The Uncommon Normal: Recent Episodes
Twyla Franz
Living as a disciple-making-disciple in your neighborhood doesn’t have to feel intimidating, and that is why I started The Uncommon Normal. My vision for the podcast is that it will be a space to steep in truth that combats the faulty messages we have believed about our worth and our purpose. A space that will inspire both a dream of what it could look like to live missionally right in your neighborhood and the courage to take baby steps in that direction. A space to be life-long learners together.
If meal-prep sounds exhausting . . .
If your quiet time is inconsistent (or non-existent) . . .
If you're already wondering how to clone yourself . . .
If you want meaningful moments in the midst of the busy . . .
If you long for authentic community . . .
If you wish you could just slow August down a tad . . .
This list of tips is for you.
They're practical. Easy to implement. Gifts from my actual life to you.
Links mentioned:
- Get a FREE, 5-Day Email Course: Turn Your Loneliness into Ripple-Effect Faith in 5 Days.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
- This handy, 5-minute quiet time guide from Jennifer Dukes Lee is free to download!
- I Don't Have to Hold it All Together by Nichole J. Suvar
Like shoes, our habits can help or harm us. Sometimes it's not obvious from the outside, but inside, we feel either weighed down or revived. That's our clue. Pay attention. Some shiny new habits might not be right for you, and some familiar ones may be past their lifespan.
Links mentioned:
- Get a FREE, 5-Day Email Course: Turn Your Loneliness into Ripple-Effect Faith in 5 Days.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
- My word of the year, koinonia.
Even a former "most positive student" can hit a negativity streak. Even a well-practiced gratitude journaler can catastrophize. Even the most spiritual among us can spiral into negative self-talk.
Indeed, even the host of Begin Within: A Gratitude Series, who has a front-row seat to the life-changing nature of thankfulness, has days where the mind runs wild and the thoughts self-betray.
I want to step softly here because negativity can appear bristly, but there's a tender underbelly.
Links mentioned:
- Get a FREE, 5-Day Email Course: Turn Your Loneliness into Ripple-Effect Faith in 5 Days.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
- To gently cultivate gratitude in your life, consider subscribing to Begin Within: A Gratitude Series. Every Thursday you'll get a new story in your inbox–real-life examples of what gratitude looks like on both mundane and downright hard days.
Self-sufficiency is a sludge of pride and survival. Sometimes it's our only option. Sometimes we make it our only option. I fall into the latter category.
Links mentioned:
- Get a FREE, 5-Day Email Course: Turn Your Loneliness into Ripple-Effect Faith in 5 Days.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
We can be incredibly artful about disguising our pride–me included. I'd rather you see diligence and dependability, and not dig deep enough to trace them back to pride. I would prefer to convince you that I'm always capable and composed, so you don't question why I reach for this consistency. I want you to see me as selfless and sweet-natured–never stubborn or snappy or overly sensitive–and assume pride never drives me to curate your impression of me.
But the truth is, pride can slide into our best of intentions, subvert our peace, and sandwich itself between us and other people. It hides inside of lies that sound incredibly convincing . . .
Links mentioned:
- Get a FREE, 5-Day Email Course: Turn Your Loneliness into Ripple-Effect Faith in 5 Days.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
Self-pity is not neutral. All the while we maintain composure and let self-pity subside at its own pace, it's wreaking havoc on our mental health. It's time to go on the offensive and reclaim the ground self-pity has stolen.
Links mentioned:
- Get a FREE, 5-Day Email Course: Turn Your Loneliness into Ripple-Effect Faith in 5 Days.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
-
Recite Scripture verses to actively oppose self-pity:
-
1 Corinthians 10:13
- James 5:13
- Romans 12:2
- Philippians 4:13
- Galatians 2:20
Where do you feel the pressure to be on par with someone else? To prove yourself worthy? To pretend your way into confidence?
Links mentioned:
- Get a FREE, 5-Day Email Course: Turn Your Loneliness into Ripple-Effect Faith in 5 Days.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
- Find two summer's worth of Enneagram blog series HERE.
I've got a thing with control. I like to paint it as a virtue because self-control sounds less harsh. Like less of a problem. But it actually isn't.
Your need to feel in control might come out in different ways than mine. Perhaps you vocalize more than internalize. Perhaps you extend your controlling efforts externally rather than internally. But it's the same thieving trio–fear, pride, and shame–eroding your peace, dimming your light, and keeping you in a rut.
Links mentioned:
- Get a FREE, 5-Day Email Course: Turn Your Loneliness into Ripple-Effect Faith in 5 Days
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
Can we go there–to the root of our unruly inner dialogues–so we can find peace and strength and mental relief? That's my invitation to you today.
Our inner thoughts have had too much say for too long. They keep us in the shadows, thinking small. They sabotage our friendships and our focus. Cloud out the voice of God so we think we're on our own.
Where do we start? Here, with five easy-to-implement practices to keep our self-talk in check.
Links mentioned:
- Get a FREE, 5-Day Email Course: Turn Your Loneliness into Ripple-Effect Faith in 5 Days
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
Maybe there's a similarly pesky voice of perfectionism following you around inside your head, telling you that you should be able to get incrementally better. Every. Single. Day.
It's relentless.
You're worn out from all your undue try-hard.
But also, maybe you carry a bit of shame around with your perfectionism.
You're told you worry too much.
Focus on the wrong things.
Care too much about your work.
Can we talk about you? How you can be a perfectionist and have peace of mind? How you don't have to turn off your desire to do your best? How your perfectionism can be an asset, not just to you or a supervisor, but for God's kingdom?
Links mentioned:
- Get a FREE, 5-Day Email Course: Turn Your Loneliness into Ripple-Effect Faith in 5 Days
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
Self-doubt surfaces quickly when it's thinly veiled behind borrowed confidence and temperamental self-esteem. Maybe this is your story.
To others, you appear secure, but you feel deeply insufficient inside. You can take the lead, finish the work, maintain a high standard of excellence, and pass as having it together. But you can't outrun the voice that whispers,
If only they knew how little you know, how long you've been in this role, or how lost you feel . . .
If only they knew how un-brave and undeserving you actually are . . .
If only they knew how meticulously you mask the peculiar aspects of your personality . . .
If only they knew the 14-year-old inferiority you never outgrew . . .
I've given ground to similar, self-sabataging thoughts. Spun in circles fueled by incessant overthinking. Second-guessed my way to the safest way forward.
I admit I've dismissed myself before anyone else could. Pulled away from friendships, convinced I'm more burden than blessing. Deflected praise because I disbelieve my own worth.
If you are nodding your head to any of this, there is hope. I wish we could sit down together and remind each other of what's irrevocably true of us. But maybe the reason we don't believe it yet is because we've skipped a step, so let's start there.
Links mentioned:
- Get a FREE, 5-Day Email Course: Turn Your Loneliness into Ripple-Effect Faith in 5 Days
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
- Stuff I'd Only Tell God by Jennier Dukes Lee
- Sacred Prayers by Ann Voskamp
To you, Googling "how to be a better person." You, longing to be the sort of neighbor who effortlessly welcomes others into your home, leans into conversations with sincerity and delight, and spills over with hopefulness. You, with your burgeoning summer calendar and dwindling blank space. You, feeling squeezed between ideals and actual life.
You don't need an out-of-reach plan, additional demands on your time, or an annoying voice filling your head with "shoulds." So here are some simple summertime tips that will fill you up rather than deplete you.
Links mentioned:
- If baby steps are your pace, get a quick tip in your inbox each week to help you connect with your neighbors and let your faith ripple into your neighborhood.
- Get a FREE, 5-Day Email Course: Turn Your Loneliness into Ripple-Effect Faith in 5 Days
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
I sign up on a whim. One half-marathon for Saturday, through hilly horse country. My calves are still tight from three runs the same morning, because my impetuous mind decided to run to the start line of a community 5k, which also meant I had to get home on foot after the race.
Honestly, my only hope of non-stop running for the half is contingent on keeping a slow, steady pace. And resting.
Funny how sometimes the best way to prepare is literally to take a break. To slow to a walk. To sit in the sun. To stretch. To strengthen with pilates.
Fear tells me to cram-train, to sprint up more hills, to prove (pre-race) to myself that I can make it that many miles. But muscle memory brings quiet assurance that I've gone the distance. My own permission slip from my last half-marathon says it's okay to break pace, to walk a spell, to simply finish.
This close to the race, rest will get me further than distance training.
And maybe it hits close to home in other areas of my life too. I'm a work-in-progress when it comes to rest. Sometimes my stubbornness is misdirected, and I strive for excellence in relatively inconsequential areas. Too often, I keep my proverbial plate full by working ahead in order to create margin for a future version of myself (who will simply find something else to perfect or create). You see the cycle. Perhaps you can pinpoint the same pattern in your own life.
Links mentioned:
- FREE, 5-Day Email Course: Turn Your Loneliness into Ripple-Effect Faith in 5 Days
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
Sometimes you are doing too much, and you know it from the tumble of thoughts burying the task that truly needs your attention. You find yourself making slow progress in several areas simultaneously. At every spin, you find more before you that could be straightened, sorted, or scheduled.
Oh friend, I get it.
I admit I mostly (okay, only) wipe out the interior of my fridge when I should be packing for a trip. I tidy the pantry and put wheels to a wild whim of an idea when I have barely enough margin for the minimum. I make spontaneous updates to pages on my website that don't need to be fixed.
The higher my stack of urgent responsibilities, the faster my brain churns. There is a reason I keep an AquaNotes pad in my shower to capture sudden inspiration.
If you struggle with your relationship with work–fighting excuses, inefficiency, or exhaustion–welcome! There's grace and good news, I find, for real people like us.
My slow journey through the New Testament lands me in the book of Colossians, and this week I'm lingering in chapter three. Here's what strikes me about verse 17: Paul doesn't say to do your work unto the Lord only when your load isn't too much, or only when you can keep your priorities in a God-honoring order, or only when you don't feel stressed, stretched, or sidelined.
Links mentioned:
- FREE, 5-Day Email Course: Turn Your Loneliness into Ripple-Effect Faith in 5 Days
- If you're not getting weekly gratitude stories, you can sign up HERE.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
Sometimes I can get stuck in my routine. I start my morning the same way every day I can. I fall into a rhythm with school and gymnastics and church. I even put plates a certain way in the dishwasher–every time.
In the midst of the repetition, faith can begin to feel a bit monotonous. Perhaps you've experienced this. You might feel like you're on autopilot, mudding through the motions, willing your heart to be in it. Maybe you're struggling to keep up with the minimum because the needs that take your time? Well, they keep multiplying.
Links mentioned:
- FREE, 5-Day Email Course: Turn Your Loneliness into Ripple-Effect Faith in 5 Days
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
It feels like summer, and I sit on the step with Seph Schlueter singing through my portable speaker. Funny how you can play worship songs on repeat, but they move you forward, rather than in circles. Yes, you are essentially listening on loop, but the lyrics unravel your reservations and amplify your expectancy with every replay.
Links mentioned:
- Songs I Play on Repeat playlist.
- FREE, 5-Day Email Course: Turn Your Loneliness into Ripple-Effect Faith in 5 Days
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
Perhaps it's grief, your physical health, or some other life disruption that makes the ground gallop beneath you. And it's all you can do right now to keep putting one foot forward at a time. Here are three truths that will steady you when life feels unstable.
Links mentioned:
- FREE, 5-Day Email Course: Turn Your Loneliness into Ripple-Effect Faith in 5 Days
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
"Did you see what I wrote on the mirror?" He's giddy insistent. First, he points to words I don't even see in the disappearing, post-shower stream.
God is good.
God is great.
Bless his 9-year-old heart, reminding me that even when we can't see how, God's steadiness writes a never-ending story.
Links mentioned:
- FREE, 5-Day Email Course: Turn Your Loneliness into Ripple-Effect Faith in 5 Days
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
It sounded like a prank call, but I promise we were serious. Seriously set on seeing the sunrise in a city where we'd spend spring break. This was before the days of smartphones to check the weather app. So we did what made most sense to our college student brains—call local numbers in the phone book to ask when the sun rises.
I think of it now as radiant pink entrances us en route to school. These sunrise spottings almost make me like Daylight Savings. Almost.
Since I started running, I catch every sunrise I can. I time my runs down to the minute so I can capture the colors from the church at the crest of the hill. But on school days, I usually miss the sun breaking through the night . . . except when Daylight Savings aligns the time.
A sunrise feels like a God-hug in the middle of the rush to get to school. A splash of His endless creativity. The visible evidence that He is always watching over us.
Or, as Jennifer Dukes Lee writes in her book How to Love Your Morning, that He is watching with us. In her captivating story-telling style, she paints a picture of a God pointing our eyes to the sunrise He created for us. I don't want to spoil it for you, so you just might need to read the book yourself! (This story is in chapter two.)
Links mentioned:
- How to Love Your Morning by Jennifer Dukes Lee
- FREE, 5-Day Email Course: Turn Your Loneliness into Ripple-Effect Faith in 5 Days
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
Lately, it seems we're walking the thin line between breaking and believing. Lighting candles because we need a flicker of hope. Lengthening hugs because we all need the warmth of presence. How do we make Easter meaningful in the middle of spring break–and all sorts of honest aches?
Links mentioned:
- FREE, 5-Day Email Course: Turn Your Loneliness into Ripple-Effect Faith in 5 Days
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
You were made to delight the very heart of Christ. Your words are meant to move the heart of God.
Your devotion undoes Him.
Your worship declares Him worthy.
Your one surrendered life, aligned with His, honors Him.
Links mentioned:
- FREE, 5-Day Email Course: Turn Your Loneliness into Ripple-Effect Faith in 5 Days
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
Amen isn't an ending, but an acknowledgement that God can be counted on. It's agreement with what already beats in the heart of our Lord. It's coming alongside God's already, willingly-spoken "yes."
Links mentioned:
- FREE, 5-Day Email Course: Turn Your Loneliness into Ripple-Effect Faith in 5 Days
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
Down in the unseen recesses of our mind, we worry we aren't seen. That our superhero power is being invisible, although no one asked if that's what we wanted.
We walk around lonely, longing for the assurance that we matter, trying to reconcile the breach between life right now and as it will be, when everything finally makes sense.
We get partial perspective this side of heaven. "Only part of the big picture," Paul says (1Corinthians 13:12).
I realize that everything I know is only part of the big picture. But one day, when Jesus arrives, we will see clearly, face-to-face.
The Voice
And this slice of right-now? It feels raw some days. Unfair, often times. Can a distant promise soften the ache in between the now and Jesus coming again to right the wrongs and reveal what we don't yet know and replace our loneliness with knownness?
There is a day coming when the heart of every human will be revealed. On that day, all we long to know will be unlocked. We'll have peace–and all the puzzle pieces.
But Paul tells us we don't have to wait until then to be cradled in the gaze of God. Today, and every day in between now and eternity, we are already seen. As the verse continues,
In that day, I will fully know just as I have been wholly known by God.
1 Corinthians 13:12, The Voice
Even when you're overlooked by the people around you, you are noticed by the God of the universe.
Even when other people misunderstand you, you are "wholly known" by God.
Even when you're surrounded by instability, struggling with insecurity, or seeking answers, you are secure with the One who sees you.
What happens when you know in the depths of your soul that you are seen? Security. Surrender. Solidarity. Let's unpack them together.
Links mentioned:
- FREE, 5-Day Email Course: Turn Your Loneliness into Ripple-Effect Faith in 5 Days
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
Sometimes all the things in your head get really loud. You're anxious over everything imagined and irrational. Your self-set expectations make you feel small, and in the tangle of untruths toying with your mind, you've got to remind yourself that hearing God's voice isn't for the ultra-spiritual alone. It's for the worn-out worriers, the willful wanderers, the wisdom-deficient, and the opportunity wasters. For those spiritually "in training," as my pastor says.
Links mentioned:
- To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up HERE.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
This is for you, feeling alone even when you're surrounded by other people. This is for the introvert keen on deep friendships but second-guessing her own merit. This is for those new to town, missing home, starting over. This is for the long-time homeowner who knows fewer than five neighbors by name. This is for lonely Christians longing for something to shift.
Links mentioned:
- FREE, 5-Day Email Course: Turn Your Loneliness into Ripple-Effect Faith in 5 Days
- To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up HERE.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
I wonder where you're feeling most overwhelmed. What's beneath your tension headache and audible exhales? What stiffens your shoulders and triggers an insatiable, internal stopwatch?
"Don't forget to enjoy this season," my literary agent says, and it startles me. Because I'm so busy sorting out the next two years I forget that the season I'm in should feel slow. There should be room to breathe. To dream, not all rushed like I'm in crunch time, but like lungs expanding. Like a soul at rest.
Maybe you relate. You try to solve problems ahead of time to eliminate potential stress. But you're out of your lane and time zones ahead and really, you just need to stay present right where you are.
Links mentioned:
- Ann Voskamp's questions in Sacred Prayer.
- To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up HERE.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
I lived on Nicollet Ave. in a city that's been ablaze with rage, but I was too tiny to know anything but the security of arms cradling me. Minneapolis, MN was simply home. My birthplace. My nativity.
This morning a candle wafts rich vanilla into my chilly basement and my Bible is open to the book of Jeremiah. Jeremiah's intensity seems fitting for the fractures dividing our country. "There is no cure for my grief," he writes. "My heart breaks for what I see and hear" (Jeremiah 8:18, The Voice).
Maybe that's what you feel too. The heaviness. The defeat. The grief.
As I read Jeremiah 9:23-24, I wonder what breakthrough might happen if we spent less time drawing conclusions and more time drawing close to God. Less time taking sides and more time by His side.
Links mentioned:
- To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up HERE.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
I'm typically the one playing it safe. I minimize risk through research and reluctance. Control what I can and avoid the rest.
Perhaps it won't surprise you that this is the first time in four days I've left my neighborhood. But the interstate is stunning. I'm heading into the sun, which accentuates the ice. I would have missed this ethereal wonderland if I didn't brave the roads—just like I can miss the adventure God calls me to if I insist on playing it safe.
Links mentioned:
- To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up HERE.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
To springboard off Christine Hoover's "back-door friend," I've turned items from around my house into archetypes to help us better understand friendship. Which one best describes the type of friend you are?
Links mentioned:
- Messy Beautiful Friendships by Christine Hoover.
- Sometimes we keep our friendship shallow–by accident. Discover if you are making any of these ten common mistakes by grabbing the free download HERE. You'll also get a powerful secret to help you deepen your friendships.
- To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up HERE.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
Maybe January feels like a hinge month. Like what happens the rest of the year rests on what you do with this one month.
You feel all kinds of pressure to pick the right New Year's resolutions, the perfect word of the year, the habits that will stack up to lifestyle change. You write and rewrite your measurable goals, your keep and let-go list, your personal mission statement.
Perhaps you're fed up with merely existing. You long for depth, clarity, connection. And January, you determine, is the tone-setter for the remaining months. The mark of your maximum braveness. The hinge-point for 2026.
Or it might be time to step into something that has been a long time coming. You feel more inadequate than excited, here on the precipice of a brand new season.
