All posts tagged: christian

I need to write about Jarrid Wilson.

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It felt like we all lost. Like the entire community of us, those who have been fighting it for years, decades and those who are recently discovering themselves and how to cope with it, it felt like we all lost the fight. That’s how I felt at least, when I heard the news about Jarrid Wilson: pastor, father, husband and mental health advocate, taking his own life. It’s….unpleasant in general for many reasons…and by unpleasant I mean tragic, terribly sad and disturbing. The extremely haunting truth about his death…the part of it that sent me down a roller coaster of difficult emotions last night….emotions that were stronger than they should have been for someone I didn’t know was this: he was fighting the same thing I and many others fight everyday. He was doing the right things. Sharing. Talking. Helping other people through his struggle. He was a pastor. He loved Jesus. He loved people. People loved him. He wasn’t alone. And it still over took him. For the rest of us. Those of us …

So…People had a lot to say about my mental health post.

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To say I was anything but surprised on the amount of feedback I got from my latest post would be lying. People loved it. It’s crazy because I was so hesitant to talk about this topic for many reasons, but I’m glad I did. There’s something about the human condition that uses the struggles that we all face to connect us. It gives us a community of people who relate to the fact that we all have something we’re going through. We’re all warriors earning our badges throughout this life and when we realize that we can shift the focus from ourselves and instead support each other. I think that’s pretty amazing. I made a video addressing the feedback I received. It’s on YouTube and you can find it by clicking here. I have a bunch of other videos on YouTube as well, but this is definitely one I’m proud of simply due to the amount of effort it took for a quick “thanks for loving on me” post. I’m also pretty proud of this …

Don’t Run. Fight. Be Brave.

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Transparency post. I’m never as brave as I look. I have to remind myself constantly that it’s okay to be fearful, but that fearfulness is not an exscuse for stagnancy. My tendency when things catch me off guard, stress my beyond comprehension or scare me is to hide or run away from the challenge. By hide, I don’t mean physically (at first), but I more so hide emotionally. I shut myself off to feelings and can become very clinical in my approach in an attempt to patch it up and remove it from my sight. I become a “1) what’s the problem 2) what’s the solution” type of person. People who aren’t familiar with me and how I handle stress (which is 98% of the population) will often celebrate this side of me because it’s effective. I get praised for having a small to non existent stress response or being able to maintain my cool under insane amounts of pressure, but inside I fully well know that what I’ve done on the inside to get …

Practically in Love 1:3

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Hey Friends! Thanks for popping in. This is part 3 of a little series that I’ve been doing. If you’d like to know what the series is about and it’s purpose check out my intro to the series Practically in Love here. Alright, part 3 here we go! Boundary setting is an act of love. For yourself yes, but also for others.  Why is it so important to set personal boundaries? Because it gives you space to think and to grow. Without proper boundaries, you open yourself up to distractions and to stressors that in the end tangle you up and can affect your ability to grow. Obviously some stressors are relatively unavoidable, but if we look closely at our lives and the things that leave us feeling  overly stretched and stressed, most of those things come from the inability to set boundaries around our time, commitments and involvement. Lets talk about gardening for a moment. Random? Not quite. There are plenty of people who are amazing at gardening. I, for one, am not one of …

Practically in Love 1:2

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Hey Friends! Welcome to my first ever series! In brief, this series is about learning how to practically love the people around us. If you want more details about this series, check out my previous introductory post here. This week we’re going to focus on practically loving others by showing respect. I wasn’t going to start with respect simply because it seems so basic. We learned about respect way back in the beginning in elementary school and as children learning how to properly interact with adults. So I figured it could be a little too simplistic and foundational as a start…but then I thought about that word I just used; foundational. Foundations are things we build on. You wouldn’t build a house without first making sure it had a strong foundation, why? Because it wouldn’t stand. We can’t talk about love without talking about respect. It’s just that simple. Over time we have decided that we get to determine whether another person is worthy of respect. We make them earn it from us. We create …

