death.  At other times it is a series of small decisions or lessons learned that guide us in a new direction and then we look back over time and see we are no longer who we once were.       It is hard to believe this summer my family and I will have been in this home for 6 years.  It is even harder to believe how much has changed in my life in what seemed like just a few short years.  But what I want to focus on and remember is what God has done in me over the last year.  This past weekend was what I am calling a "Marker Moment" in my life.  It is a point in time that I chose to mark with a specific act to say "THIS is worth remembering".  On 2/3/24 I chose to be baptized in my church, not because

      I cried myself to sleep the other night.  Well, almost.  I lay on my pillow as tears streamed down my face and my thoughts raced with all the ways I had messed up, wasn't good enough, and told me all the worst things I could think about myself.  I felt utterly defeated.   The interesting thing was the catalyst for this wasn't that big of a deal, my day had been good, and a few hours earlier I had felt fine.  But that didn't seem to matter at the moment because just that quick my mind had made me out to be the worst.       I say "almost" because as I lay there wrestling with my thoughts, I eventually got to the place where I had had enough.  All these things weren't true, and deep down I knew it.  Yet, after a full day, I felt too weary to tell myself anything different.  Thankfully, I had somewhere else to turn.       This might sound  cliche, overly simple, or like a platitude, but I will say it anyway:  Prayer is powerful.  How do I know?  Because ju

 It’s Christmas Eve.  We have had quite a year as we settled in at a new church, raised a puppy, and continue to learn how to engage and parent a pre-teen and teen.  We are in a new season.  One that is sometimes uncomfortable as we encounter new territories in parenting and in our faith.  But we are all learning and growing as individuals and as family and encountering God and his presence in new ways as we step into all that he is doing in our church, our family, our ministry.   I say all this as a simple update and to segue into one of the things we have been learning in our new church community.  We have been pondering and encountering the Holy presence of God and viewing our response to Him.  Do we fear the Lord and keep him in his proper place of honor and worship?  Do we make him too small in our lives?  Do we know his heart and desire for us?  So as these ideas swirl in and around me, this advent reflection poured out: Lord, when you visited the Israelites by cloud and fire on

 Psalm 34:4 says: I prayed to the Lord and he answered me.  He freed me from all my fears.        I admit that I can be a fearful person.  It doesn't always look like outright fright like when you get to the top of the hill on a roller coaster and can finally see the way down.  No, my fear can disguise itself.  It may look like saying no to something that should have been a yes, rejecting something simply because it is new to me, worry and anxiety out of concern for myself or my family, and it can even sometimes come as a wave of depression or a lack of self-esteem.       When I reflect on fear, I can justify that it is a response or an emotion that was designed to keep me safe.  After all, "healthy" fear might keep us from running out into traffic as a child, driving recklessly as a teenager, or risking our life savings as an adult.  But when it comes to fear there is definitely an unhealthy side.  As a parent, I see moments where my kids fear.  For example, I know they

      Have you ever paid attention to what gets you fired up?  And I am not talking about a good football game or someone cutting you off on the road.  What bothers you?  When you look at the world around you what do you see and think to yourself, "this isn't right" or my favorite pre-teen phrase "that's not fair".  There is something to those strong feelings, but let me come back to that.      This week I was reading from the book of Exodus about the story of Moses.  Being raised in the Egyptian palace, Moses could have lived his whole life with privilege and riches.  But one day Moses began noticing the Hebrew people (the people he came from) were being oppressed and treated very severely.  I can only imagine he burned with righteous anger seeing the people treated as slaves and when he witnessed an Egyptian beating a Hebrew it says, "After looking in all directions to make sure no one was watching, Moses killed the Egyptian and hid the body in the sa