First, a confession: I'm here with you–both hopeful for this year and overthinking how to best embrace January. I'm doing the thing I've been preparing years for, but it feels lonelier than I expected. I'm writing more slowly than ever. Looking forward to actual up-comings–a finished manuscript, rounds of editing, choosing a cover, sharing with you what I've been co-creating with God–is entirely different than anticipating the possibility of it all.
Second, an invitation: step back into ancient, soon-to-be Israel with me as we simplify how to transition well. I find uncanny relevance in the book of Joshua. It's a significant season in Israel's history as they leave the wilderness and step into God's promise. Inside Joshua's story are powerful yet simple tools to take with us into 2026.
Links mentioned:
- Gifts and Gratitudes journal from Ann Voskamp.
- To help you begin a year-round gratitude practice, sign up HERE to get a gratitude story in your inbox each week.
- To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up HERE.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
Okay, Lord, I get it. My stubborn insistence that I never need help is the opposite of koinonia.
Koinonia is a lighter way to live.
An easier way to breathe.
It takes the shape of rest–right in the middle of writing a book. Looks like a yes to relationship-building, which is wired in all of us, by God's design.
Every time you link arms, share a burden, trust a friend with your confession, unite in prayer, accept help, or make space around your table, a little light gets in under your shell. Your got-to-keep it together begins to erode. Your self-defeating assumptions are deflated. Your insecurities are dethroned.
But koinonia with God is where it begins. There's no sweeter fellowship than with God's son. No conversation more life-transforming than with the Word of God. No bond more true than you can have between God and you.
Links mentioned:
- Find the Instagram carousel fromWholeHearted Enneagram here for encouragement for the rest of the Enneagram numbers.
- To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up HERE.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
When we read primarily to check a box, it's only a matter of time before we check out. If we read out of guilt or obligation, we approach the Word already bored. If we expect the words to go over our head, we'll forget God promises us wisdom if we'll only ask (James 1:5). And if we give up before we get started, we'll never give the Word a chance to become our lifeline in crisis, our won't-miss rhythm, our reassurance of God's with-ness.
Links mentioned:
- For shorter, guided plans, check out the ones on YouVersion.
- Mary Demuth's 90-day Bible reading challenge.
- Ann Voskamp's Sacred Prayer journal.
- To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up HERE.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
What if we could make the new year better than the last? If we could guarantee that God's goodness–up close and unmissable–would overshadow the trials? If we could see, threaded through the seams of our stories, the through-line that makes everything make sense?
Links mentioned:
- Stuff I'd Only Tell God by Jennifer Dukes Lee.
- Songs I Play on Repeat playlist (in the resource library).
- Apple and Spotify playlists of my top 25 songs from '25 (also in the library).
- Names of God phone wallpaper (free).
- Word-of-the-year ideas & monthly reflection sheets to amplify your word-of-the-year growth in 2026 (get both HERE).
- Read more about nevertheless gratitude HERE.
- To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up HERE.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
For every weary soul needing a bit of light, a scrap of real hope, a simple Christmas prayer. For every taxed mama and bustling grandma. Every newlywed and fresh divorcee. Every grieving heart. Every family scrambling to make Christmas happen.
Wherever these words find you, and whatever heaviness fills the room, I pray for gritty, overflowing hope. I pray that the tender nearness of Jesus meets you in this moment. That His peace supersedes the pressure you're feeling right now.
When you're emptied of all you can do on your own, when you've used up all the words, when your edges fray and your adrenaline runs out–there's room for more of God. Only when we're at the end of ourselves do we open in uninhibited welcome. And God? He always makes good on His word:
Move your heart closer and closer to God, and he will come even closer to you.
James 4:8, The Passion Translation
Today, let's stand on this promise together. Because when we really need real hope, we can rely on the unwavering Word of God.
Links mentioned:
- To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up HERE.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
As I step back to see where I've gone wrong, I see three potential pitfalls where you might be stuck as well.
Links mentioned:
- Get a list of 200 missional word-of-the-year ideas HERE.
- Get the word-of-the-year month reflection sheets HERE.
- To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up HERE.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
Ann Voskamp says korban boils down to closeness:
Sacrifice in Hebrew is korban, which literally means an approach, a moving closer. Sacrifice is not losing something but moving closer to Someone.
Korban isn't so much about loss as it is about proximity to Jesus. And to draw closer to Christ I must let rest all I try to do on my own strength.
Links mentioned:
- To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up HERE.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
We slow-baked gratitude into our DNA for this. This! So that we might make space for awed worship, genuine praise, honest adoration.
Links mentioned:
- To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up HERE.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
It's almost Thanksgiving, and maybe this year you're just trying to make it through. Trying to smile through the "fixings" and the feasting while something feels empty inside.
Maybe everything is right on the surface but stress is eating at your inner calm. Or you're grieving a shift, an unwelcome season, a spot empty around your table. Perhaps the budget simply can't cover the holiday spread you envisioned on your table.
Can I reach a hand right through your screen—a hand to steady yours right now?
You might not be able to see how yet, but you will make it through. How do I know? Because I know the God who won't let go of you.
I know that at this very moment, He's giving thanks for you. If Jesus were seated at your table on Thanksgiving, and you were going around saying one thing you're grateful for, He'd lock eyes with you and say, "It's you. It's you I can't stop thinking about. It's you who squeezes My heart. It's you I'd give everything for."
Links mentioned:
- The Spill-Over Gratitude Challenge
- To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up HERE.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
An accessible life is permeable.
God can get in. God can ripple out through us.
A no-place-off-limits openness to God welcomes the tender work through which He frees and heals us. Trust gives God permission to inhabit. He enters where He's invited, never barging through barricades in our hearts, but knocking with patience and persistence.
Openness in our relationships allows the work God is doing inside to show so that others may be drawn to His hope and light. It brings purpose and depth to our friendships: we get to point people to Jesus, as we were created to do, simply by living our learning-to-follow Christ lives in plain sight.
Links mentioned:
- The Spill-Over Gratitude Challenge
- To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up HERE.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
But what if we've tried to keep gratitude too quiet? What if it gets buried in the lines of our journals? What if gratitude is looking for a way to ripple beyond us–spilling over like uncontained laughter?
Links mentioned:
- The Spill-Over Gratitude Challenge
- To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up HERE.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
But what if we've tried to keep gratitude too quiet? What if it gets buried in the lines of our journals? What if gratitude is looking for a way to ripple beyond us–spilling over like uncontained laughter?
Links mentioned:
- The Spill-Over Gratitude Challenge
- To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up HERE.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
Reversing the hurry of the holidays sounds lovely, but let's get practical. Without a plan, I get swept into the busyness of the holiday season. I don't linger. I squeeze in more and move faster and connect less. You too?
Links mentioned:
- The Spill-Over Gratitude Challenge
- The Greatest Gift: Unlocking the Full Love Story of Christimas by Ann Voskamp
- Merry and Bright: Rediscover the Hope, Peace, and Joy of Christamas by One Story Well.
- The Spirit of Christmas: Discovering His Presence Throughout the Advent Season by Cyntha Ruchti.
- To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up HERE.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
You might find yourself in a similar situation, caught between what you think you should be able to do, and what you can, at this moment, achieve. Between the voice in your head that says slowing down is shameful and the kind tone you'd use to encourage anyone besides yourself.
So until you have the courage to tell this to yourself, here is permission to break pace. Do solid B work. Set a boundary. Begin something brand new.
Links mentioned:
- To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up HERE.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
Perhaps the biggest threat to thriving is apathy.
Have you found this to be true?
Stop reading your Bible and your hunger for it dissipates.
Stop listing gratitude and it's harder to find gift in the hard.
Stop praising God and fear settles in.
Stop praying and God feels farther away.
Stop investing in your marriage and it begins to fray.
Stop your workout rhythm and it's difficult to pick it back up.
Stop your healthy eating habits and old cravings come back.
The law of inertia comes into play when we pause forward momentum in anything. We either keep learning, growing, becoming–or our gains begin to dissolve.
There is no stand-still.
It's forward or backward.
Growth or regression.
Thriving or declining.
Links mentioned:
- To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up HERE.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
We enter autumn a bit unsteady. Feeling behind but also needing soul stillness. Burning candles as we grasp for inner peace.
So for both you and I, here are ten fall-back-on truths to anchor us this autumn season.
Links mentioned:
- To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up HERE.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
That longing you can’t silence for community–to know and be known–is neither superficial or selfish. It’s the evidence of God’s heart for you.
Belonging wasn’t your idea first. It was His. Before the first created man had breath in his lungs, God the Father, the Son, and the Spirit existed in perfect community. As Jennie Allen says, “Our God has been relational forever. It means that He created us out of relationship for relationship.”
And we feel it sharply when we’re out of sync with God’s design. While we’re created for community, many walk around feeling lonely. No matter the number of people in our periphery, aloneness is often internal. Even in a crowd of people, many feel like an outsider.
Perhaps that’s how you feel today. Like few know the actual you. Like you’re the only one without a “best friend.”
Researchers tell us the percentage of people without close friends is rising at a concerning rate. But it’s not a statistic when it’s your own life. Your own ache.
You might downplay what’s missing by staying busy. Filling your life with God-honoring activity. Trying to grow “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” (Galatians 5:22-23). But still you crave relational depth . . . and there’s a reason why.
Links mentioned:
- To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up HERE.
- For my top friendship deepening tips–applicable to both neighbor and non-neighbor friendships–grab the free download HERE.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
We’re hearing ripples of revival. Seeing fresh hunger for God in unexpected places. Feeling the stirring within our own souls.
God is on the move, as always. But we’re noticing it now.
The cracks in our culture—the very things that deeply grieve us—let the light of Christ in. Light is always brightest when the dark is darkest. And isn’t it like God to bring uncontainable hope alongside the hard-to-reconcile and still-being-redeemed?
The holy rumble of God’s kingdom coming here “on earth as it will be in heaven” (Matthew 6:10) begs the question: how do we fan the fire?
What will keep our hearts expectant? How can we nurture this new hunger for God?
Links mentioned:
- To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up HERE.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
I see it in your eyes that can’t mask the tiredness, hear it in the cracks in your voice, feel it with you in the hurried steps and anxious scrolling: life feels fractured. Unsteady. At times, unfathomable.
We quiet our questions, assuming God sees coming redemption before we can glimpse it. But we can’t hush the disquiet in our souls. Is there a way to thrive no matter what life throws our way? To grow resilience that keeps hope alive?
Links mentioned:
- To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up HERE.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
Grace is a trust equation: our nothing plus God’s everything equals ripple-effect redemption.
God’s grace, according to my friend Jennifer Sakata–and host of Living the Grace Life Podcast–“is that forward movement that restores connection and rebuilds relationships.” How perfectly this line summarizes 2 Corinthians 5:19!
It is central to our good news that God was in the Anointed making things right between Himself and the world. This means He does not hold their sins against them. But it also means He charges us to proclaim the message that heals and restores our broken relationships with God and each other.
The Voice
There’s better up ahead—relational wholeness between God and us, us and others–and grace gets us there.
Links mentioned:
- Grab the Enneagram Neighboring Lists (available both as phone wallpaper and as a printable pdfs).
- To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up HERE.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
An others-first mentality seems rare these days. Maybe that’s why “charity of the heart,” as Paul describes it, always makes my gratitude list (1 Cor. 8:1). Life can feel like a race in slow motion, where making space for someone else comes at a cost.
But you and I get to be the sort of people who normalize uncommon rhythms–like noticing the people in front of us, getting to know our neighbors, and building others up.
We are those who love because we’re outrageously loved (1 John 4:19). Who serve because we copy the One who serves us (Matthew 20:28). Who go lower, not higher. Who build up, not tear down, each other with our words. Who let others go ahead while we look out for their blind spots.
Have you caught the shift in your heart when you put someone else first?
Making someone else’s day makes yours better too.
Encouraging someone else lifts your spirit as well.
Building others up also builds you up.
But perhaps you need some fresh ideas, relevant to your life and your neighborhood. Here are eight practical ways to build up others.
Links mentioned:
-
To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up HERE.
-
Read the written version of this episode HERE.
To the one doing the work while someone else gets promoted.
To the one diligently practicing, who hasn’t been picked yet.
To the one quietly faithful, serving in selfless and unseen ways.
To the one holding up the team but never getting credit for it.
To the one behind the brilliant ideas, the one always building others up, and the one quick to assume responsibility but not the praise.
To the mama making sacrifices no one will ever know about.
To the beautiful soul who carefully avoids the spotlight.
To the neighbor offering snacks, rides, toys, or encouragement, never expecting a thanks.
Here’s good news: the praise that matters most is already coming–from Him.
Links mentioned:
-
To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up HERE.
-
Read the written version of this episode HERE.
The very lives we live fit like iridescent shapes into the kaleidoscope of God’s plan for this wonderful, aching earth. We bump up against each other as life jostles us. It may feel at times like friction. But look through the kaleidoscope and you’ll see the stunning picture we create together.
We’re a colorful assortment of polygons differentiated by shape and shade. And all this difference, together, makes the ever-changing picture beautiful.
Together, we point to Him–as God-reflectors and missional neighbors. You and I get to mirror the example Christ set through the way we love our neighbors.
Let’s look at a few practical, genuine ways to be a good neighbor.
Links mentioned:
-
To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up HERE.
-
Read the written version of this episode HERE.
The very lives we live fit like iridescent shapes into the kaleidoscope of God’s plan for this wonderful, aching earth. We bump up against each other as life jostles us. It may feel at times like friction. But look through the kaleidoscope and you’ll see the stunning picture we create together.
We’re a colorful assortment of polygons differentiated by shape and shade. And all this difference, together, makes the ever-changing picture beautiful.
Together, we point to Him–as God-reflectors and missional neighbors. You and I get to mirror the example Christ set through the way we love our neighbors.
Let’s look at a few practical, genuine ways to be a good neighbor.
Links mentioned:
-
To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up HERE.
-
Read the written version of this episode HERE.
-
For more ideas on how we can help each other out of ruts and cover each other’s blind spots, check out the Enneaneighboring Summer Series. You can also grab the Enneagram Neighboring lists–available both as phone wallpapers and printables–for tailored ideas on being a good neighbor HERE.
It makes all the difference, doesn’t it, whether we’re running away from or towards something?
One feels like friction, the other like invitation.
One feels like failure licking at our heels, the other like movement itself is a win.
I slow to a walk beneath the cloudless sky, pondering a question: When have I been the one running from something?
From a decision I didn’t want to make.
From conflict I’d rather avoid.
From a yes that felt too costly.
From a necessary no that could disrupt the peace.
Links mentioned:
-
To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up HERE.
-
Read the written version of this episode HERE.
Can we talk about how to stop hiding where it feels safe and cozy and predictable? Because maybe what makes you “come alive,” as Howard Thurman famously wrote, is somewhere beyond the line of where risk meets comfort.
Links mentioned:
- To learn more about Enneagram 8s–including what we appreciate most about you, how you can use your strengths to mirror God’s grace to your neighbors, and (for the rest of us) how we can best missionally love the Enneagram 8s we know–grab the Enneagram Neighboring Lists. Each list is available both as phone wallpaper and as a printable pdf.
- To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up HERE.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
You’re a rock that steadies others, die-hard strength that looks out for the weak, focus and grit that helps the rest of us show up more fully in our own endeavors. But beneath your tenacity is a tenderness that can feel unnerving. Some days you struggle to find grace for yourself within your sky-high personal standards. Can we talk about it?
Links mentioned:
- To learn more about Enneagram 8s–including what we appreciate most about you, how you can use your strengths to mirror God’s grace to your neighbors, and (for the rest of us) how we can best missionally love the Enneagram 8s we know–grab the Enneagram Neighboring Lists. Each list is available both as phone wallpaper and as a printable pdf.
- To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up HERE.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
If ever you’ve wished for a fast forward button through the painful seasons of your life, this is for you.
You’re full of spontaneous energy and fun ideas. You help the rest of us lighten up and enjoy the adventure of life. You’re bold and bright and brilliant. We’re grateful for your contagious optimism, your eager yeses, your enthusiastic encouragement.
Because of you, we try new things that we’d be afraid of otherwise. We also dream bigger dreams, thanks to you. You connect many a person because you have a special way of making everyone feel welcome. Thank you for the endless ways you enrich our lives!
But friend to friend, can we talk about the anxiety that unsettles you in the quiet moments? The exhaustion that takes over when you slow down? The pressure you feel to always stay positive?
Links mentioned:
- To learn more about Enneagram 7s–including what we appreciate most about you, how you can use your strengths to mirror God’s grace to your neighbors, and (for the rest of us) how we can best missionally love the Enneagram 7s we know–grab the Enneagram Neighboring Lists. Each list is available both as phone wallpaper and as a printable pdf.
- To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up HERE.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
You’re the hands holding everything for everyone, the arms keeping us safe, the backbone of community, the feet that stand for the good all. You prepare for all the things we miss or underestimate.
Rarely do you rest.
Even when your hands are still, you’re working out potential issues inside your head. Researching the safest option. Eliminating the unknowns.
How long has it been since you’ve had a break from the residual fear that tenses your brow and deflates your smile?
Where does worry catch your breath?
What’s keeping your mind restless when you want to be asleep?
Links mentioned:
- To learn more about Enneagram 6s–including what we appreciate most about you, how you can use your strengths to mirror God’s grace to your neighbors, and (for the rest of us) how we can best missionally love the Enneagram 6s we know–grab the Enneagram Neighboring Lists. Each list is available both as phone wallpaper and as a printable pdf.
- To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up HERE.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
This is for the planners. The methodical. The curious. The articulate.
This is for those of us who prefer a little more time to process, who sometimes (maybe most times) want to blend in, who run out of words before the day is done.
Links mentioned:
- To learn more about Enneagram 5s–including what we appreciate most about you, how you can use your strengths to mirror God’s grace to your neighbors, and (for the rest of us) how we can best missionally love the Enneagram 5s we know–grab the Enneagram Neighboring Lists. Each list is available both as phone wallpaper and as a printable pdf.
- To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up HERE.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
Some days you feel like you don’t fit in. At times, you worry you’re flawed and broken. Often, you fear you’re too much. And we hate that for you, because what we see is someone who reflects Jesus’ tender emotions, His genuine care for us, His reassuring presence.
Links mentioned:
- To learn more about Enneagram 4s–including what we appreciate most about you, how you can use your strengths to mirror God’s grace to your neighbors, and (for the rest of us) how we can best missionally love the Enneagram 4s we know–grab the Enneagram Neighboring Lists. Each list is available both as phone wallpaper and as a printable pdf.
- To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up HERE.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
The insecurity you’d do about anything to keep hidden, the way you’re always on a 10 but still feel behind, your fear of rejection–leave it with Him. You don’t have to carry it anymore.
Links mentioned:
- To learn more about Enneagram 3s–including what we appreciate most about you, how you can use your strengths to mirror God’s grace to your neighbors, and (for the rest of us) how we can best missionally love the Enneagram 1s we know–grab the Enneagram Neighboring Lists. Each list is available both as phone wallpaper and as a printable pdf.
