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Enjoyed – A Mini Musing
If you are a reader then you will absolutely understand the idea that some books leave a mark on your life. One of those books for me is The Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren. This is a book that certainly did the rounds in the early 2000s church. It is also a contributing factor to my coming back to faith. All that to say, I love this book! So when Mike and I started to re-read it a while back it was sure to bring some new revelations. One such revelation was early on when Rick discusses our eternity. Yes, we get to look forward to spending eternity with God. But God is also…
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Filled To Overflowing
Filled To Overflowing – The Next Step When You Are Running On Empty If you are anything like me, being around people revives your spirit and gives you energy. Married life has been wonderful for this part of my personality. I now have a live-in person who is “expected” to talk and connect with me on a regular basis, especially when I’ve had a hard day or have to get my word count out. But this tendency to need people around, and my desire to connect on a deeper level can also be a challenge. You see, sometimes I find it hard not to expect or require too much from the people…
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Mini Musing – Spiral Up
Do you ever feel frustrated when issues you thought you had dealt with seem to rear their ugly heads again? Doesn’t it feel demoralising when you find yourself responding to a situation the way you used to, even though you have worked so hard in that area? As I was struggling with my thoughts on this recently, I was reminded that when we come to Christ we come as we are, in all our messy brokenness. But He doesn’t want us to stay that way – do I hear a “Thank you Jesus!” However, He also knows we can’t deal with everything all at once. One step at a time,…
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Mini Musing – Delighted
If you are a feijoa lover then autumn in New Zealand is a great season, especially if you know someone with a tree! These types of trees can be so abundant with fruit that when you say yes to “some” feijoa’s the giver will often supply you with a massive bag of them! As they hand it over, with a smile on their face, it is as if they are passing on the mission – you too now have to find as many ways as possible to use up the fruit before they go bad. The other day as I was sorting through another bag of gifted feijoa’s I felt a…
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Discovered in Disappointment
Discovered in Disappointment TRIGGER WARNING – Subject deals with miscarriage and infertility. Have you ever felt disappointed at God? Not just upset, but angry, confused and deeply disappointed. Maybe you felt like he’d spoken to you, taken you on a journey, was directing and leading you, but then it all looked lost and you wondered if you got it completely wrong? Or, is it that life has handed you some big curveballs and you wonder how God can turn it around? Disappointment is certainly not a place people talk about much in Christian settings. But what do you do when these are your feelings and this is your journey? When Disappointed Is…
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The Purpose of Pain
For all the wonderful things about life; loved ones, adventures, the beauty around us, and great experiences we look forward to, this life is also full of a lot of pain and challenges! But if we don’t face the pain head-on and continue the journey of working through our feelings and responses to it, pain and its unhealthy fruit, can rob us of the life God wants us to live and impact how we relate to those around us. Through my journey to healing I have found three truths that have helped me move forward.
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Suicide – My Story of Hope
Suicide - My Story of Hope This is not a part of my story that I have shared often. This is not because I am ashamed that I struggled, as I believe struggles can make us stronger if we let them, but because my life is so different now. That part of my life feels like a time and experience that happened to someone else. However, I feel prompted to share this given the recent, horrifying run of suicides in our nation, and our world. My prayer is that my story gives someone who reads it HOPE! A hope that although life may feel hopeless, it absolutely doesn’t need…
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Lessons from the Trenches
Lessons from the Trenches Four key steps when marriage gets tough. All marriages go through difficult seasons, where the feelings of love are harder to find. But sometimes things can get extra tough! One of you may have admitted to an affair, or woken up one day feeling like the love has gone. Or perhaps you are spending increasing amounts of your time together arguing or ignoring each other. It is at this point that we all have a choice to make: will we get out of the marriage and move on to perceived “greener pastures”, or will we get stuck in and fight. They say that anything in…
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Hope Anchor
Hope - a word that is often used to describe our feelings of expectation that something we are struggling with or waiting for will change for the better. We say to someone struggling, “you need to have hope.” We talk about the outcome we hope to happen. But for me, the concept of hope has been an ongoing source of struggle. So often in periods of waiting, hope has seemed painful and pointless as expectations and desires go unmet. Since I know God is all powerful and can do all things, when it feels like he doesn't follow through, or it seems to take a long time, my balance in…
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The Infertile Journey
The Infertile Journey 3 keys to finding peace in life's storms In August of 2015, 4 months before our wedding, our journey began. In a quest to find out what kind of contraception we should use we started the process of testing. By November that year we received our first letter. The prognosis didn’t look so good and we were being referred to a specialist. More testing and in July of 2016 our 2nd letter came. We were told that the likelihood of us ever conceiving a baby naturally was very low. I write this blog, two years into our marriage and from the depths of our storm. We…
