places | seasons | mental & spiritual health
I don't know about you, but I've been feeling pretty worn down recently. Pandemic, politics and parenting have my baseline anxiety a bit higher than normal -- I've been catching my jaw clenched, my breath shallow, my back sore with tension. When anxiety is high, my threshold for other stimuli becomes lower. So when my …
“Today was not a good day,” I darkly greeted my husband as he entered our apartment and took in the scene. I laid on the couch while the kids had some screen time in our bedroom. My struggle with anxiety and maintaining my mental health had taken a more prominent role in our lives over …
Continue reading "5 Ways My Husband Supports My Mental Health, A Family Life Guest Post"
Typical of little people, my children have both believed in the power of a Band-aid. Not just for broken skin, band-aids are requested for all kinds of boo-boos. Bug bites, scratches, or burns, and bruises, soreness, or bumps -- the act of adding a bandage has magical powers to soothe. It’s not just band-aids either, …
A couple of years ago in preparation for a Bible study on the book of Galatians, I read Tim Keller’s excellent book Galatians For You. When he gets to the end of chapter 3, he stops and camps out on how Paul uses the imagery of clothes all over his letters and helps us understand …
About a year ago, I finally got serious about washing my face. A few comments from Gilmore Girls about looking scary when we don’t wash off our make-up really stuck with me, so while I didn’t have access or money for lots of skincare products, washing my face and moisturizing is the least I can …
Back in college, we had this Discipleship Group and sometimes we found the materials to be a little bit cheesy. We’d be reading some illustration and then some not-so-subtle transition would tie it back into the spiritual or Biblical principle at hand, something as smooth and artful as “And so it is with God.” It …
I turned out okay. Poptarts and Little Debbies didn’t ruin me and, come to think of it, I wasn’t ever ruined at all. Even things less than ideal, painful as some were and even are, did not undo me. They made me.
There’s an old Brooke Fraser song called “Crows and Locusts” that I don’t think I ever really understood, except that it’s been swirling around in my head as I study Galatians and talk to my counselor and sit still enough to think about what’s happening in my soul. “It was the year The crows and …
Continue reading "Crows and Locusts: A Drafting Desk Blog Guest Post"