- To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up HERE.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
- Guided journals I recommend: Stuff I’d Only Tell God by Jennifer Dukes Lee and Sacred Prayer by Ann Voskamp
- For weekly inspiration, subscribe to Begin Within: A Gratitude Series.
There you are. You’re quick to see the needs in front of you, but sometimes it feels like no one sees you.
You are more than the warm, smiling face greeting us at the door. More than the volunteer we count on for an enthusiastic “yes.” More than the way you welcome both friend and stranger with the hugs we all love.
Sometimes your worth gets all tangled up in what you can do to serve others. Your helpfulness is a beautiful reflection of Jesus inside you—true. But let’s detach self-worth from all the things that require you to bend backwards or burn out.
Links mentioned:
- To learn more about Enneagram 2s–including what we appreciate most about you, how you can use your strengths to mirror God’s grace to your neighbors, and (for the rest of us) how we can best missionally love the Enneagram 1s we know–grab the Enneagram Neighboring Lists. Each list is available both as phone wallpaper and as a printable pdf.
- To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up HERE.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
To you, exhausted from trying so hard to be perfect, weighed down by feeling worthless, worrying about what others think of you–let’s take a big exhale together.
It’s time for a trade: The intrusive anxiety, the dreaded insufficiency, and the battle in your mind–for acceptance that doesn’t hinge on your perfection.
Links mentioned:
- To learn more about Enneagram 1s–including what we appreciate most about you, how you can use your strengths to mirror God’s grace to your neighbors, and (for the rest of us) how we can best missionally love the Enneagram 1s we know–grab the Enneagram Neighboring Lists. Each list is available both as phone wallpaper and as a printable pdf.
- Need song recommendations? Get my favorites HERE.
- To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up HERE.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
Some days you get in a slump and maybe you don’t truly believe there’s a place for you. You dismiss somewhere way down inside that God would actually want you next to Him. That He seeks your presence.
Then you read John 14:2 and it hits hard: you are in the front of God’s mind. You’re not a last thought. Not unfilled potential. Not looked over in the slew of everyone else.
Links mentioned:
-
To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up HERE.
-
Read the written version of this episode HERE.
Underneath my slouched posture and avoidance of eye contact was the belief that my voice didn’t matter. I left speaking up to those whose words were more effortless, less awkward. I thought that meant they mattered more.
Perhaps you can relate.
You dismiss the value of your voice because someone else can articulate it better, say it with more confidence, or couch it in more credibility. You second-guess, self-critique, self-sabotage. Because, like me, you struggle to believe, way down deep, that your voice also matters.
Links mentioned:
-
To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up HERE.
-
Read the written version of this episode HERE.
We want there to be good reason for the delay.
Want to know the waiting will one day make sense.
Want assurance that God’s best will be worth all the angst and surrender.
Links mentioned:
-
To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up HERE.
-
Read the written version of this episode HERE.
I think of how less light around me works almost like blinders on a horse. Blinders are the piece on a horse’s harness that blocks their vision–not entirely, but so they see only what’s straight ahead. It’s a built-in focus mechanism. One I often resist but deeply need.
Links mentioned:
-
To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up here.
-
Read the written version of this episode HERE.
-
Get the playlist of my favorite worship songs HERE.
-
Get a FREE Names of God Phone Wallpaper HERE.
I was a keep-to-myself neighbor for most of my life. A scarcely-seen neighbor. A door-locked-unless-I-expected-guests neighbor.
But I was also a lonely neighbor.
I thought it was normal to drive across town every time you wanted to meet up with a friend. To close the garage door as soon as you pull inside and gaze at the ground when you walk to the mailbox. To nod a cordial hello if you see a neighbor but not step inside their house, not hoist their kid onto your knee as they stir something on the stove, not leak tears in living rooms and share meals in front yards and welcome your house to fill with neighbor kids.
You don’t know what you’re missing until you experience the opposite.
Links mentioned:
-
To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up here.
-
Read the written version of this episode HERE.
-
Get a FREE Names of God Phone Wallpaper HERE.
And I want to know his secret.
What compels the psalmist to pursue the teachings of God regardless of the hour? To chase after God’s will with urgency and love God Himself wholeheartedly?
It’s not perfection, because the unnamed author of this Psalm openly admits failure to fully follow God’s decrees. “Oh, that every part of my life would remain in line with what You require!” he exclaims (v. 5).
I take another sip from the not-round rim of my mug, grateful a deep love of God’s Word doesn’t hinge on my ability to live a holy, impeccable life. With all its dents and dimples, my Rae Dunn mug still holds 16 ounces. And similarly, my imperfection surrender and limited understanding and straying thoughts and selfish impulses don’t stop God from filling me with Himself through His Word.
Links mentioned:
-
To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up here.
-
Read the written version of this episode HERE.
-
Get a FREE Names of God Phone Wallpaper HERE.
Just imagine what might happen if the words we say breathed life, ignited hearts, and amplified hope when they were overheard! If what came out of our mouths was laced in humility and grounded in our God-identity. If our words repaired breaches and lent hope and lit a candle for someone else.
Someone listening over our shoulder, curious how to trust God when life doesn’t make sense.
Someone observing at a distance how we become the hands and feet of the Lord we say we love.
Someone with doubts and no idea what to do with them.
Someone who feels unlovable.
Someone misunderstood.
Someone keeping it together on the outside but crumbling inside.
Someone made the brunt of a bad joke.
Someone serving selflessly and feeling unseen.
Someone with questions that hollow and a soul-ache that persists.
Links mentioned:
-
To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up here.
-
Read the written version of this episode HERE.
-
Proverbs 4:23, ESV
-
Philippians 4:8, The Voice
-
Get a FREE Names of God Phone Wallpaper HERE.
We get both–the imposter syndrome and the subtly-inflating self-impression. We shame and doubt ourselves, wondering who we are to think God can use us for His grand purpose. And we’re also guilty of esteeming ourselves too highly, as if our value has anything to do with us and not the One who breathed undeserved worth into our lungs just because He loves us so.
Links mentioned:
-
To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up here.
-
Read the written version of this episode HERE.
-
Loved to Life by Ann Voskamp.
-
Get a FREE Names of God Phone Wallpaper HERE.
What if we let go of the “metrics-based growth” Jennifer Dukes Lee cautions will “[hurry] our hearts,” and lean instead into the two heart cultivators Jesus offers?
Links mentioned:
-
To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up here.
-
Read the written version of this episode HERE.
-
Jennifer Dukes Lee's books.
-
Get a FREE Names of God Phone Wallpaper HERE.
After a rich, tear-wet journey through the Old Testament searching for who God is on every page, resting in His endless love felt like a bear hug. Again and again and again the truth that God’s love never runs out and is always meant for us brought strength to my soul, filling me for another day of pouring out.
Links mentioned:
-
To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up here.
-
Read the written version of this episode HERE.
-
Daughters First Retreat
-
Get a FREE Names of God Phone Wallpaper HERE.
It hits like the curled top of an ocean wave: every name I’ve penned in Bible margins, in answer to Ann Voskamp’s question in Sacred Prayer–”Who do I say that God is today? (Mark 8:29)”–is who God is in the right-now. Not a single descriptor is merely a past-tense attribute of God’s nature. Each name spans as far back and reaches as far beyond as endless eternity.
Links mentioned:
-
To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up here.
-
Read the written version of this episode HERE.
-
I’m taking Mary Demuth’s 90-Day Bible Reading Challenge, searching for names of God as I read like it’s some sort of treasure hunt. Never though to look for God in this way until I began journaling through Ann Voskamp’s Sacred Prayer.
-
Get a FREE Names of God Phone Wallpaper HERE.
We don’t have to be more or less of anything. Our presence alone blesses Him. I’m sitting with that as I ponder how we best serve God and minister to the people in front of us on His behalf.
Links mentioned:
-
To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up here.
-
Read the written version of this episode HERE.
-
I’m taking Mary Demuth’s 90-Day Bible Reading Challenge, searching for names of God as I read like it’s some sort of treasure hunt. Never though to look for God in this way until I began journaling through Ann Voskamp’s Sacred Prayer.
-
Get a FREE Names of God Phone Wallpaper HERE.
What strikes me about this picture of open hands is that for hands to be unfolded daily, they must be balled-up daily too. I can relate to that.
Links mentioned:
-
To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up here.
-
Read the written version of this episode HERE.
-
Get a FREE Names of God Phone Wallpaper HERE.
It begins to connect as I pause at the word ‘name’ at the end of Psalm 91: because we know God by name–by His many names–we know TO call on Him, HOW to call on Him, and WHAT to call Him.
Links mentioned:
-
To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up here.
-
Read the written version of this episode HERE.
-
I’m taking Mary Demuth’s 90-Day Bible Reading Challenge, searching for names of God as I read like it’s some sort of treasure hunt. Never though to look for God in this way until I began journaling through Ann Voskamp’s Sacred Prayer.
-
Get a FREE Names of God Phone Wallpaper HERE.
It begins to connect as I pause at the word ‘name’ at the end of Psalm 91: because we know God by name–by His many names–we know TO call on Him, HOW to call on Him, and WHAT to call Him.
Links mentioned:
-
To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up here.
-
Read the written version of this episode HERE.
-
I’m taking Mary Demuth’s 90-Day Bible Reading Challenge, searching for names of God as I read like it’s some sort of treasure hunt. Never though to look for God in this way until I began journaling through Ann Voskamp’s Sacred Prayer.
-
Get a FREE Names of God Phone Wallpaper HERE.
This morning, wide awake way too early, I pondered how there’s nothing else I’d rather have running through my head when I can’t sleep than the weighty glory of God Himself.
Unless I proactively tell my thoughts where to dwell, they wander willful and easily distracted. I lean into lies that incite fear or unworth rather than lean on the One who knows every tender hope and unspoken prayer.
Maybe that’s you too.
And you’re ready to change the string of what-if’s and self-belittling on repeat inside your head. Ready to root deep in what you need to believe:
That God’s good in the middle of the story.
Capable even when it appears all’s gone awry.
Worthy of praise long before He brings redemption.
So I want to tuck a few ideas in your hand for holding onto truth–tried and true ones that I personally use. They all hinge on repetition, which I find to be the gentlest, most effective way to adjust trajectory.
Links mentioned:
-
To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up here.
-
Read the written version of this episode HERE.
-
I’m taking Mary Demuth’s 90-Day Bible Reading Challenge, searching for names of God as I read like it’s some sort of treasure hunt. Never though to look for God in this way until I began journaling through Ann Voskamp’s Sacred Prayer.
These are the days of appointments and answers I don’t like. Of whispering hope in a waiting room to one anxious heart.
Links mentioned:
-
To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up here.
-
Read the written version of this episode HERE.
-
I’m taking Mary Demuth’s 90-Day Bible Reading Challenge, searching for names of God as I read like it’s some sort of treasure hunt. Never though to look for God in this way until I began journaling through Ann Voskamp’s Sacred Prayer.
-
I’m also reading an early copy of Ann Voskamp’s newest book, Loved to Life. And maybe it’s the best of her work, if that’s even possible since every one of her books has deeply changed me.
It’s a hopeful whisper: soul-sister friendship.
Isn’t that what we long beneath the obligatory “I’m good! How are you?” and mustered-up smiles and silent sighs?
We want something more than surfacy talk about movies and weather, car lines and school projects. More than flighty friendship that unravels over bent feelings and assumptions.
Perhaps your heart-felt prayer is not for more friends but deeper friendship.
The kind that welcomes your crying face into the chaos of the kitchen and hugs you with flour-dusted hands.
The kind that pauses and makes space, knows before you say anything, loves fiercely when it’s inconvenient, remains loyal when it’s costly.
The kind we find between two would-be rivals–a prince and God-chosen king, Jonathan and David–in the book of 1 Samuel.
Links mentioned:
-
To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up here.
-
Read the written version of this episode HERE.
-
“Ten Things You Might Be Doing That Keep Your Relationships Shallow" (FREE download).
-
I’m taking Mary Demuth’s 90-Day Bible Reading challenge (and you can too!). Sign up HERE.
-
Ann Voskamp’s Sacred Prayer journal is the one I’m using, and her questions gives space to record who God is, where we are in relation to God, and more. I find it dovetails beautifully with Mary’s challenge.
How would you talk with God if you knew He was walking around in your house?
I recently read a mandate God had spoken to the Israelites through Moses: “Treat your camp as a sacred place because the Eternal your God will be walking around in it” (Deut. 23:14, The Voice).
And I wonder, what would it change if we knew how paper-thin is the distance between God and us? If we knew He was right here when we’re worn from wonted rhythms? When loss hits and questions rise? When we have to make wretched-hard decisions in this busted-up world?
Links mentioned:
-
To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up here.
-
Read the written version of this episode HERE.
-
Watch/listen to Steffany Gretzinger - This Close [with Chandler Moore] (Official Lyric Video)
-
I’m taking Mary Demuth’s 90-Day Bible Reading challenge (and you can too!). Sign up HERE.
-
Ann Voskamp’s Sacred Prayer journal is the one I’m using, and her questions gives space to record who God is, where we are in relation to God, and more. I find it dovetails beautifully with Mary’s challenge.
I’m writing by candlelight while walking but I can’t stop. Here, another name. There, two more. I’m chasing the God I’m finding as I read.
Links mentioned:
-
To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up here.
-
Read the written version of this episode HERE.
-
I’m taking Mary Demuth’s 90-Day Bible Reading challenge (and you can too!). Sign up HERE.
-
Ann Voskamp’s Sacred Prayer journal is the one I’m using, and her questions gives space to record who God is, where we are in relation to God, and more. I find it dovetails beautifully with Mary’s challenge.
You know that dismantling way a verse in Scripture can seem like it’s just for you? How you feel seen through in an instant by the kind gaze of Jesus?
That was me on day three of a 90-Day Bible Reading Challenge—overcome by “the God who answers me whenever I am in distress and who is with me wherever I go” (Gen. 35:3, The Voice).
Links mentioned:
-
To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up here.
-
Read the written version of this episode HERE.
-
Psalm 63 by Justin Rizzo. Watch on YouTube HERE.
-
Get the Song I Play on Repeat playlist from the resource library HERE.
-
I’m taking Mary Demuth’s 90-Day Bible Reading challenge (and you can too!). Sign up HERE.
-
Ann Voskamp’s Sacred Prayer journal is the one I’m using, and her questions gives space to record who God is, where we are in relation to God, and more. I find it dovetails beautifully with Mary’s challenge.
Maybe New Year’s Eve feels like a celebration of endings. We get to bury what didn’t do well or go right and start over. Plant fresh seeds and forget the ones that never grew.
I get it. It’s wearying caring for seeds that haven’t sprouted yet. And your heart just needs a break, your lungs a moment to breathe.
But here, on the cusp of all a fresh new year has to offer, I want to share what I’m clinging to for my own unsprouted seeds.
Links mentioned:
-
Get 200 Word of the Year ideas PLUS monthly reflection sheets to amplify your growth HERE.
-
To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up here.
-
Read the written version of this episode HERE.
In the midst of tinsel and torn paper tomorrow, may we remember the greatest gift ever wrapped is a baby in swaddling clothes. May our hearts thump with the excitement of a child when we behold Him, fully God even as a babe.
Links mentioned:
-
Get 200 Word of the Year ideas PLUS monthly reflection sheets to amplify your growth HERE.
-
To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up here.
-
Read the written version of this episode HERE.
Sometimes you go looking for a word of the year, and sometimes it finds you–like a cat who adopts you first or a word nestled into Ann Voskamp’s Sacred Prayer journal that stills your heart. And you know, without scouring word lists or weighing options or praying long for clarity, that the Hebrew word korban is your one word for 2025.
Links mentioned:
-
Get 200 Word of the Year ideas PLUS monthly reflection sheets to amplify your growth HERE.
-
To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up here.
-
Read the written version of this episode HERE.
Sometimes you go looking for a word of the year, and sometimes it finds you–like a cat who adopts you first or a word nestled into Ann Voskamp’s Sacred Prayer journal that stills your heart. And you know, without scouring word lists or weighing options or praying long for clarity, that the Hebrew word korban is your one word for 2025.
Links mentioned:
-
Mary Demuth’s 90-day Bible reading challenge.
-
The five songs I played most in 2024:
-
Savior
- Worthy of It All
- At The Altar
- I Breathe You In God
-
What A Miracle
-
Get the Songs I Play on Repeat Playlist from my resource library.
-
Subscribe to Tuesdays with Twyla.
-
Get 200 Word of the Year ideas PLUS monthly reflection sheets to amplify your growth HERE.
-
To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up here.
-
Read the written version of this episode HERE.
How’s this for a trade? Your never-named aloud fears, your residual shame, your tucked-deep message of unworth, the lists you haven’t completed, the names you’ve called yourself inside your head, the band-aids over old scars–for the deepest inhale of grace that makes you feel light and lovely from your nose to your toes.
Links mentioned:
- To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up here.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
Maybe you’re just not feeling it this year, but you’re wearing the smile anyways. You wish it could feel authentic.
I see you holding so much extra. Extra and also less, for there’s loss and disappointment and deeply-set worry scrunching lines in your brow. It’s a lot under the weight of amplified expectations and hold-your-breath prayers and silent wishes that everyone could at least pretend to be happy.
Joy seems like a novel idea. If only it could be produced with decor and Thanksgiving fixings. If only it didn’t feel fair-weathered and immensely fragile.
Links mentioned:
- It’s not too late to join the #ReflectJesus challenge! Grab the challenge prompts HERE and I’ll pop into your inbox the rest of the month with daily prayers to help you and I reflect Jesus like a mirror.
- To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up here.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
I’m better at learning things fast—as if beginner to expert overnight is a goal worth pursuing. But the things that take grueling-slow learning and moment-by-moment surrender, those are the harder lessons to learn. The ones most worth learning.
Links mentioned:
- It’s not too late to join the #ReflectJesus challenge! Grab the challenge prompts HERE and I’ll pop into your inbox the rest of the month with daily prayers to help you and I reflect Jesus like a mirror.
- To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up here.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
We give self-talk its own category and unreined license to belittle and badger. Under labels like inner critic, perfectionism, and people-pleasing, these self-directed lies appear safe.
But maybe we’ve normalized lying to ourselves about who we are and what we’re worth. Perhaps we’ve underestimated the impact of repeating self-condemnation and sharp comparisons, of setting inhuman standards of perfection, of marking our success (or lack of) with effort and efficiency rather than character and surrender.
And we feel scarceness, smallness, purposelessness, and discontentment in place of actual happiness.
Links mentioned:
- It’s not too late to join the #ReflectJesus challenge! Grab the challenge prompts HERE and I’ll pop into your inbox the rest of the month with daily prayers to help you and I reflect Jesus like a mirror.
- To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up here.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
Set out to reflect Jesus like a mirror and you come face-to-face with your list of what you lack. Your squabbles and squeamish fears, your flat-out insecurity and sneaky pride. The features you’d change. The less-thans and not-likes and labels confirming your unworth.
Links mentioned:
- It’s not too late to join the #ReflectJesus challenge! Grab the challenge prompts HERE and I’ll pop into your inbox the rest of the month with daily prayers to help you and I reflect Jesus like a mirror.
