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This weekend I did a major closet purge. It feels so good to have space and easily shut the drawers, but it was also kind of hard. Saying goodbye to certain items was saying goodbye to a season of my life (I no longer need as much business casual). I was saying goodbye to other items […]

Mark and I have been in Florida the last 3 months. It’s been in incredible time with the Lord. He’s preparing us to hit the road running when we return to MN very soon. He’s been speaking to us about our church (https://rt4sanctuary.org/), the foster care initiative and our house of healing (aka the Encounter

The Lord has been speaking to me about how priorities (the plural) almost goes against the very definition of priority: something given the time, attention, importance above all other competing alternatives. Once we have more than one priority, we have to decide still between alternatives which can carry confusion. I painted this picture a couple

When anger rises in me, I often see two paths in front of me: to respond in outburst or reaction or to stuff it down and ignore it. Let’s be honest, if I am angry enough at the trigger, I don’t actually see those two options before reacting in an outburst! The issue with those

The Bible says the joy of the Lord is our strength (Neh 8:10). It is a gift to us and in us from Jesus (John 15:11) and a fruit of the Holy Spirit inside of us (Gal 5). Joy is such a powerful gift we have access to, but also seems to be a hard

The transformation a caterpillar goes through to become a butterfly is very interesting. Although the DNA of both creatures are identical, the genes that are “turned on” and “turned off” are not the same. In the cocoon, the caterpillar’s organs and body essentially turn to goo in order to grow instead a completely new structure

I still can sing the lyrics from VBS over 20 years ago, “Be Bold, Be strong for the Lord thy God is with you. Do not be terrified, do not be discouraged. For the Lord thy God will be with you wherever you go. BE BOLD!” This verse (Joshua 1:9) is often partnered with lessons

Proverbs 22:6 “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.”  I’ve been meditating on this verse in preparation for our conference this weekend. I have always looked at this verse as kind of a disciplinary verse. Train them up to be kind,

“On the first day of the week, Mary of Magdala came to the tomb early in the morning, while it was still dark, and saw the stone removed from the tomb. So she ran and went to Simon Peter and to the other disciple whom Jesus loved, and told them, “They have taken the Lord from the tomb, and

It seems like so many things try to steal our joy these days. 40 degrees and gray skies top my list. We could also add boarded up stores, social distancing, loss of income, inability to spend time with loved ones etc. But joy is a result of believing, not an uncontrollable outcome. Joy is rooted