Practically in Love : Intro

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Love one another It wasn’t a suggestion. It wasn’t prefaced with “You should probably..” or followed up with “If you feel like it.” It was a command that was actually followed up with “as I have loved you.” Who is the speaker? Jesus. What did he want us to do? Love each other as he had loved us. It seems simple enough, until you think about what that actually means. I feel like our society has corrupted the idea of love. We think love is that thing we’re feeling when someone special makes us feel warm and fuzzy inside or that showing love is saying “I love you” at the close of a phone conversation. I have reason to believe that this is nowhere near the kind of love that Jesus was talking about. I think Jesus was talking about the messy kind of love. The kind of love we avoid because it takes too much time or makes us too uncomfortable. Why do I think that that’s the kind of love that Jesus was talking …

Validation

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Validation: The recognition or affirmation that a person or their feelings or opinions are valid or worthwhile. As people we love to be validated. We love to know that someone out there thinks that we matter. We love validation in our work places. We want the boss to know that they need us, we want our co workers to know that we’re adding benefit to the workplace. We love validation in our schools. We want our teachers to think we’re intelligent. We want to be told “Great job!” on our papers or projects, or get excellent grades so that we avoid disapproval from those around us. We crave validation in our friend groups. We want our friends to value us. We hurt when a friend doesn’t talk to us for a few days or when our snap streak is broken. We want validation from people who aren’t even our friends. How do we know this? Because most of us (not all of us) spend far too much time trying to find out why certain people …

You Asked: How to Spend Time with God Throughout Your Day

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Hey Friends! Todays topic is one that was actually sent to me by one of you. I got a few requests as a result of a post I put out on twitter, but I really wanted to talk about this one first because its something that I am personally challenged with at this particular time in my life. Todays topic: How to spend time with God throughout your day. Now, those of you who identify yourselves as christians most likely know that you should be making time for God daily, if you didn’t, now you do. Most of us are pretty good at that. We wake up in the morning and open up our bible app. We wait for that welcome message at the top of our screen and for our daily streak number to register that yes, I have opened my bible app for the 147th time in a row (or maybe you’re like me and your on day 15…again…). Some of you may even end your day with some God time, praying and …

Friday Findings

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Hi friends! Happy Friday! I hope this week has been a good one! This week for me has been challenging, but the good kind. I’ve been challenged to do things that made me uncomfortable, things that I felt incredibly unprepared for and to shine a light on a side of me that I prefer to keep hidden for the sake of a friend. Specifics? They’re coming. So, what exactly is this “Friday Findings”? It’s a section of my blog where I will  update you weekly on things I want to talk about from the past week. Category: lessons learned. Lets get started! This week God has been teaching me something. What? I’m not quite sure yet. But twice this week I’ve been in situations where I’ve had to get quite uncomfortable and talk about things I normally wouldn’t for the sake of encouragement and transparency. It was pretty cool. I don’t normally jump for opportunities like that because I usually walk away from them feeling pretty exposed and vulnerable. This time was no different. In …

Let’s Chat: Teenagers

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“Timid and shy and scared am I Of things beyond my ken I need someone older and wiser Telling me what to do You are seventeen going on eighteen I’ll, depend, on you” Can anyone guess where this is from? Yes! The Sound of Music. My all time favorite musical. If you’ve seen it you remember the scene: It’s pouring out and Leisl is dancing  just out of reach of the rain with her man candy Rolf. She’s singing about how she is becoming a woman, and needs Rolf, to look out for her. Rolf, mind you, is only a whopping one year older than she is. The teen years were a journey for all of us I’m sure. I know that mine were…and that’s if by journey the connotation is less an evening stroll through the woods and more of a spinning, looping, speeding rollercoaster with no indication of when you’ll be let off. Dating was a thing. Like…a real thing, not a sitting next to a boy in the cafeteria thing. But, having …