- To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up here.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
I find what works on a mountain also applies to our relationships with our Enneagram opposites and how we approach an election.
Links mentioned:
- Discover your Enneagram number and how it helps you love your neighbors well HERE.
- To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up here.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
David finds himself in a spot many of us do today, sandwiched between the ugly and awful repercussions of a severed relationship with God and the invitation to find oasis in the here-and-now as we wait for full glory.
Links mentioned:
- Check out Begin Within: A Gratitude Series. Get the weekly story in your inbox to cultivate year-round, ripple-effect gratitude!
- Take the #ReflectJesus gratitude challenge!
- To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up here.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
With-ness. Could there be a word that sits closer to the tender heart of God? It strikes me while praying for North Carolina, Chaing Mai, and Florida how God’s promise to join us as we gather in His name (Matthew 18:20) reveals His desire 1) to be with us and 2) for us to be together.
Links mentioned:
- To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up here.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
- Samaritan’s Purse (choose hurricane relief, any other specific need, or simply where it’s most needed).
- Health and Hunger Coalition (located in Boone, NC and providing hard-to-reach neighbors with food).
- Within Reach Global (bringing compassion and the gospel to Chaing Mai, Thailand).
A reflection is a mirror image. It captures the slightest tilt of the head, a shift in posture, merriment in the eye, or sorrow squeezing eyebrows together. It’s not static, but fluid, transcribing in real-time every stray hair and sigh, every question etched in a facial expression. The fullness of emotion, the details of dress, the way we slump or stand tall–a mirror will tell it truthful.
If we’re to mirror Jesus back to a hurting world, we’ve got to fall in sync with His breath, His heartbeat, His tears and tender expressions. We’ve got to memorize the features of His face, the veins in His nail-scarred hands, and the inflections of His voice.
Links mentioned:
- I can’t say enough good things about Jennifer Dukes Lee’s guided journal, Stuff I’d Only Tell God.
- Read more on Matthew 5:7 HERE.
- Check out my dear friend Jennifer Sakata’s newly released podcast, Living the Grace Life.
- To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up here.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
What if I were a bit more like her? Noticed details and demeanor, presence and absence? Gave others a glimpse of how we each matter to God?
Links mentioned:
- Discover your Enneagram number, what we love about you, how your Enneagram strengths help you love your neighbors well, and how to best love your neighbors with different numbers HERE!
- Around the Clock Mom by Sarah Butterfield.
- To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up here.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
When we’re walled on every side by insurmountable, when the odds aren’t in our favor, when there’s no action or inaction that’s risk-free, what do we do? Because sometimes it appears there isn’t a way out.
Maybe you’ve been there, or that’s where you are today: pinched between bad and also bad. You need an immediate and miraculous rescue.
Let’s turn for a moment, from the story you’re living to one described in the book of 1 Samuel. Here we find faith that takes a little different angle than Even If Faith (even if You don’t answer the way I hope, I still trust You, God) or Nevertheless Faith (in the middle of the very worst, nevertheless I choose to believe that You’re good). This is a story of Maybe He Will Faith.
Links mentioned:
- To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up here.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
When we feel welcome, we come back. Kids know this instinctively. As adults, we might have to unravel what we’ve learned about hospitality because we’ve somehow begun caring more about keeping our house clean than putting our guests at ease. Our efforts, though good-intentioned, may sabotage what we truly want: for others to feel at home in our home.
Links mentioned:
- To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up here.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
When we feel welcome, we come back. Kids know this instinctively. As adults, we might have to unravel what we’ve learned about hospitality because we’ve somehow begun caring more about keeping our house clean than putting our guests at ease. Our efforts, though good-intentioned, may sabotage what we truly want: for others to feel at home in our home.
Links mentioned:
- Discover how to clean for unexpected guests HERE.
- To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up here.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
Are you longing for soul rest too? Grace that holds? Peace that lasts? Let’s name it together.
Links mentioned:
- To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up here.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
Consider this: What if the multi-faceted masterpiece of your God-given strengths and life experiences helps you reflect Jesus in a way that literally no one else can?
Links mentioned:
- To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up here.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
As I remember my dad’s calm presence in the passenger seat, I think of Jennifer Dukes Lee’s nudge to see Jesus as a driver’s ed coach rather than a chauffeur.
Links mentioned:
- To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up here.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
As I hold the decisions I want to delay and the ones I’m tempted to rush in open hands, here’s what’s helping me tune in to God’s voice right now.
Links mentioned:
- To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up here.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
When I’m tempted to make assumptions about something that’s likely not about me, I ask myself a question: Is my reaction opening my heart or closing me off?
Links mentioned:
- To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up here.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
It’s been one year since the biggest, littlest miracle happened. As I stand on this side, thankful for now, and also knowing not a single tomorrow is guaranteed, I think of you.
Maybe you’re begging for it to all make sense. You might be white-knuckling a prayer because time is short and you’re scared. Or you’re looking backwards, grieving something you couldn’t fix.
Sometimes our knees find the floor because God’s nearness overwhelms us, and sometimes it’s because we’re desperate to find Him. The latter are the moments we want to believe God knows best and actually cares. Because we need reassurance that His heart is wholly, irrevocably good.
Links mentioned:
- The rest of the (in)courage guest post I read.
- Life Changing Stories devotional.
- To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up here.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
I was the kid my parents would regularly remind to stand up straighter. Because I’d slouch. If that was you too, you know how you sometimes feel like you never outgrew the label of insecure adolescent.
Links mentioned:
- The worship songs I love best.
- To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up here.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
I’ll walk you through the key habits in my current morning routine, not to tell you what to include in yours, but to show you how to use a framework that can flex with the time you have available on any given day. Here’s what I’m believing for you: hunger to know God more fully and grace for what it looks like in your actual life.
Links mentioned:
- Breath prayers to combat anxiety.
- The worship songs I love best.
- To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up here.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
Ever feel like you’re on the operating table? Like all your wound-tight knots and woundedness are under scrutiny?
That’s where I was just the other day—asking a brave question in my journal then heading outside to work through it with God while I walked.
When you find yourself turning well wishes for the weekend into “leave me alone,” assuming genuine questions indicate annoyance and obligation, and taking gentle correction as confirmation you can’t do anything right, you’ve got to get to the bottom of it.
Links mentioned:
- To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up here.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
The very spots that deplete us of our rightness and self-sufficiency open us up to truth that frees and a God who redeems. The fractures sting, but they deflate pride, make more room for God inside. They help us get out of our own way so God can have His perfect way in us.
I’ve been one to pray it’s behind me soon. Figured out fast. Healed fully and speedily.
But that’s often not God’s way. He sees what’s beneath confident exteriors and denials of help. Knows where words have wedged then splintered. Where we’re rehashing the past or fearing the future.
Sometimes He lets us break so He can repair the breach, not in a quick-fix way but with patient, gentle care that heals through to the bone. He also nudges us toward each other as we mature in our faith.
Why? Because we seek reassurance that we’re not alone. We long to be held while we’re lending each other courage to try again, truth to combat false narratives we’ve adopted, and trust that God is more than able to make impossible things happen.
Here’s the thing: we get to prop up each other’s arms and encourage discouraged hearts and stand in solidarity. Our very presence becomes an anchor, tethering each other to hope that runs in abundance.
Links mentioned:
- To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up here.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
Trees arch overhead, like God bending towards us. Distance thins and glory pools—and I am drenched.
Links mentioned:
- To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up here.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
Let’s talk tips for adding positive voices to our list and giving more attention to the ones we already listed.
Links mentioned:
- To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up here.
- Joyce Meyers’ “Knowing Who I Am In Christ.”
- Grab the Songs I Play on Repeat playlist from the resource library!
- My favorites to follow on Instagram: Jennifer Dukes Lee, (in)courage, The Ruth Experience, Jill E. McCormick, Jennifer Sakata, Robyn Chapman, and Caesar Kalinowski.
- Mary Demuth’s 90-day Bible reading challenge.
- Try Dwell Differently: Overcome Negative Thinking with the Simple Practice of Memorizing God’s Truth
- Book rec: She Believed HE Could, So She Did: Trading Culture’s Lies for Christ-Centered Empowerment.)
- Guided journal rec: Stuff I’d Only Tell God.
- Alli Holcomb’s All of My Days album.
- Wrap Yourself In The Word exercise.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
That’s what I envisioned for the rest of my life—overseas missions. I wanted to follow Mother Teresa’s footsteps to India.
Links mentioned:
- To get a short, doable tip in your inbox every week to help you get to know your neighbors, sign up here.
- For Enneagram insight into how you can lean into your strengths as a missional neighbor and best love your neighbors, grab my (free) Enneaneighboring lists—available both as phone wallpaper and printables.
- Finally, take the 30-day missional living challenge as you read Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors. It’s free on Kindle for a few days and you can get a sample week from my resource library anytime.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
If you’re like me, you’d rather re-live the happy moment before the scar formed. The day at the waterpark with your 4-H club or the bike ride with your boyfriend or the ease of slicing vegetables with a Cutco knife. The untainted dream, memory, relationship. But what changed you is the pain. What changes all of us is the things that give God open access.
Links mentioned:
- Neighboring Tip of the Week email series.
- Stuff I'd Only Tell God by Jennifer Dukes Lee (aff link).
- Relentless by Michelle Cushatt (aff link).
- Find Your People by Jennie Allen (aff link).
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
Maybe you’re overdue an exhale also.
I see it in your face with its tired lines and clenched jaw. Your crammed calendar and the gas light on your dashboard.
It’s been you trying to figure it out for long enough. You worrying about it late into the night, blaming yourself for being behind, criticizing your honest hard effort.
Links mentioned:
- Neighboring Tip of the Week email series.
- Stuff I'd Only Tell God by Jennifer Dukes Lee (aff link).
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
For those of us teetering close to burnout, here’s what I’m learning to put first.
Links mentioned:
- Get a sneak peek of my pocket-sized devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life, HERE. If you want the rest it’s $4.99 on Kindle or $6.99 for the paperback. Grab the bonus 30-day missional living challenge (free with a purchase) to get the most out of the devotional.
- "There is No Striving" by UpperRoom.
- Growing Slow by Jennifer Dukes Lee (aff link).
- Remaining You While Raising Them by Alli Worthington.
- The Everyday Disciple podcast by Caesar Kalinowski.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
Maybe you need less try-hard and self-blame and instead, a well-placed visual reminder. Something on your phone or wall or mirror to keep your goal constantly on your mind.
Links mentioned:
- Get a sneak peek of my pocket-sized devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life, HERE. If you want the rest it’s $4.99 on Kindle or $6.99 for the paperback. Grab the bonus 30-day missional living challenge (free with a purchase) to get the most out of the devotional.
- Free list of 200 missional words to encourage you to get to know God and your neighbors better. Get it HERE.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
But talking, I’ve found, isn’t the only antithesis of listening. The thoughts inside our heads can also inhibit our ability to be present.
Links mentioned:
- Get a sneak peek of my pocket-sized devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life, HERE. If you want the rest it’s $4.99 on Kindle or $6.99 for the paperback. Grab the bonus 30-day missional living challenge (free with a purchase) to get the most out of the devotional.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
Jesus and the God-breathed words I’m holding in my hands aren’t just for my mind, but my heart. It’s light and it’s food. Because we’re not robots replicating Him but dearly loved children. He satisfies us with His abundance—for us and so we can tell those around us what we’ve experienced.
Links mentioned:
- Get a sneak peek of my pocket-sized devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life, HERE. If you want the rest it’s $4.99 on Kindle or $6.99 for the paperback. Grab the bonus 30-day missional living challenge (free with a purchase) to get the most out of the devotional.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
There' a risk I’ve feared but not dug into the why. God wants to talk about it. Show me where my assumptions are flawed and reactionary.
Maybe you’ve been here too. Fearing the no because you don’t want to be misunderstood or rejected again. Fearing the yes because you’d assume it was sympathy or special consideration, and you want neither. You’d rather erase both possibilities, not risk hoping or caring.
Links mentioned:
- Get a sneak peek of my pocket-sized devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life, HERE. If you want the rest it’s $4.99 on Kindle or $6.99 for the paperback. Grab the bonus 30-day missional living challenge (free with a purchase) to get the most out of the devotional.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
- Find Jennifer Dukes Lee's guided journal, Stuff I'd Only Tell God HERE. Highly recommend!
Then God interrupts, as I’ve known Him to do. Corporate restructuring, says my husband when he calls me. Effective immediately.
Links mentioned:
- Get a sneak peek of my pocket-sized devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life, HERE. If you want the rest it’s $4.99 on Kindle or $6.99 for the paperback. Grab the bonus 30-day missional living challenge (free with a purchase) to get the most out of the devotional.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
I wasn’t prepared to read the Psalm drenched in tears and pleading prayers. In the Bible I held close this time last year, it’s barely legible through pen marks and smudges. But in The Voice, which I read for Mary Demuth’s 90-day Bible reading challenge, the page was untouched.
Links mentioned:
- Mary Demuth’s 90-Day Bible Reading Challenge. Grab the book (affiliate link), and join us here.
- Get a sneak peek of my pocket-sized devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life, HERE. If you want the rest it’s $4.99 on Kindle or $6.99 for the paperback. Grab the bonus 30-day missional living challenge (free with a purchase) to get the most out of the devotional.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
We want to get it, don’t we? Faith that’s not safe but real. Conversation with Jesus that is constant yet effortless. Honesty we know is welcome. A passion to know God intense enough to wake us in the middle of the night.
Links mentioned:
- Mary Demuth’s 90-Day Bible Reading Challenge. Grab the book (affiliate link), and join us here.
- Get a sneak peek of my pocket-sized devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life, HERE. If you want the rest it’s $4.99 on Kindle or $6.99 for the paperback. Grab the bonus 30-day missional living challenge (free with a purchase) to get the most out of the devotional.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
You know now how hard it is to not say what your peers have normalized. Also, that what we say seeps into our thoughts and grows roots.
Links mentioned:
- Mary Demuth’s 90-Day Bible Reading Challenge. Grab the book (affiliate link), and join us here.
- Get a sneak peek of my pocket-sized devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life, HERE. If you want the rest it’s $4.99 on Kindle or $6.99 for the paperback. Grab the bonus 30-day missional living challenge (free with a purchase) to get the most out of the devotional.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
We’re not Paul. Don’t have years of experience preaching. Wisdom to write epistles that will be handed down for many generations. We haven’t had shipwrecks and imprisonments chisel away our selfish impulses.
But you know what we do have?
Shoes that walk our neighborhoods.
Cars that drive familiar streets.
Tables where meals are eaten.
Parks where we play.
Carpool lines, bleachers, classrooms, and pews with the same people we see every week.
We underestimate it because that’s just the stuff of everyday life.
It is, but it’s more. It’s opportunity in a million tiny ways for us to pass on a way of kingdom living that roots in Christ as our source and seeks to copy Him in practical ways.
Links mentioned:
- Mary Demuth’s 90-Day Bible Reading Challenge. Grab the book (affiliate link), and join us here.
- Get a sneak peek of my pocket-sized devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life, HERE. If you want the rest it’s $4.99 on Kindle or $6.99 for the paperback. Grab the bonus 30-day missional living challenge (free with a purchase) to get the most out of the devotional.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
Jesus loves busy people. Yes, you read that right. No matter how up-tight or snippy you’ve been today. How not-present you were yesterday. How defeated you feel. Jesus never stops loving you.
We think our behavior comes first. He says come anyway.
We think it’s up to us. The Finisher says, “Dear child, all’s been done.”
Links mentioned:
- Mary Demuth’s 90 Day Bible Reading Challenge. Grab the book (affiliate link), and join us here.
- Get a sneak peek of my pocket-sized devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life, HERE. If you want the rest it’s $4.99 on Kindle or $6.99 for the paperback. Grab the bonus 30-day missional living challenge (free with a purchase) to get the most out of the devotional.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
You and I are not passive acceptors of whatever happens. We go to battle with songs of praise and wisdom from tattered Bible pages and ruthless, trusting obedience. We lock arms with our people and hold each other up when we can’t stand on our own.
Links mentioned:
- Mary Demuth’s 90 Day Bible Reading Challenge. Grab the book (affiliate link), and join us here.
- Get a sneak peek of my pocket-sized devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life, HERE. If you want the rest it’s $4.99 on Kindle or $6.99 for the paperback. Grab the bonus 30-day missional living challenge (free with a purchase) to get the most out of the devotional.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
I want to be enough. Get it all the way right. Finish it on my own. But hold my not-enough in open hands. Release. Surrender. Dig deeper and discover more to let go. That’s hard.
And it’s holy. Gift dripping with grace. God here in this paper-thin place.
I’d tell you I know God’s good, but then I met Him on my knees and through many tears and with worship music loud and on repeat and I know Him differently now. When praise is easy, you trust what you see. Take prayers answered how you expect as evidence that God hears, cares, redeems. But when you’re in the middle a long time and don’t know how it will end, you’ve got to lean into what you can’t see. Trust that God is good now. Nevertheless.
Even when He’s not done yet—because there is where His more-than-enough collides with your not-enough.
Links mentioned:
- Mary Demuth’s 90 Day Bible Reading Challenge. Grab the book (affiliate link), and join us here.
- Jennifer Dukes Lee’s study for It’s All Under Control (affiliate link).
- Read the first chapter (FREE!) of Becky Beresford's writes in her soon-releasing book, She Believed HE Could, So She Did: Trading Culture’s Lies for Christ-Centered Empowerment.
- Get a sneak peek of my pocket-sized devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life, HERE. If you want the rest it’s $4.99 on Kindle or $6.99 for the paperback. Grab the bonus 30-day missional living challenge (free with a purchase) to get the most out of the devotional.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
I read Song of Solomon 2:1 (“I am a rose of Sharon . . .”) and remember pulling hundreds of Rose of Sharon seedlings in the spring. They look like an army of twigs laughing at the sky. Not innocent, you realize in year two when they’re already two feet tall and rain-softened earth won’t release the roots. So you squeeze your hands through squares of double-layer fence to pull them young because now you know what happens.
Links mentioned:
- Mary Demuth’s 90 Day Bible Reading Challenge. Grab the book (affiliate link), and join us here.
- Six reflection questions I recommend using as a monthly word-of-the-year check-in. Get the printable HERE.
- Get a sneak peek of my pocket-sized devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life, HERE. If you want the rest it’s $4.99 on Kindle or $6.99 for the paperback. Grab the bonus 30-day missional living challenge (free with a purchase) to get the most out of the devotional.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
That’s her role—her one aim—to teach us to revere God Eternal. She knows the direction is vital. That we’re always pursuing something, and if it isn’t Him, it’s something that will distance us from Him.
Links mentioned:
- Mary Demuth’s 90 Day Bible Reading Challenge. Grab the book (affiliate link), and join us here.
- Playlist of Songs I Play of Repeat.
- Get a sneak peek of my pocket-sized devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life, HERE. If you want the rest it’s $4.99 on Kindle or $6.99 for the paperback. Grab the bonus 30-day missional living challenge (free with a purchase) to get the most out of the devotional.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
Fear is familiar. It’s kept you quiet even when you honestly had something to say. Convinced you to not try, not risk, not show up. Trapped you in your head, in a vicious cycle of people-pleasing and self-perfecting. Stolen more than you want to admit: joy, peace, relational depth.
