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Showing posts from 2018

Weighing In On Mental Illness - After A Long Silence

Reach Out - Get Help With all the sad news circulating today about yet another celebrity taking their life after a battle with mental illness, I felt I just had to weigh in. I know…I know. There are a million people putting in their “two cents” on this topic right now. Some opinions are helpful, some are hurtful. Mine may fall silent among the crowd, but I am going to put it out there regardless, because I have been there. I believe there is strength in personal experience, so I am choosing to share mine. For as long as I can remember, I have struggled with feelings of disconnection. I remember standing on the playground as a child at school, having an existential crisis while looking at my hands or other parts of myself, thinking “is this really my hand (or foot, arm, leg, whatever)?”, and then immediately feeling shame and embarrassment for having such weird thoughts. I never talked to anyone about this. Somehow, I just knew in my mind that to tell someone the strange

Spare Change...How Do You Spend It?

It’s Friday afternoon, and I am beginning my weekly countdown to 5 pm. Only a few more hours to go, and then I will be free for the weekend to do whatever I please. Or will I? How many times a day do you think this way, "I am free to do as I please"?  I realize many of us spend our days dictated by someone else’s schedule or agenda. We have jobs that tell us when to arrive and when to leave. We have expectations and goals to meet each day, and they are rarely set by us. It would stand to reason that when we break out of that routine, we wish to control the remainder of our time - our “spare change” if you would. We rarely value time as a commodity, until we run out of it. Our desperate attempt to grab hold of whatever extra minutes we can find and hoard them for ourselves is a natural reaction, but not the most valuable or advantageous. We all have obligations in life. We must eat. We must have shelter. We must have clean clothing. We must be able to pro

Let Us...

Have you ever wondered what it would take to have a successful year? Not just the kind of year that you get through, or the kind that you feel OK about. I am talking about a truly life-altering kind of year. The kind that causes you to look back and shout "Hallelujah!!" when you see all the growth and transition God has brought forth in you. What would it take for 2018 to be that year for us? At the beginning of 2018, when everyone was knee-deep in their resolution making process, I had the privilege of listening to a series of messages by world-renowned Bible teacher, Derek Prince. If you have not experienced the pleasure and the challenge of his teaching, I would encourage you to seek him out (derekprinceministries.org) .  In this series, entitled Twelve Steps to a Good Year , Derek walks us through the book of Hebrews, and points out twelve specific verses that point us towards a life more set on God -- more set on service -- and much less s