Lesson(s) Learned

Oftentimes, it’s easy to see one snapshot of a person’s life and make a “snap” judgement. I’ll give you two personal examples of this. Back in 2011, I was given the great opportunity to speak on stage & share the Gospel with the women at a church in Tiburon, Haiti. If someone were to take a snapshot-judgment of my life then, I’d probably gain a lot of respect from fellow Christians. What a wonderful thing I was doing!  Fast forward to 2017, I was admitted to the behavioral health floor of the hospital (for the second time). I sat down to a meal with a man struggling with PTSD and on the verge of suicide when his neighbor called for help & got him admitted into the hospital. Through both of our very broken mindsets, God graced me the opportunity to share with him the hope that can be found in the Bible. I encouraged him to read his Bible that night, and the next morning at breakfast he told me that he read the Bible for the first time. Pause. Had someone taken a sna...

Mental Illness & the Family of God Growing up, I was always raised with the thought line, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.” Over the years, I’ve come to realize that sometimes what is “nice” and what is necessary to voice aren’t always the same thing. For example, it’s not nice to tell someone that they are a sinner. It is actually quite offensive. No one likes to be told that they’re wrong. But telling someone they are a sinner is necessary to leading them into a relationship with Jesus Christ. Staying silent and being “nice” are actually the opposite of what Scripture admonishes us to do when it says to SPEAK the truth in love. When you love someone, you will speak truth to them. Even if it’s offensive. I love my fellow brothers and sisters in Christ, and I feel led to speak out with what is about to follow. As some may already know, God has graced me with a story that took me through a very dark time and brought me out to make me a witnes...

Marker Zebra Stripes It all started several weeks ago when my husband and I decided to watch Madagascar for the first (and hopefully, only) time in our lives. What I thought was just a questionable-decision-birthed-out-of-boredom turned out to be a full-fledged Madasgascar-a-thon when all was said and done. That’s right…so because Jeff thought Madagascar 1 was pretty hilarious, we ended up watching sequels. [Side thoughts: Why don’t filmmakers ever label first movies with a 1… letting you know there’s more to come.. and as a warning that you should probably just walk away from watching the first movie at some point, so that you don’t end up pretending to like it & be stuck in a Madagascar-a-thon. Just saying]. So we started watching the sequels, & they were really not great. at all. & yet there’s a ton of them. & then the spin-off movie. About the penguins. I just can’t. I guess I’m just not in a season of life to get that severely bored. So, all sequel-sadness...