Links mentioned:
- Get a sneak peek of my pocket-sized devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life, HERE. If you want the rest it’s $4.99 on Kindle or $6.99 for the paperback. Grab the bonus 30-day missional living challenge (free with a purchase) to get the most out of the devotional.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
The aerial view from my seat is a timely reminder to zoom out, look for the through line staking what’s true and more important. Sometimes you need to step back to see what you’re missing.
Links mentioned:
- Gratitude has a ripple effect. Learn more about Begin Within: A Gratitude Series HERE (which seeks to inspire year-round, ripple-effect gratitude).
- Get a sneak peek of my pocket-sized devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life, HERE. If you want the rest it’s $4.99 on Kindle or $6.99 for the paperback. Grab the bonus 30-day missional living challenge (free with a purchase) to get the most out of the devotional.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
Kneeling in His presence is an act of reverence. A declaration that He is God and I am not. I need that reminder daily because I’m quick to overstep, as if I can chart my own course better than He can.
Links mentioned:
- Jennifer Dukes Lee’s guided journal, Stuff I'd Only Tell God (affiliate link).
- Mary Demuth’s 90 Day Bible Reading Challenge. Grab the book (affiliate link), and join us here.
- Playlist of Songs I Play of Repeat.
- Get a sneak peek of my pocket-sized devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life, HERE. If you want the rest it’s $4.99 on Kindle or $6.99 for the paperback. Grab the bonus 30-day missional living challenge (free with a purchase) to get the most out of the devotional.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
Here’s what I really want you to know about God: He has always desired to be with us. That’s who I find in the pages of Exodus as I rapid read The Voice translation for Mary Demuth’s 90 Day Bible Reading Challenge. A God who always makes a way for us to be near Him because He wants to be known. A God indescribably pained when we turn away.
Links mentioned:
- I’m taking Mary Demuth’s 90 Day Bible Reading Challenge. Grab the book (affiliate link), and join us here.
- Get a sneak peek of my pocket-sized devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life, HERE. If you want the rest it’s $4.99 on Kindle or $6.99 for the paperback. Grab the bonus 30-day missional living challenge (free with a purchase) to get the most out of the devotional.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
God’s promise-laden answer to the Israelites is the same to us—self-wranglers, self-pitiers, self-justifiers. We who like to control the where, when, and how. We who are quick to complain, compare, criticize.
Links mentioned:
- I’m taking Mary Demuth’s 90 Day Bible Reading Challenge. Grab the book (affiliate link), and join us here.
- Get a sneak peek of my pocket-sized devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life, HERE. If you want the rest it’s $4.99 on Kindle or $6.99 for the paperback. Grab the bonus 30-day missional living challenge (free with a purchase) to get the most out of the devotional.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
Let’s start here. I admit I’m scared of the word I’ve chosen for 2024. It’s a finger on a tender place that I know I need to surrender—and I’m not sure I’m ready. My word of the year will spin me to face the mirror and truths I have a hard time believing about myself. Draw me into the arms of Jesus who listens with compassion etched into every line on His face.
Links mentioned:
- Growing Slow: Lessons on Un-Hurrying Your Heart from an Accidental Farm Girl by Jennifer Dukes Lee
- The Next Right Thing by Emily P. Freeman
- Small Is Big, Slow Is Fast: Living and Leading Your Family and Community on God’s Mission by Caesar Kalinowski
- Caesar’s podcast, Everyday Disciple, is also a gold mine, and it’s been the hugest honor to join him for a few of the episodes.
- Get a sneak peek of my pocket-sized devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life, HERE. If you want the rest it’s $4.99 on Kindle or $6.99 for the paperback. Grab the bonus 30-day missional living challenge (free with a purchase) to get the most out of the devotional.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
Let’s start here. I admit I’m scared of the word I’ve chosen for 2024. It’s a finger on a tender place that I know I need to surrender—and I’m not sure I’m ready. My word of the year will spin me to face the mirror and truths I have a hard time believing about myself. Draw me into the arms of Jesus who listens with compassion etched into every line on His face.
Links mentioned:
-
200 word of the year ideas!
-
My friend Yohonna Smith, host of the Girls Talking Life podcast, has a Word of the Year – Word Study to help you get more out of your word. It’s a free resource, and you can download it HERE.
-
Get a sneak peek of my pocket-sized devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life, HERE. If you want the rest it’s $4.99 on Kindle or $6.99 for the paperback. Grab the bonus 30-day missional living challenge (free with a purchase) to get the most out of the devotional.
-
Read the written version of this episode HERE.
Maybe you’re so wrapped up in making Christmas feel right for everyone else, you’ve forgotten you actually don’t have to do anything to make Christmas perfect.
Links mentioned:
- Get a sneak peek of my pocket-sized devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life, HERE. If you want the rest it’s $4.99 on Kindle or $6.99 for the paperback. Grab the bonus 30-day missional living challenge (free with a purchase) to get the most out of the devotional.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
This is for the one holding her breath, feeling the anxious weight of the best and bustle of December. This is for the one trying to figure out exactly where good becomes too much.
Links mentioned:
- Grab this FREE phone wallpaper to remind you that God’s face lights up when He sees you.
- If you love Christmas music but find it makes you a bit anxious, try instrumental. Violin is my favorite for unknotting tension, and I play this album often.
- I’m big fan of Stuff I’d Only Tell God* (affiliate link). While supplies last you can get Jennifer Dukes Lee’s journal for less than $11 dollars, and that includes free shipping and a 10-pack of card inspired by the journal.
- Get a sneak peek of my pocket-sized devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life, HERE. If you want the rest it’s $4.99 on Kindle or $6.99 for the paperback. Grab the bonus 30-day missional living challenge (free with a purchase) to get the most out of the devotional.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
I never knew what would happen if I picked a word of the year until I did. And maybe that’s where you are today. You hear talk at the end and beginning of every year about words of the year. You see lists of ideas popping up on Pinterest. Friends enthusiastically sharing their special word.
But then there’s a whole lot of silence, and it leaves you wondering what actually happens with those words. Are they forgotten? Ineffective? Perhaps they shape lives in ways too personal to share online.
This is for you if you’ve never picked a word of the year and are genuinely curious what it’s all about. It’s also for you if you’ve chosen a word before and didn’t know what to do with it. Or gave up on it, on accident of course.
Let’s address the “what happens” question first. I understand you might have more questions, as well, like “Do you have any word ideas?” and How do I know which word to choose?” We’ll get to those too.
Links mentioned:
- Get my list of 200 missional living word-of-the-year ideas HERE!
- Get a sneak peek of my pocket-sized devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life, HERE. If you want the rest it’s $4.99 on Kindle or $6.99 for the paperback. Grab the bonus 30-day missional living challenge (free with a purchase) to get the most out of the devotional.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
Sometimes thanks is silent. Spoken not in words but awe as we inhale God’s overwhelming goodness and weighty glory. The very first line of Psalm 65 stops me: “Oh God in Zion, to you even silence is praise” (TPT).
Silent praise assumes familiarity. Connectedness that can fill in the blanks and simply savor presence. That’s the kind of relationship King David had with his beloved Lord. He goes on to pen this sentiment: “How satisfied we will be just to be near you!” (v. 4).
As the calendar draws us gently toward Advent, I want to hold this wonder that offers wordless praise. Because isn’t that the point of practicing gratitude for 30 days—that it would never end?
Links mentioned:
- Get the prompts for the Thank Somebody Challenge HERE! I'll send them with directions.
- Get a sneak peek of my pocket-sized devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life, HERE. If you want the rest it’s $4.99 on Kindle or $6.99 for the paperback. Grab the bonus 30-day missional living challenge (free with a purchase) to get the most out of the devotional.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
Fellow perfectionist, let’s talk about you. That lie running through your head telling you it’s got to be better. The pressure you feel to get it right, down to crossed t’s and dotted i’s. The shame that flushes your face when someone presses on your lack. The way you want to hide your work the moment you notice a flaw.
You don’t want another voice telling you to chill, so I promise that won’t be me. We waste a lot of time trying to better ourselves with resolutions and willpower. But the truth is, you can’t turn off your inner critic by badgering yourself with threats. You’ve tried it, as have I, and it doesn’t work.
So what can we do when perfectionism tries to rule our lives? Here’s a list of seven things I’m learning to do.
Links mentioned:
- Get the prompts for the Thank Somebody Challenge HERE! I'll send them with directions.
- Get a sneak peek of my pocket-sized devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life, HERE. If you want the rest it’s $4.99 on Kindle or $6.99 for the paperback. Grab the bonus 30-day missional living challenge (free with a purchase) to get the most out of the devotional.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
I’m quick to dismiss a thank you. Chalk it up to niceness, and spin it negative. What you really mean to say is I’m stubborn, impulsive, and a perfectionist. Or I’ll downplay it as nothing because it was less than what I’d intended and undeserving of thanks. That, or I’ll redirect the conversation back to you because the attention makes me squirm a little inside.
It took a conversation with a handful of neighbors for me to name it aloud to any other besides my husband. We meet midweek over lunch hour and practice letting each other in. As in, to the down-beneath things that spin us toward or away from God. The lies we’re exchanging for God’s truth. The practices that keep our heads up and our hearts in the right place. Nicole Unice’s The Struggle Is Real study is a perfect launch pad for these honest conversations.
If you’ve joined us for the November Thank Somebody Challenge, you’ve been writing a lot of thank yous. Mailing cards, leaving notes, sending heartfelt texts or voice messages for the people who matter to you. But for some of us, that part feels natural. What’s a whole lot harder is when the thank you comes our way.
Whether you’re completing the challenge or not, let’s talk thank yous and how to get better about accepting them. With grace, grit, and humility, because honestly, it takes all three. Tune in for four practices that are helping me with this.
Links mentioned:
- Get the prompts for the Thank Somebody Challenge HERE! I'll send them with directions.
- More on knowing God on our knees HERE.
- Want to know the songs I play on repeat? Grab my playlist HERE.
- Follow @stuffidonlytellgod on Instagram—and grab a copy anywhere books are sold.
- Get a sneak peek of my pocket-sized devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life, HERE. If you want the rest it’s $4.99 on Kindle or $6.99 for the paperback. Grab the bonus 30-day missional living challenge (free with a purchase) to get the most out of the devotional.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
You’re trying to be thankful for what you have and who’s in your life, but more glaring is what’s missing. Who wasn’t there. Who doesn’t actually know you. Who hurt you on purpose. Whose words told you that you can’t, couldn’t, shouldn’t.
Can we talk about it? Because if that’s you feeling all mixed up inside because isn’t a gratitude challenge supposed to make you feel better, it’s not time to bottle it all up.
We push away the hard memories as if they can collect so much dust in the recesses of our minds that we won’t recognize them. Wear our happy faces and only tell the things that are good and well in our lives.
But it’s exhausting, isn’t it?
I know because I’ve got memories too that take me to bittersweet places. Scars that are still healing. Ones I remember every time I bake sourdough.
Links mentioned:
- Get the prompts for the Thank Somebody Challenge HERE! I'll send them with directions.
- Get a sneak peek of my pocket-sized devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life, HERE. If you want the rest it’s $4.99 on Kindle or $6.99 for the paperback. Grab the bonus 30-day missional living challenge (free with a purchase) to get the most out of the devotional.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
As we turn the calendar to November, let’s keep Kristin’s question in mind: “How often do you and I compliment someone to the degree that they begin to believe it about themselves?” But let’s do more than think about it. Let’s put it into practice.
Links mentioned:
- Find The Ruth Experience’s new book, The One Year Daily Acts of Gratitude Devotional HERE!
- Scroll with me through Begin Within: A Gratitude Series, and you’ll find over 150 testimonies of gratitude leaving a lingering effect.
- Sign up HERE to get the weekly story in your email inbox.
- Begin Within: A Gratitude Series turns three on Nov. 1st, and we're celebrating with a GIVEAWAY! Enter (through 11/3/23) HERE!
- Also beginning Nov. 1st is the Thank Somebody Challenge! Grab the prompts HERE! I'll send them with directions.
- Get a sneak peek of my pocket-sized devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life, HERE. If you want the rest it’s $4.99 on Kindle or $6.99 for the paperback. Grab the bonus 30-day missional living challenge (free with a purchase) to get the most out of the devotional.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
You don’t have to wait until this chapter is over to tell your story. Actually, it’s better if you don’t. Tune in to hear three compelling reasons why!
Links mentioned:
- Growing Slow by Jennifer Dukes Lee.
- Get a sneak peek of my pocket-sized devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life, HERE. If you want the rest it’s $4.99 on Kindle or $6.99 for the paperback. Grab the bonus 30-day missional living challenge (free with a purchase) to get the most out of the devotional.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
I like simple. If you and I were sitting in my front yard, settled comfortably into my favorite hammock lawn chairs, and you told me that you were offended and couldn’t let it go, here’s what I’d share. Two things. Two things you can start today that will help you stay calm when life feels unfair.
Links mentioned:
- Get the YouTube playlist of songs I play on repeat.
- Check out Jennifer Dukes Lee’s guided journal, Stuff I’d Only Tell God: A Guided Journal of Courageous Honesty, Obsessive Truth-Telling, and Beautifully Ruthless Self-Discovery.
- Get a sneak peek of my pocket-sized devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life, HERE. If you want the rest it’s $4.99 on Kindle or $6.99 for the paperback. Grab the bonus 30-day missional living challenge (free with a purchase) to get the most out of the devotional.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
The fifth annual gratitude challenge begins November 1. I’m introducing it early so you’ll have more time to invite some friends to join you. And also because I really couldn’t wait any longer to let you know this year’s theme.
The gratitude challenges for the past several years have been focused on you cultivating a heart of thanks that ripples into your neighborhood. Here at The Uncommon Normal, we’re all about getting close to Jesus and growing deep, missional friendships. We know that a rooted, thriving relationship with God leads us to meaningful connections with the people around us. Where these relationships intersect, we find community. Mission. Purpose.
What grows on the inside as we spend time with Jesus shows in our facial expressions, words, tone, actions, and reactions. Missional neighboring boils down to this: Because our lives have a ripple effect, we input what we want to overflow.
But for all the ripples we create, we’ve also been blessed by ripples extending from others. We’re been prayed for, cared for, invested in. Noticed, encouraged, inspired, lovingly challenged. Many of these people are unsung heros. This year we’re going to tell them thank you.
Instead of sharing our gratitude challenge responses in our journals or via social media, we’re going to send them to specific people who have been Jesus to us or helped us look a little more like Him. We’ll call it the Thank Somebody Challenge.
- Grab the challenge prompts and directions HERE.
- Get the weekly Begin Within: A Gratitude Series story in your email inbox by signing up HERE.
- Get a sneak peek of my pocket-sized devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life, HERE. If you want the rest it’s $4.99 on Kindle or $6.99 for the paperback. Grab the bonus 30-day missional living challenge (free with a purchase) to get the most out of the devotional.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
How do we overcome that underlying fear keeping us from getting close to God and getting to know our neighbors? Because in order for the things God is doing inside us to ripple out beyond us, we’ve got to lean hard into both of these relationships. This is the essence of missional neighboring.
Links mentioned:
- In case you’re not yet familiar with the Enneagram, you can learn more HERE.
- Want more on the intersection of the Enneagram and mission? Check out the Enneaneighboring Summer Series 2022.
- Too often we focus on the outward expressions first. But the truth is that we can’t recreate the outcome of proximity to Jesus without actually drawing close.
- Want to know more? I put it in a little book for you, because I really want you to grasp how the posture of your heart affects everything else. We address the inside first, and then God ripples out from our lives. Get a sneak peek of my pocket-sized devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life, HERE.
- If you want the rest it’s $4.99 on Kindle or $6.99 for the paperback. Grab the bonus 30-day missional living challenge (free with a purchase) to get the most out of the devotional.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
Truth is that God’s not nearer on the mountains than He is in the valleys. He’s the same unchanging God and we have always-access to Him.
Links mentioned:
- Read the rest of Katie Pozzuoli’s story, “Gratitude in the Thin Places,” HERE.
- Read the rest of Jennifer Dukes Lee's Instagram post on thin places.
- Learn more about Stuff I’d Only Tell God HERE.
- Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors. Download a free sample from the resource library, and if you want the rest it’s $4.99 on Kindle or $6.99 for the paperback. Grab the bonus 30-day missional living challenge (free with a purchase) to get the most out of the devotional.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
It can feel like God says GO—then closes the door. Makes a way only to press pause or send you in another direction. And here, on the brink of possibility and surrender, you question whether you heard Him right. If you ever hear Him right.
Links mentioned:
- Discover the worship songs I play on repeat. My Songs I Play On Repeat playlist is free and you can grab it HERE.
- Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors. Download a free sample from the resource library, and if you want the rest it’s $4.99 on Kindle or $6.99 for the paperback. Grab the bonus 30-day missional living challenge (free with a purchase) to get the most out of the devotional.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
Missional neighboring is telling the middle parts of our stories while they’re still unfolding and we’re still growing. Holding the grace, hope, strength, wisdom God gives in open hands so it can spill over. Naming God as hero in our stories.
Links mentioned:
- Discover the worship songs I play on repeat. My Songs I Play On Repeat playlist is free and you can grab it HERE.
- Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors. Download a free sample from the resource library, and if you want the rest it’s $4.99 on Kindle or $6.99 for the paperback. Grab the bonus 30-day missional living challenge (free with a purchase) to get the most out of the devotional.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
The things spinning and unraveling for you can derail you. Or they can teach you the nature of God. Your questions, your doubt, your anger—they can force distance between you and God. But if you let them, they’ll crack you open in ways that give God access.
Links mentioned:
- Discover the worship songs I play on repeat. My Songs I Play On Repeat playlist is free and you can grab it HERE.
- Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors. Download a free sample from the resource library, and if you want the rest it’s $4.99 on Kindle or $6.99 for the paperback. Grab the bonus 30-day missional living challenge (free with a purchase) to get the most out of the devotional.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
The critical voice in your head is brutal, insistent, loud. But it bossed you around for long enough. Quieted your voice. Kept your door closed and your relationships shallow.
Links mentioned:
- Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors. Download a free sample from the resource library, and if you want the rest it’s $4.99 on Kindle or $6.99 for the paperback. Grab the bonus 30-day missional living challenge (free with a purchase) to get the most out of the devotional.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
Our right-now is where then and tomorrow meet. Then, with its best and worst cobbled together. Tomorrow, with its own mix of hope and expectation. We live both. Are both.
- Learn more about Stuff I'd Only Tell God on JenniferDukesLee.com.
- Ready to order? Find it on Amazon here.
- Check out my book recommendation of Stuff I’d Only Tell God to discover more about Jennifer Dukes Lee’s journal, why I’m obsessed with it, more of my favorite prompts, and some of my own filled-in pages.
- Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors. Download a free sample from the resource library, and if you want the rest it’s $4.99 on Kindle or $6.99 for the paperback. Grab the bonus 30-day missional living challenge (free with a purchase) to get the most out of the devotional.
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.
In the movie True Spirit, Jessica reminds her coach that he’d told her to work with the waves, not fight against them. I won’t spoil the movie in case you haven’t seen it yet, but let’s borrow this nugget of wisdom because it applies to
- the overwhelm you feel as you think about what you still need to do before the first day of school
- the fear pinching hard, making it difficult to breathe, see the good in God, get up in the morning
- the impostor syndrome that says you can’t and shouldn’t do that thing God put on your heart
- the hard stuff that gets in between you and your spouse, you and one of your kids, you and a friend
Links mentioned:
- Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors. Download a free sample from the resource library, and if you want the rest it’s $4.99 on Kindle or $6.99 for the paperback. Grab the bonus 30-day missional living challenge (free with a purchase) to get the most out of the devotional.
- View the written version of this episode.
In honor of Alli Worthington's book releasing today, let’s talk friendship tips. I’ve collected several from books I’ve read recently, and we’ll start, of course, with one from Remaining You While Raising Them.
Links mentioned:
- Learn more about Alli Worthington's new release, Remaining You While Raising Them (which was released on August 8th!).
- Want more tips on growing deeper friendships? Check out “How to Grow Deeper Friendships” on the blog for my top ten, or this conversation with Caesar Kalinowski on the Everyday Disciple podcast, where we talk through those secrets to growing deeper friendships.
- You can also discover here if you’re doing any of these ten things that keep relationships shallow.
- Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors. Download a free sample from the resource library, and if you want the rest it’s $4.99 on Kindle or $6.99 for the paperback. Grab the bonus 30-day missional living challenge (free with a purchase) to get the most out of the devotional.
- View the written version of this episode.
Can we talk about that nudge that’s been sitting in your heart a while?
Maybe it’s a specific step. Say hi to a neighbor. Take someone a meal. Carve margin or protect white space that’s up for grabs. Invite someone over. Start a book or podcast club in your neighborhood.
But it might be vague. An idea you’re turning over that you can’t exactly name. More of a feeling. A desire to connect. A hope that you actually will.
It felt clearer a first, but you’d almost forgotten until I brought it up. I promise I’m not being nosy for no reason. Thing is that I’m talking to myself but I’ve got a hunch you’ve got one of those little God-nudges too.
Links mentioned:
- Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors. Download a free sample from the resource library, and if you want the rest it’s $4.99 on Kindle or $6.99 for the paperback. Grab the bonus 30-day missional living challenge (free with a purchase) to get the most out of the devotional.
- View the written version of this episode.
Sometimes you fling prayers toward heaven like you’re just practicing your aim. Other times it’s a transfer from your cupped hands to God’s big ones. The difference is where you’re standing.
Links mentioned:
- Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors. Download a free sample from the resource library, and if you want the rest it’s $4.99 on Kindle or $6.99 for the paperback. Grab the bonus 30-day missional living challenge (free with a purchase) to get the most out of the devotional.
- View the written version of this episode.
As much as God is concerned with our hearts, I’d say the final Beatitude is His way of showing us His heart. He’s not deaf to desperate cries or blind to injustice. He’s incredibly grieved when people hurt other people. That’s why He treats the persecuted with such tenderness.
Links mentioned:
- Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors. Download a free sample from the resource library, and if you want the rest it’s $4.99 on Kindle or $6.99 for the paperback. Grab the bonus 30-day missional living challenge (free with a purchase) to get the most out of the devotional.
- View the written version of this episode.
Links mentioned:
- Learn more about Stuff I'd Only Tell God on JenniferDukesLee.com.
- Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors. Download a free sample from the resource library, and if you want the rest it’s $4.99 on Kindle or $6.99 for the paperback. Grab the bonus 30-day missional living challenge (free with a purchase) to get the most out of the devotional.
- View the written version of this episode.
Heart purity creates vision clarity. Eyes “open to see more and more of God,” Jesus says (Matthew 5:8 TPT).
More of His never-failing faithfulness.
More of boundless grace.
More of His deep wisdom.
More of His sure and steady peace.
More of His unconventional leadership style.
More of His infinite creativity.
More of His better-than-ours timing.
More of His tireless kindness.
More of His relational nature.
More of His adoring gaze.
More of His yearning for our full attention.
More of His desire for two-way communication.
More of His mercy-driven priorities.
More of His disciple-making mission.
Links mentioned:
- Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors. Download a free sample from the resource library, and if you want the rest it’s $4.99 on Kindle or $6.99 for the paperback. Grab the bonus 30-day missional living challenge (free with a purchase) to get the most out of the devotional.
- View the written version of this episode.
If I’m not careful, I turn mercy into a list of things to do. Things that make me look compassionate and neighborly. Things I use to curate my impression, convince myself and others that I’m a “good Christian.” Outside, rather than inside, things.
Links mentioned:
- Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors. Download a free sample from the resource library, and if you want the rest it’s $4.99 on Kindle or $6.99 for the paperback. Grab the bonus 30-day missional living challenge (free with a purchase) to get the most out of the devotional.
- View the written version of this episode.
You find out what you crave the most deeply when you and God have one of those uncomfortably honest conversations about it. He’s kind and also persistent. “What’s worth most to you?” He asks, bringing up threadbare hopes, miracle-required prayers, goals you’re working hard to achieve, and still-raw wounds. Things you’ve made about you that have nothing to do with you at all.
Links mentioned:
- Get the playlist of Songs I've Played On Repeat.
- Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors. Download a free sample from the resource library, and if you want the rest it’s $4.99 on Kindle or $6.99 for the paperback. Grab the bonus 30-day missional living challenge (free with a purchase) to get the most out of the devotional.
- View the written version of this episode.
- Learn more about Stuff I'd Only Tell God on JenniferDukesLee.com.
- Ready to order? Find it on Amazon here.
Funny how a word like gentleness can step all over the ways you’ve tried to do things for God, tried to do them your way. By yourself.
It’s more comfortable to tackle the things you can master or offer on your own. Let pride mask as excellence and work ethic. Serve God with your best but forget to get out of the way. Truth is I need the things I can’t do—the things that take a God-sized miracle—to remind me it’s neither up to me or about me at all.
A gentle spirit runs counter to what culture celebrates: independence and rightness. Self-made success. Goal setting and exponential growing. We buy into the lie that we don’t need God. But gentleness is an invitation to humility—and mind-flexibility as I like to remind my girl with a bendy back and a double dose of my stubbornness. It encourages us to move aside and let God be big. Maybe that’s precisely why Jesus blessed gentleness in the Sermon on the Mount.
Links mentioned:
- Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors. Download a free sample from the resource library, and if you want the rest it’s $4.99 on Kindle or $6.99 for the paperback. Grab the bonus 30-day missional living challenge (free with a purchase) to get the most out of the devotional.
- View the written version of this episode.
I write an occasional book recommendation, so I thought it fitting to share more about Jennifer Dukes Lee's Stuff I'd Only Tell God—including the real reason I'm obsessed with it. Plus, I truly want you to have this book, so I'm giving away a copy. I hope that you'll help me pay it forward by also gifting someone else a copy.
Links mentioned:
- Check out my book recommendation of Stuff I’d Only Tell God (the written version) to discover more about Jennifer Dukes Lee’s journal, why I’m obsessed with it, more of my favorite prompts, and some of my own filled-in pages.
- If you’re listening in real time, I’m giving away a copy of Stuff I’d Only Tell God, and you can enter the giveaway through the end of the day (EST) June 12th.
- Learn more about Stuff I'd Only Tell God on JenniferDukesLee.com.
- Ready to order? Find it on Amazon here.
- Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors. Download a free sample from the resource library, and if you want the rest it’s $4.99 on Kindle or $6.99 for the paperback. Grab the bonus 30-day missional living challenge (free with a purchase) to get the most out of the devotional.
There’s a side of waiting that touches the rawness of grief. We’re impatient, we’ll joke, but many of the things we’re waiting for aren’t the sort of thing you really laugh off.
We’re waiting for clarity on a big decision.
Something to work out that hasn’t. Perhaps won’t.
Something to be repaired, redeemed, restored.
An apology.
Acknowledgment.
Forgiveness.
Justice.
Closure.
A yes we’ve worked for, prayed for, pined for.
The right person.
The right job.
The right open door.
The next milestone.
The waiting is only the surface of the story—one slice of the picture. Where there’s sweet, there’s also a sprinkle of salty and a peppering of bitter. Hurts. Lies. Regret. Shame. Things that twist down into our minds, spiral us away from God.
It’s no wonder that “the Hebrew word for ‘wait’ and for ‘mourn’ is almost identical,” as Dr. Brian Simmons points out in the footnote on Matthew 5:4 in The Passion Translation. They’re intricately connected. Perhaps inseparable.
Links mentioned:
- Check out my book recommendation of Stuff I’d Only Tell God to discover more about Jennifer Dukes Lee’s journal, why I’m obsessed with it, more of my favorite prompts, and some of my own filled-in pages.
- If you’re listening in real time, I’m giving away a copy of Stuff I’d Only Tell God, and you can enter the giveaway through the end of the day (EST) June 12th.
- Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors. Download a free sample from the resource library, and if you want the rest it’s $4.99 on Kindle or $6.99 for the paperback. Grab the bonus 30-day missional living challenge (free with a purchase) to get the most out of the devotional.
- View the written version of this episode.
The phrase The Passion Translation uses in verse 3 is happiness: “What happiness comes to you when you feel your spiritual poverty! For theirs is the realm of heaven’s kingdom.”
We’re not talking about artificial or fleeting happiness here. This is toowayhon bliss. Pure, uncontainable delight. Knowing and being fully known by God. Forever-access to Him.
But where this happiness comes from might have you shaking your head. Spiritual poverty?! Whatever that is, no thank you!
But stay with me. Especially if you’re shouldering a weight that’s crushing you or praying your small but broken prayer.
Links mentioned:
- Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors. Download a free sample from the resource library, and if you want the rest it’s $4.99 on Kindle or $6.99 for the paperback. Grab the bonus 30-day missional living challenge (free with a purchase) to get the most out of the devotional.
- View the written version of this episode.
Here in my neighborhood, lengthier days mean we stay longer in our front yards, negotiate bedtime with children who learn by example that time with friends is good for the heart. We don’t apologize when we stop to chat with the first neighbor we see outside and stay for an hour. Because we’re hungry for connection. Because life is richer when we do life with our neighbors.
Links mentioned:
- Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors. Download a free sample from the resource library, and if you want the rest it’s $4.99 on Kindle or $6.99 for the paperback. Grab the bonus 30-day missional living challenge (free with a purchase) to get the most out of the devotional.
- Obstacles to Neighborhood Missional Living Series (available on the blog and podcast)—it addresses the biggest hurdles so you can get unstuck.
- Enneaneighboring Summer Series—discover how to neighbor with more purpose, compassion, and intentionality.
- The Uncommon Normal manifesto—grab the free printable here.
- View the written version of this episode.
The first “book” I wrote was How-To-Take-Over-My-Job-As-Administrative-Assistant. Clearly, I excel at taking myself too seriously.
Although I worked with wonderful people and wanted to provide the smoothest transition possible when I left to stay home with our coming-soon firstborn, I see beneath good intentions an undercurrent of pride. That I could do my job better than anyone else. That my 30-some pages of How It’s Done would actually be helpful.
Pride creeps up in other areas of my life too. Tells me to put on mascara before running errands. Say life’s good when it’s only partially true. Rise to my own unrealistic expectations. Eliminate the opportunity to be embarrassed.
It does another thing too. It affects my friendships. Gives me permission to be real about the safe stuff, but not the truest stuff. Share my already-finished stories but not the currently-happening, God-and-I-are-talking-about-this ones. Offer advice before empathy—and help without being willing to accept it myself.
A big reason we don’t know our neighbors is we’re convinced we don’t need any help. I’ll do it sick, scared, or ill-prepared before I admit I have a need, and maybe you will too. But pride-bent self-reliance sabotages relationships.
Links mentioned:
- Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors. Download a free sample from the resource library, and if you want the rest it’s $4.99 on Kindle or $6.99 for the paperback. Grab the bonus 30-day missional living challenge (free with a purchase) to get the most out of the devotional.
- View the written version of this episode.
The way the world tells us to win gives us other names too. Like I’m-on-top and I-can-do-this-by-myself. Names that sound an awful lot like pride and push away both God and people.
Links mentioned:
- Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors. Download a free sample from the resource library, and if you want the rest it’s $4.99 on Kindle or $6.99 for the paperback. Grab the bonus 30-day missional living challenge (free with a purchase) to get the most out of the devotional.
- View the written version of this episode.
P.S. If you're listening this week, I'm co-hosting a GIVEAWAY 5/8-5/12 to help you deepen and strengthen your friendships. Enter here!
Years ago, I landed on a hybrid morning routine that pulled inspiration from two of my favorite writers, Emily P. Freeman and Ann Voskamp. It’s a flexible model that keeps the important things a priority without letting me get hung up on how long I spend or how much I read. Read my original morning routine post here, or stick with me to see where I’ve adapted it to this current season.
Links mentioned:
- Read my original morning routine post here.
- I’m learning that the physical posture of surrender greatly affects my heart.
- I’m learning that my word of the year has to stay present or it won’t grow me.
- Writing in my gratitude journal at the beginning of the day is a daily reminder that God is good nevertheless.
- Get the weekly Begin Within Gratitude story here.
- Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors. Download a free sample from the resource library, and if you want the rest it’s $4.99 on Kindle or $6.99 for the paperback. Grab the bonus 30-day missional living challenge (free with a purchase) to get the most out of the devotional.
- View the written version of this episode.
That childhood pain of feeling overlooked, misunderstood, or not-good-enough never went away. You mask it well behind a smile, hard work, selflessly devoting yourself to your people. But you feel that opened-up ache when you’re not invited, praised for what you can produce, unintentionally dismissed.
It feels like confirmation. You’re visible but not truly seen.
No wonder you try so hard to prove your worth. You’re trying to believe it yourself.
And all your striving efforts come out sideways because you can’t outwork, outperform, out-perfect that nagging, self-critical voice.
Maybe that’s why you’ve got a default answer when it comes to your Christian life: yes. Yes to the Bible study. Yes to leading a second small group. Yes to serving in the nursery, packing food, helping with special events. For sure yes to the women’s retreat. Angel tree kids. Prayer nights. Jesus prom.
You feel guilty even thinking about turning down an opportunity to be Jesus’s hands and feet. Because that’s what gets God’s attention, right?!
Links mentioned:
- The UpperRoom worship set I mentioned.
- Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors. Download a free sample from the resource library, and if you want the rest it’s $4.99 on Kindle or $6.99 for the paperback. Grab the bonus 30-day missional living challenge (free with a purchase) to get the most out of the devotional.
- View the written version of this episode.
It’s usually when we least expect it. The diagnosis. Death. Hard and beautiful news that will forever change life.
It’s then that the chasm between all that’s good and all that’s not yet seems wide. When we’re see-sawed by rolling waves of grief and questions begging hard for answers. Wrung and undone.
Maybe you’re freshly here too. Or you’ve been here much longer than you thought it would take to heal.
Links mentioned:
- Jennifer Dukes Lee’s guided journal, Stuff I’d Only Tell God. (Take a peek here, and pre-order the journal here.)
- Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors. Download a free sample from the resource library, and if you want the rest it’s $4.99 on Kindle or $6.99 for the paperback. Grab the bonus 30-day missional living challenge (free with a purchase) to get the most out of the devotional.
- View the written version of this episode.
“Your love is like an ocean,” as Rick Pino sings, and I’m love-drunk on the waves. I stand waist-deep, watching wave crests break the line of sky and water. Behold the rushing glory of God sweeping me into His embrace.
I must go deeper, where saltwater swells higher. Taste the breath of God in the wind. Drink in the dripping nearness of God.
I’m here. Held. Whole. Wildly, outrageously, unconditionally loved.
I need nothing more. Only Him. So I inch out a little farther. Close my eyes and let His love lift me. Drench me. Fill me.
There’s an endless expanse of God’s love. For you. For me. For the whole lot of us pressed into the space of the now and the not-yet. Where there’s questions reminiscent of heaven and end stops that plant us in the right-here-and-now.
I hold onto the scent of ocean, waves, God’s with-ness. It’s the week after the world changed with the death and living-again of One both God and man. A collision of normal and also not. I’m guilty of being one quick to forget that Easter’s not a day come and gone but a day that changes everything. Forever.
Links mentioned:
- Find inspiring gratitude stories here.
- In case you're not getting Tuesdays with Twyla yet, I often share the worship songs I play on repeat. Join us here.
- Learn more about the physical posture of surrender in this recent post.
- AIf you haven’t grabbed my brain dump sheet yet, there’s space to write how you’ll connect with God, another for how you’ll nurture relationships, and a third for the tasks that are yours to do. It’s a way to de-stress, re-prioritize, and balance your life—and you can grab it free here!
- Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors. Download a free sample from the resource library, and if you want the rest it’s $4.99 on Kindle or $6.99 for the paperback. Grab the bonus 30-day missional living challenge (free with a purchase) to get the most out of the devotional.
- View the written version of this episode.
This week feels both heavy and light, like oil and vinegar sloshing around in my heart. Like the pain of being seen and misunderstood at the same time.
Easter is a courageous celebration. Joy that raises hallelujah-hands when the pain is still raw. Kneels in awe when everything else is rushing by.
Jesus said yes to all of it—betrayal, denial, torture, separation—knowing full well what it required, and doesn’t that make your heart brim over with gratitude?
He is the light in the agonizing night. The hope-holder and heart-healer. The one worth every hosanna.
I don’t know what’s pressing that spot on your back and making you feel defeated. Unanswered questions, something you can’t take back, words you can’t unhear? But maybe the clearest answer God gives through Easter is to praise Him anyways.
Not after. But now.
Links mentioned:
- Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors. Download a free sample from the resource library, and if you want the rest it’s $4.99 on Kindle or $6.99 for the paperback. Grab the bonus 30-day missional living challenge (free with a purchase) to get the most out of the devotional.
- View the written version of this episode.
There’s something about the physical posture of surrender—kneeling low or lifting expectant hands high—that ushers you to holy ground where God is near and only He matters. I remember childhood examples and spending countless hours face down on the carpet in my grad school dorm. Being at Asbury earlier this year reminded me of how special it is to linger here undistracted, honest and undone.
Links mentioned:
- Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors. Download a free sample from the resource library, and if you want the rest it’s $4.99 on Kindle or $6.99 for the paperback. Grab the bonus 30-day missional living challenge (free with a purchase) to get the most out of the devotional.
- View the written version of this episode.
Remember when I ran out of gas twice in the same day? I do.
It was early 2000’s and I was driving a worn red Tempo with crank windows and a “Fall madly in love with God” sign duct taped in a back window. Thankfully, I had a gas canister and was a short walk from a gas station when my car sputtered and stopped the first time. But my college budget and optimism convinced me to not finish filling my tank before a trip across the bridge into Duluth that evening. And deja vu.
I’m also chronically late, not because I move too slow but because I try to squeeze too many things in before I leave.
You too?
Links mentioned:
- Get the (FREE) Brain Dump Sheet (to de-stress, prioritize, and balance your busy life).
- Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors. Download a free sample from the resource library, and if you want the rest it’s $4.99 on Kindle or $6.99 for the paperback. Grab the bonus 30-day missional living challenge (free with a purchase) to get the most out of the devotional.
- View the written version of this episode.
When it comes to the little things that wedge between neighbors, we’ve been both recipient and offender, but we’re not keeping score. Or are we?
Sharing lemonade on front porches and lazy Sunday afternoons have given way to diced-up communities. Most of our neighbors are name-less and face-less. And us? Interaction dodgers, conveniently so.
We band-aid our loneliness by keeping busy. Too busy to have a conversation with that one neighbor who offended us three years ago. Too busy to let go of the past.
Instead of communicating, we cancel each other without a second thought. But we’ve become so quick to move on that we can’t see what we’re missing: the treasure of the people right in front of us.
Links mentioned:
- Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors. Download a free sample from the resource library, and if you want the rest it’s $4.99 on Kindle or $6.99 for the paperback. Grab the bonus 30-day missional living challenge (free with a purchase) to get the most out of the devotional.
- View the written version of this episode.
"You begin right where you are. That’s the next step in this revival."
Dr. Robert E. Coleman Take it from someone with decades-more wisdom than me: the people right next to you matter. Discipleship is an overflow of our faith that reaches into our homes and neighborhoods, finds people pressing into real-life questions and seeking honest answers. It’s found in the rhythms of everyday life, the cadence of casual conversations. It’s God seeping into our habits and our tone, our reactions and our words.
And this unforced, ripple-effect way of living is what revival is riding on.
To piggy-back off what we talk about last week (you can find it here, if you missed it), we stay hungry for God by continuing “coming to him who is the Living Stone . . .” (2 Peter 2:4a TPT). In His presence, we grow in maturity, letting go of what distances us from Him. Then we live it out by loving the people right in front of us with Christ-saturated grace, practical compassion, and humble openness. With and without words.
May we be the kind of people not content to keep our thirst for Christ a secret. Who don’t limit our love to words or compartmentalize faith and everyday life.
Links mentioned:
- “Rain Is an Opportunity to Share an Umbrella: Real-Life Ways to Love Those Right in Front of Us” teaching and accompanying workbook, created for the Faith in Action Summit and now available (free) to you.
- The Obstacles to Neighborhood Missional Living Series. Join me on the blog or podcast as we tackle the biggest roadblocks to missional living and how to overcome them.
- Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors. Download a free sample from the resource library, and if you want the rest it’s $4.99 on Kindle or $6.99 for the paperback. Grab the bonus 30-day missional living challenge (free with a purchase) to get the most out of the devotional.
- View the written version of this episode.
What I witnessed at Asbury during one of the last public services: Beautiful, no-hype, worshipful, reverent hunger. A small Baptist church near campus, graciously offered as an overflow space, filling with those seeking not an experience, but simply Jesus. A livestream glitching and voices all around the church spontaneously rising to lead worship. Students taking the lead, worshipping, preaching, sharing their life verses, testimonies of God reaching through their walls and hurts to love them.
Everywhere an air of humility and expectancy. Peace. Unity. People joyfully serving each other, offering free snacks, water, homemade spaghetti.
Asbury wasn’t naming it, defining it, or containing it. It wasn’t rehearsed or polished. But hunger is magnetic and authenticity attractive. So people came from all over the world, stood hours in freezing temperatures, worshiped in the line and on the lawn and the stairs and the overflow spaces.
Perhaps you were there too, or at Lee, Cedarville, Samford, or one of the other colleges following suit. You’ve gotten a taste of the sweet presence of Jesus, the healing that unity brings, the freedom that comes with tender confession. And now you’re asking, What next?
Let’s talk about it—because a taste is meant to whet the appetite not to satisfy.
Links mentioned:
- Grab a FREE sneak peek of Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors
- Order or leave a book review on Amazon.
- View the written version of this episode.
The mirrors in our homes can’t answer our self-worth questions, but there is a mirror that can. Scripture calls it the “mirror of the Word” (James 1:23 TPT). Gaze into this mirror and you will see how God sees you: created to look like Him, chosen, cherished, constantly on His mind. You’ll learn that God has a plan for your life, that impossible things are possible when He lives inside you, and your role in God’s mission for all to see, know, and adore Him.
Links mentioned:
- Grab a FREE sneak peek of Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors
- Order or leave a book review on Amazon.
- View the written version of this episode.
God doesn’t want me to be a finished product before I open up my life. He uses me as-is. Not because I’m great, but because I don’t have to be. He’s got everything covered and I just have to show up. Be willing. Available. Authentic.
Links mentioned:
- Grab a FREE sneak peek of Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors
- Order or leave a book review on Amazon.
- View the written version of this episode.
Who else needs permission to stop running and pay more attention to where we’re going?
Links mentioned:
- Get a printable of the manifesto.
- Grab a FREE sneak peek of Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors.
- Get the 30-day missional living challenge FREE when you purchase Cultivating a Missional Life.
- Order or leave a book review on Amazon.
- View the written version of this episode.
It’s the faithful, loving ways God corrects me that make me mirror Him. And in the tension of keeping tasks and relationships in the right order, I find that I need Him to do what a loving Father does: call out the best in me.
Links mentioned:
- Grab a FREE sneak peek of Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors
- Order or leave a book review on Amazon.
- View the written version of this episode.
Where is worry creeping into your thoughts today? For you—and for the people the ripples of your life touch—try praying Scripture when you’d otherwise give in to worry. Here are 10 powerful Scripture verses you can pray to calm your anxiety.
Links mentioned:
- Grab a FREE sneak peek of Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors
- Order or leave a book review on Amazon.
- View the written version of this episode.
Can we get real practical today? How do you ask for help when even the thought turns your throat dry?
Links mentioned:
- Grab a FREE sneak peek of Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors
- Order or leave a book review on Amazon.
- View the written version of this episode.
Can we talk about it? How we can get the most out of our Bible reading plan—whatever that plan is—so fruit can grow and ripple?
Links mentioned:
- Grab a FREE sneak peek of Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors
- Order or leave a book review on Amazon.
- View the written version of this episode.
Reflecting on the things that worked for me in 2022 is an idea I borrowed from Emily P. Freeman, whose annual, end-of-the-year list-making was inspired by Anne Bogel’s question, “What worked this year?” For Emily’s tips on this reflective practice, and to find out what worked for her in 2022, listen to episode 259 on The Next Right Thing.
Links mentioned:
- Get Tuesdays with Twyla
- Ann Kroeker’s Your Compelling Book Proposal course
- FREE list of 200 missional word of the year ideas
- Grab a FREE sneak peek of Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors
- Order or leave a book review on Amazon.
- View the written version of this episode.
Imagine how it would impact the rest of your year if you committed to missional living for the month of January!
The good news is that you can get my 30-day missional living challenge free when you purchase Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors. To help you get the most out of the devotional, the bonus challenge is tailored to fit your unique style of neighboring.
Links mentioned:
- FREE list of 200 missional word of the year ideas
- Read “How to Find a Perfect Word of The Year for 2023”
- Listen to episode 75
- Grab a FREE sneak peek of Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors
- Order or leave a book review on Amazon.
- Get the (tailored) 30-Day Missional Living Challenge
- View the written version of this episode.
We often enter Christmas contrasting the wonder we felt as a child with the weight produced by adulting. We long for a white Christmas like we long to find again the innocent bliss of youth.
We wish for a magic erase as high and wide as the world—one that could wipe away the tears from every crying eye, one that would restore hope and justice to the fractures and fissures, one that would provide a slate clean as brand-new.
And maybe we long for this all to be true because something in us knows it was meant to be true and that it can be true.
Maybe we’re looking for snow to cover what Jesus already erased.
Links mentioned:
- Grab a FREE sneak peek of Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors
- Order or leave a book review on Amazon.
- View the written version of this episode.
Do you choose a word for each year? Wait until January to think about it? Give up before you pick a word because it’s another decision and you don’t like making decisions?
Imagine if you already had your new word chosen before New Year’s Day? You’ve written it on your mirror, a sticky note on your dashboard, or on your phone wallpaper. You’re expectant and ready.
Now, let’s talk about how to get there.
Links mentioned:
- Joyce Meyer’s scriptural affirmations.
- FREE list of 200 missional living word of the year ideas.
- Grab a FREE sneak peek of Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors.
- Order or leave a book review on Amazon.
- View the written version of this episode.
Maybe we weren’t ready for the pace of 2022, and in the wake of Thanksgiving, we find ourselves exhausted. Emptied. Road weary.
Do you feel it too? The shortness of these weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas? The pressure to say more yeses, but not to rest? The expectations we assume everyone else has of us? The need to pull over, stretch your legs, tilt your face skyward, taste the silence?
You have permission to do December differently. Cup your hands around a mug of hot tea. Say no to something you don’t have the capacity for. Make space in your heart for good things to flourish.
Links mentioned:
- Grab a FREE sneak peek of Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors
- Order or leave a book review on Amazon.
- View the written version of this episode.
Your challenge, beginning with these last two days of November, is to get missional. Lean into the work God is doing inside you and let it ripple out to the people near you. Missional living is a direction, not a destination, so take it just one small yes at a time. Stay close to Jesus, and let Him guide you.
Our gratitude prompts to close out November are
- Mission – 11/29
- Everyday—11/30
This is not the end, but only the very, very beginning.
Links mentioned:
- Get the #GratitudeRipples challenge graphics and learn more about how gratitude can have a ripple effect.
- Begin Within: A Gratitude Series
- Get the weekly Begin Within Story in YOUR email inbox!
- Grab a FREE sneak peek of Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors
- Order or leave a book review on Amazon.
- View the written version of this episode.
Every November, I provide a gratitude challenge for you and your friends to join. This year, the challenge will center on the truth that gratitude has a ripple effect. We’ll use an acrostic, Gratitude Affects More Than Just Me, to lean into gratitude with an eternal, kingdom-minded, neighboring-with-grace-and-intention perspective.
Our challenge this week is to get relational, and what better example to follow than the way Jesus did it?
He listened.
Asked lots of questions.
Embraced interruptions.
Washed feet.
Shared hope.
Glorified God.
Our Thanksgiving gatherings provide a perfect setting to practice peopling the way Jesus did.
The gratitude prompts this week are
- Hospitality – 11/22
- Apology—11/23
- Neighbor—11/24
- Join—11/25
- Understand—11/26
- Support—11/27
- Table—11/28
Spend some time in conversation with God about each of these words. Ask Him to show you how to define them and what He is asking you to do with them. If you hear something specific, write it down even if it’s not what you share publicly as your challenge response.
Links mentioned:
- Get the #GratitudeRipples challenge graphics and learn more about how gratitude can have a ripple effect.
- Begin Within: A Gratitude Series
- Get the weekly Begin Within Story in YOUR email inbox!
- Grab a FREE sneak peek of Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors
- Order or leave a book review on Amazon.
- View the written version of this episode.
Every November, I provide a gratitude challenge for you and your friends to join. This year, the challenge will center on the truth that gratitude has a ripple effect. We’ll use an acrostic, Gratitude Affects More Than Just Me, to lean into gratitude with an eternal, kingdom-minded, neighboring-with-grace-and-intention perspective.
Your challenge for this week three of the #GratitudeRipples challenge is to make space for curiosity. Notice the people around you. Move towards them.
Our gratitude prompts this week are
- Time – 11/15
- Story—11/16
- Margin—11/18
- Observe—11/11
- Reflect—11/19
- Expand—11/20
- Truth—11/21
Invite God to converse with you about each prompt. Ask Him what He wants you to let go, embrace, or apply. Don’t overthink your response. Just listen and lean in.
Links mentioned:
- Get the #GratitudeRipples challenge graphics and learn more about how gratitude can have a ripple effect.
- Begin Within: A Gratitude Series
- Get the weekly Begin Within Story in YOUR email inbox!
- Grab a FREE sneak peek of Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors
- Order or leave a book review on Amazon.
- View the written version of this episode.
- Follow The Uncommon Normal on Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook.
Every November, I provide a gratitude challenge for you and your friends to join. This year, the challenge will center on the truth that gratitude has a ripple effect. We’ll use an acrostic, Gratitude Affects More Than Just Me, to lean into gratitude with an eternal, kingdom-minded, neighboring-with-grace-and-intention perspective.
Links mentioned:
- Get the #GratitudeRipples challenge graphics and learn more about how gratitude can have a ripple effect.
- Begin Within: A Gratitude Series
- Get the weekly Begin Within Story in YOUR email inbox!
- Grab a FREE sneak peek of Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors
- Order or leave a book review on Amazon.
- View the written version of this episode.
- Follow The Uncommon Normal on Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook.
Every November, I provide a gratitude challenge for you and your friends to join. This year, the challenge will center on the truth that gratitude has a ripple effect. We’ll use an acrostic, Gratitude Affects More Than Just Me, to lean into gratitude with an eternal, kingdom-minded, neighboring-with-grace-and-intention perspective.
Links mentioned:
- Get the #GratitudeRipples challenge graphics and learn more about how gratitude can have a ripple effect.
- Begin Within: A Gratitude Series
- Get the weekly Begin Within Story in YOUR email inbox!
- Grab a FREE sneak peek of Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors
- Order or leave a book review on Amazon.
- View the written version of this episode.
- Follow The Uncommon Normal on Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook.
Every November, I provide a gratitude challenge for you and your friends to join. This year, the challenge will center on the truth that gratitude has a ripple effect. We’ll use an acrostic, Gratitude Affects More Than Just Me, to lean into gratitude with an eternal, kingdom-minded, neighboring-with-grace-and-intention perspective.
Links mentioned:
- Get the #GratitudeRipples challenge graphics and join us Nov. 1 for the challenge!
- Enter the GIVEAWAY to celebrate the two-year birthday of Begin Within: A Gratitude Series. The giveaway ends Nov. 1.
- Begin Within: A Gratitude Series
- Get the weekly Begin Within Story in YOUR email inbox!
- Grab a FREE sneak peek of Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors
- Order or leave a book review on Amazon.
- View the written version of this episode.
- Follow The Uncommon Normal on Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook.
Taking cues from David, let’s talk about what we can practically do when God feels distant.
Links mentioned:
- Begin Within: A Gratitude Series
- Get the weekly Begin Within Story in YOUR email inbox!
- Grab a FREE sneak peek of Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors
- Order or leave a book review on Amazon.
- View the written version of this episode.
- Follow The Uncommon Normal on Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook.
In the midst of both welcome and unwelcome change, let’s ask ourselves this question: Am I hanging onto the right things?
Links mentioned:
- Grab a FREE sneak peek of Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors
- Order or leave a book review on Amazon.
- View the written version of this episode.
- Follow The Uncommon Normal on Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook.
Hello, Twyla here with a quick message. To each of you who have listened to an episode of The Uncommon Normal—to each of you are embracing missional living in your neighborhood in small, everyday ways—to each of you who are leaning into proximity with God and inviting others near you to really get to know you—to each of you who have taken baby steps though you’ve felt imperfectly ready—keep going. Even when your steps feel small, they are not insignificant. You are not insignificant—to God or to your neighbors.
I will be taking a break from podcast, but you can still find me in all the other places. Every week there will continue to be new content to encourage you to keep leaning into this missional life on the blog. Find me at www.theuncommonnormal.com.
If you’re not yet part of my email tribe, I’d love for you to join me! I send a note on Tuesday nights to my email friends share about all the latest things. My email friends also get free access to everything in the For You library, which includes some goodies like an entire week of devotions from my devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors, a printable of The Uncommon Normal manifesto, and a field guide to neighborhood missional living.
Did you know I also host a gratitude series, Begin Within: A Gratitude Series, on The Uncommon Normal? My vision behind the series is to inspire year-round gratitude that will impact not your life, but the lives of your family, friends, and neighbors too. Check it out while you’re visiting the blog, and if you’d like the gratitude stories to land in your inbox every week, you can let me know there as well.
Before I sign off, I wanted to take another opportunity to pray a blessing over you.
May you know how very loved you are, and how with-you and for-you and all-around-you God is. May you always find yourself at home in His embrace, and from the near-Him vantage point, you will learn to adopt His heartbeat and point all glory to Him through all you do and say. May you remember His greatness when you feel small and His gentleness when you feel less than ready. May you lean into Him and into each next baby step into neighborhood missional living. May you remember always that the direction matters much more than the pace. This I pray in the precious and holy name of Jesus. Amen.
Find me here:
The Uncommon Normal Blog
Subscribe to Unlock the For You Library
Begin Within: A Gratitude Series
Cultivating a Missional Life Devotional
There, we’ve said it already—that slow and small produces better results—but sometimes there is a lag between the knowing and the living. The world tells us to hustle but our hearts don’t concur—we sometimes just don’t stop to listen. But this ripple effect way of living, it’s not a frenzied rush, it’s not a vying to climb rungs and be on top, it’s not painting a curated picture of perfection—it’s found in the slow of real-life living.
Listen in, or if you prefer to read, head on over to the blog.
More content is available at TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
If you want to live on mission but don’t know where to start, check out my brand-new devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors.
Affiliate links mentioned:
Even If Not: Living, Loving, and Learning in the In Between by Kaitlyn Bouchillon
Simply Tuesday: Small-Moment Living in a Fast-Moving World by Emily P. Freeman
Small is Big, Slow is Fast by Caesar Kalinowski
Ever wished for a magical solution that could take you as you are today and transform you instantaneously into the person you really want to be? Perhaps you are cautiously optimistic that your life could be different, but the day-to-day choices leave you discouraged, weary, and perhaps a bit resentful. We’ve been talking about missional living and the ripple effect, but maybe you’re hung up on whether what is rippling out from you would do anybody else any good.
So let’s talk about it today. You and I. Here in this safe place.
How do you become who you really want to be?
Listen in, or if you prefer to read, head on over to the blog.
More content is available at TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
If you want to live on mission but don’t know where to start, check out my brand-new devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors.
Link mentioned:
Giveaway (for 2 paperback copies of Cultivating a Missional Life)
There are days when our world feels small—when the appointments and to-do’s and ordinary things consume us, and we anticipate that moment when we can finally rest ourselves. There are days when everyday feels largely the same and we start to feel swallowed by defeat. There are days we wonder if we are making a difference, if the little decisions matter beyond the moment, if we are nurturing the right things.
Today I want you to know that you are living in a story that is larger than what you can see. The things that you do, the choices that you make, the way that you love and show grace and lead by example—they leave an imprint. Your life has a ripple effect.
Listen in, or if you prefer to read, head on over to the blog.
More content is available at TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
If you want to live on mission but don’t know where to start, check out my brand-new devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors.
I get it. The feeling that your wheels are spinning. The dreams that are out of reach so long they begin to fade. The monotony of the everyday. Surely, truly, there is a way to wake up with a spark aflame in your heart, and the knowledge that you are part of something bigger than yourself—that the small moments of your life amount to something that matters.
Perhaps it’s less that we aren’t doing the right things as it is that there are things we need to stop doing.
Listen in, or if you prefer to read, head on over to the blog.
More content is available at TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
If you want to live on mission but don’t know where to start, check out my brand-new devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors.
You may know someone you would describe as a “good pray-er,” someone you know God listens to when they pray. But perhaps your own prayers seem to fall on deaf ears, or the words you say don’t come out quite the way you think they should, or you avoid praying out loud in case anyone hears you and judges you by your prayer.
But what if your prayers too could be highly effective? What if you too could be confident that when you pray, you are doing it right, and God actually hears you?
There is something I want you to hear today: The secret to highly effective prayers is actually both doable for and available to each of us.
Listen in, or if you prefer to read, head on over to the blog.
More content is available at TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
If you want to live on mission but don’t know where to start, check out my brand-new devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors.
If ever you’ve wished that someone could give you a step-by-step for how to pray, you’re not alone. Prayer feels often difficult because we don’t understand it, or we feel inept because we compare ourselves to others we think pray better than us, or we don’t really buy that God hears us, answers us, intervenes for us. I find it noteworthy that even though Jesus’s disciples spent time actually seeing, talking with, eating with, and doing life with Jesus, they still felt intimated by prayer. In fact, Jesus taught the progression of the Lord’s Prayer multiple times, and once was in response to the disciples’ question, “Would you teach us a model prayer that we can pray, just as John did for his disciples?” (Luke 11:1 TPT).
Listen in, or if you prefer to read, head on over to the blog.
More content is available at TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
If you want to live on mission but don’t know where to start, check out my brand-new devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors.
Do you ever wish you could return again to the simplicity of your childhood where there was less to question, less to accomplish, less to maintain? Adulting shapes us, often erases some of the child-like wonder and replaces it with measured logic. But sometimes in trying to be all we feel we ought to be, we lose a little of who we are beneath all the shoulds and should-nots.
What if we could go back, not physically to our childhood years, but to the freedom to trust and love and pray children are better acquainted with?
How would you pray today if you could lose the baggage of the years, the questions that arose from the prayers that were not answered in the way you expected, and the parameters you’ve put on what prayer looks like?
Listen in, or if you prefer to read, head on over to the blog.
More content is available at TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
If you want to live on mission but don’t know where to start, check out my brand-new devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors.
Fear is a weighty word, one we’re often more comfortable leaving unnamed. We downplay it as worry, anxiety, or insecurity. It’s our personality or preference, we say. Yet to conquer our fear we must first face it, acknowledge the grip it has had on our lives.
Listen in, or if you prefer to read, head on over to the blog.
More content is available at TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
If you want to live on mission but don’t know where to start, check out my brand-new devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors.
Links mentioned:
- This wonderful list from Joyce Meyer of scriptural affirmations.
- For more information on how to pray Scripture back to God, check out this helpful article.
- And for a list of scriptures to pray against fear, click here.
-
Resources on the Enneagram I recommend:
- The Path Between Us (book and study guide) by Suzanne Stabile
- The Road Back to You (book) by Ian Morgan Cron and Suzanne Stabile
- Your Enneagram Coach/Beth McCord (for the best free Enneagram test and lots of invaluable resources)
- The Enneacast (podcast series by Love thy Neighborhood)
- Gospel for Enneagram (including devotionals for each Enneagram type—some out already, more still coming)
- Enneasummer 2019 and 2020 series on Annie F. Down’s That Sounds Fun podcast
- The Enneagram Journey (Suzanne Stabile’s podcast) for a deep dive into all things Enneagram
Isn’t that the point of it all—to find the things that really matter and let go of the things that don’t? The war within us is that we are drawn to the things we wish we weren’t and the importance of what matters easily fades. Yet is it that the right things fade or that they are simply blurred when they get out of focus?
Listen in, or if you prefer to read, head on over to the blog.
More content is available at TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
If you want to live on mission but don’t know where to start, check out my brand-new devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors.
Selfishness is far easier to see in someone else than it is to identity in ourselves. It can slide in subtly, unannounced. It might keep quiet, hoping to remain unnoticed. Yet even before we identify it, it begins to turn our hearts. Our focus always paves a road to something, and selfishness inherently pulls our attention to ourselves—and away from our purpose to praise God. A selfish focus will always result in our living less than the life God invites us to.
Listen in, or if you prefer to read, head on over to the blog.
More content is available at TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
If you want to live on mission but don’t know where to start, check out my brand-new devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors.
Links mentioned:
Cultivating a Missional Life is $0.99 on Kindle, March 23, 2021 through March 29, 2021.
Preview before you buy! Snag your free download of the first week of devotions at www.theuncommonnormal.com.
Multitasking is an ability often highlighted on resumes and celebrated in the workplace. We like to think we can juggle all the things, and do it well. We might even welcome more on our plate, label it practice. This is how we level up, enhance our performance, earn our merit. Yet before we can know when multitasking is a good thing, we must identify where it directs our focus.
Listen in, or if you prefer to read, head on over to the blog.
More content is available at TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
If you want to live on mission but don’t know where to start, check out my brand-new devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors.
Link mentioned:
Around the Clock Mom by Sarah Butterfield
That ache inside to be seen true and valued highly, I’ve felt it too. I’ve also tried to better myself in other’s eyes, gain approval, and secure friendships as if to prove to myself that I matter. Isn’t that what we want to be reassured of—what’s beneath our people pleasing tendencies—that we matter?
Listen in, or if you prefer to read, head on over to the blog.
More content is available at TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
If you want to live on mission but don’t know where to start, check out my brand-new devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors.
Depleted. Disconnected. Deficient. Have you felt any of these lately? Like you are on empty—like you’re trying to simply survive the day, and you have little energy left for much else. You want to live well and love well, to see beyond the right-in-front-of-you obstacles and inadequacies. What if more is possible? What if opening our hearts and lives to others when our energy is low doesn’t have to demand more of us that we can actually give?
Listen in, or if you prefer to read, head on over to the blog.
More content is available at TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
If you want to live on mission but don’t know where to start, check out my brand-new devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors.
Which are the words that linger, the ones you hear in your head in your lowest moments, the ones that wear you down or beat you down or wound you many times over? Many of us have discovered the heavy truth that words indeed can hurt us, and the ones that dismantle us on the inside often don’t wound just once. Today if it’s hard to see how God can use you as a light in your neighborhood when the dark of destructive words is a reality you face daily, I want to speak hope into your hurt—to share how there is a way to be whole, how it is possible to heal.
Listen in, or if you prefer to read, head on over to the blog.
More content is available at TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
If you want to live on mission but don’t know where to start, check out my brand-new devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors.
Link mentioned:
Joyce Meyer’s list of scriptural affirmations to remind you who you are in Christ
Gentle words spoken when we least expect them reassure something deep inside our souls: that we hold value in the eyes of others. These are the words that are genuinely kind and possess a power that is not found in volume. These are the words that are both light and saturated in the weighty, Holy Spirit glory. As we lean into mission in our everyday lives, how do we speak more of these gentle words that produce so much life?
Listen in, or if you prefer to read, head on over to the blog.
More content is available at TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
If you want to live on mission but don’t know where to start, check out my brand-new devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors.
Words are hard to take back. But sometimes I wish I could rewind time, pause a moment longer before speaking, and say better words. I’ve pointed out what’s been missed in the cleaning before praising the work already done, been quick to become defensive, or let distraction sharpen my tone. But it’s not so easy to simply stop criticizing with our words. Instead of stopping what we do in our default moments, we need to start doing the right things so we can actually stop doing the wrong things.
Listen in, or if you prefer to read, head on over to the blog.
More content is available at TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
If you want to live on mission but don’t know where to start, check out my brand-new devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors.
Links mentioned:
How to Let Go of Perfect for Something Better
Morning Routine post
No can be the hardest word in the world for me to say. Can you relate? It feels selfish or strict or combative, and I’d rather go with the flow and say all the yeses and never rock the boat. But I’ve found that all the yeses make the boat sink, and a sinking boat cannot do what is boat is meant to do.
Listen in, or if you prefer to read, head on over to the blog.
More content is available at TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
If you want to live on mission but don’t know where to start, check out my brand-new devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors.
Who doesn’t want to live full, to savor this actual life, to experience joy and peace that transcends the here-and-now and not-yet-right? Yet the full life seems insistently just beyond reach. The immediate weighs heavy on hope, and it can feel like swimming slow is the best we’ve got.
Listen in, or if you prefer to read, head on over to the blog.
More content is available at TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
If you want to live on mission but don’t know where to start, check out my brand-new devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors.
Link mentioned: Get the Begin Within: A Gratitude Series stories in your email inbox!
It’s easiest to see the ways we are not qualified for missional living—how we haven’t been and it feels awkward to now start, or we know the hot mess below the surface and doubt our lives can actually point others to Jesus. We see how we’ve held back or drawn assumptions or tried and failed hard, and this starting on a new path is safer to just be for someone else. How do we actually live on mission when we are just us?
Listen in, or if you prefer to read, head on over to the blog.
More content is available at TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
If you want to live on mission but don’t know where to start, check out my brand-new devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors.
Link mentioned: Cultivating a Missional Life
I wanted to write a letter of encouragement. To speak directly to you. To remind you that you possess qualities that reflect God and therefore point arrows to Him. When you turn your gaze towards Him, your life points others towards His glory, His goodness, His kindness, His righteousness, His holiness, His joy, His love.
Listen in, or if you prefer to read, head on over to the blog.
More content is available at TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
If you want to live on mission but don’t know where to start, check out my brand new devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors.
And it struck me then, and I’ve never forgotten it: rain is an opportunity to share an umbrella.
2020 bleeding into the next chapter of 2021 may feel like the longest rainstorm we could possibility have to weather. But even the throes of a pandemic offers the same gift: rain is an opportunity to share an umbrella. Each storm is an invitation to look out beyond our own inconvenience and misery to see who else might also be caught in the pelting rain.
Rain is a gift that can help us see.
Listen in, or if you prefer to read, head on over to the blog.
More content is available at TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
If you want to live on mission but don’t know where to start, check out my brand new devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors.
The week after Christmas, it seems a little like a falling off, like a sudden dissipation of the wave of anticipation we’ve been riding. We look at the gifts that have been unwrapped and regret some of the ones bought, some of the ones not bought, and it’s easy to settle into a funk when all we see is leftover wrappings, empty wrappings. Sometimes the week after Christmas can feel empty. But as we catch our breath, we find there is grace in the lull to learn again to simply be . . . and to choose what our word of the year will be.
Listen in, or if you prefer to read, head on over to the blog.
More content is available at TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
If you want to live on mission but don’t know where to start, check out my brand new devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors.
My 7-year-old still sings that it’s a “silent mid-night,” and perhaps she’s right. Perhaps it was in the stillest part of the night—the most unexpected hour—that the sky alit with blazing glory. The shepherds were certainly surprised. Their day had begun, routine and ordinary. The sun set softly, all the norm. Even as darkness came and the stars came out, all, all still felt the same. The same as yesterday. And the day before. And the day before.
Perhaps, as we enter the week of Christmas, you’re feeling a little like the shepherds too—like all the days blend into one another, like all the days are the same.
Listen in, or if you prefer to read, head on over to the blog.
More content is available at TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
If you want to live on mission but don’t know where to start, check out my brand new devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors.
We inch ever nearer the gift of Christmas this week, count down Advent days on a calendar. Anticipation rises with the welcome of each new day. One more day—one day closer! Oh, that the joy of children would be reflected too in our hearts as we unwrap the greatest gift ever given: the hope of God here with us!
Emmanuel, we sing. O come, o come, Emmanuel. It’s a beckoning of expectant hearts for God to come near us. Because Emmanuel, I read, means “with-us God, or God with us.”
He is the “with-us God.” Here in even the smallest moments.
The ones that feel swallowed and unseen.
The ones in which we feel unseen.
Listen in, or if you prefer to read, head on over to the blog.
More content is available at TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
If you want to live on mission but don’t know where to start, check out my brand new devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors.
“Hark,” that word we know from “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,” it means to “to pay close attention to” or “listen.” It signifies action. The shepherds listened intently to the angels, then responded to glory revealed: “Let’s go! Let’s hurry,” they said, “and find this Word that is born in Bethlehem and see for ourselves what the Lord has revealed to us.” Then, the Scripture says, they ran.
Listen in, or if you prefer to read, head on over to the blog.
More content is available at TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
If you want to live on mission but don’t know where to start, check out my brand new devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors.
The approach of Christmas was marked during my childhood by the smell of a snowmobile running warm in the cold of Minnesota winters. Every year my dad would ask who wanted to go with him to find a Christmas tree, and every year as the moment of pulling up the layers of wool socks and bundling up to the nose approached, one-by-one by siblings said no, and I again got to go. I would sit in front of my dad, my helmet bobbing against his chest as we shouted Christmas carols, and I savored the snow flying into my mouth. The search for the tree was as memorable as the lifting of newspaper to unwrap each ornament and place it on the tree.
But at Christmas we discover more than the perfect tree with snow to be brushed off before it’s taken in. We unwrap more than the ornaments, shiny and memory-laden. We unwrap Christ, discover Him over and again.
Listen in, or if you prefer to read, head on over to the blog.
More content is available at TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
If you want to live on mission but don’t know where to start, check out my brand new devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors.
How do I conclude this journey of gratitude when the end is but the mere beginning? How do I put into words the difference it makes to hold as treasures the things given from God’s hand? This week we follow the ripple begun by practicing gratitude out even further to see how it touches our neighborhoods. Because gratitude, it doesn’t touch just one life, it touches many. Live gratitude and it will pull you deeper into God’s embrace. Live gratitude and it will open wider your heart to be a better parent, child, sibling, friend, colleague, and neighbor.
Listen in, or if you prefer to read, head on over to the blog.
More content is available at TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
If you want to live on mission but don’t know where to start, check out my brand new devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors.
Link mentioned:
To receive the weekly story for Begin Within: A Gratitude Series in your email inbox, sign up here.
Gratitude gives me vision to see beyond the here and now—to see wonder in even the mundane, repetitious, and awaiting-completion. It helps me appreciate my various roles, lean into the ways they each grow me. It helps me to better listen and connect and engage—to live this one life of mine to the full.
Gratitude helps me welcome interruptions as gifts, see the good first in the people I love, and be present in today’s moments.
I have but this one life to live. And so do you.
Listen in, or if you prefer to read, head on over to the blog.
More content is available at TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
If you want to live on mission but don’t know where to start, check out my brand new devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors.
As we focus this week on what is true of us because of what’s true of God, we find we must press ever deeper into who God is. All that’s true of us is true because of who God is and what He’s done for us. Our identity, our value, our mission—it’s all found in Him. He pursues us, calls us to Himself, and invites us to join Him in His mission to make disciples all across the earth—in every little, ordinary corner of the earth.
Listen in, or if you prefer to read, head on over to the blog.
More content is available at TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
If you want to live on mission but don’t know where to start, check out my brand new devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors.
The past couple days and through the next week we are focusing on attributes of God because it’s hard to live with a heart open to our neighbors if it’s closed off to God. Gratitude intwines so surely with missional living because when we give God access to our heart and life, giving our neighbors access to know us and do life with us becomes a natural overflow.
In the middle of the still-messy of 2020, I need gratitude to speak to the heart of what’s the matter on the inside of me and gently align my thinking with what is true. I need gratitude to open my eyes so I can see God more clearly. I need a deepened awareness of who God is so I can more easily see who I am in light of who He is.
Perhaps you do as well.
Listen in, or if you prefer to read, head on over to the blog.
More content is available at TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
If you want to live on mission but don’t know where to start, check out my brand new devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors.
Links Mentioned:
How to Join the Uncommon Normal Gratitude 2020 Challenge (last week’s blog post)
The #uncommonnormalgratitude2020 gratitude prompts
The #uncommonnormalgratitude2020 FB group
My quarantine playlist on YouTube
It’s been there all along, but long months of uncertainty and social issues weighing raw and heavy have made it more obvious: we are discontent. Scrabbling for peace but coming up empty. Ready for change but not always sure of the right, the true, and the best ways to pursue it. Our lives feel more than shaken, our country far from perfect, and our purpose in it all a bit fuzzy. As we near the end of 2020, many of us might be apt to join a gratitude challenge to wrap a bow round the less-than-pretty before the end of the year. But this year I invite you to something more: a gratitude challenge that speaks to the down-beneath things that keep us fulfilling our purpose in our homes and neighborhoods.
I’m calling it the #uncommonnormalgratitude2020 challenge.
How to get the most out of the challenge
- Save the below gratitude prompt graphic to your device (see links mentioned)
- Participate (on any social media platform) in the challenge either with a photo, written response, or both
- Use the hashtag #uncommonnormalgratitude2020 on all your posts
- Follow the #uncommonnormalgratitude2020 hashtag to see others’ posts
- Invite a few friends to join you in the challenge
- Read or listen to the accompanying blog/podcast posts
Listen in, or if you prefer to read, head on over to the blog.
More content is available at TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
If you want to live on mission but don’t know where to start, check out my brand new devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors.
Links Mentioned:
#uncommonnormalgratitude2020 prompts
Join my email tribe
“Begin Within: A Gratitude Series”
Submission guidelines for “Begin Within”
Worship song medley to encourage you
A glance in the direction of our front door as I was pulling into the driveway gave me pause. The teal-tinted burlap I’d just months previous pushed, pulled, and re-adjusted a few too many times was looking a bit yellow. Later that day, I took a closer look. Sure enough, the sun, which had begun to disintegrate the previous, natural burlap, was already fading the tinted burlap. And here, buried in the layers of burlap was a lesson for the finding: to create room for what will be, what is needs to be pulled away. To move forward afresh and renewed, we must let the layers unravel. To be redone we must first be undone.
Listen in, or if you prefer to read, head on over to the blog.
More content is available at TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
If you want to live on mission but don’t know where to start, check out my brand new devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors.
Have you ever been asked just the right question precisely when you needed it? A few days ago I was loving challenged by a friend to ask God the truth about my work. The conversation stemmed from an admittance that I always feel compelled to produce my very best work and struggle with giving myself a break. Because I am committed to being transparent in the middle of my learning how to live on mission, I want to bring you into the conversation I’m currently having with God. If you, too, need to learn how to let go of perfect so you can find something better, please stick with me.
Listen in, or if you prefer to read, head on over to the blog.
More content is available at TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
If you want to live on mission but don’t know where to start, check out my brand new devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors.
Link mentioned:
You Can Just Rest (Spontaneous): https://youtu.be/akrIdj4cT1Q
The holidays are scarcely on our radar yet, but already we are weary. Long days with schedules still turned upside down have cramped our ability to truly rest. We may feel less productive but more tired. In the midst of the chaos, we long to feel grounded and at our best. What we need is a simple recipe for the rest that has long eluded us.
Listen in, or if you prefer to read, head on over to the blog.
More content is available at TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
If you want to live on mission but don’t know where to start, check out my brand new devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors.
Links mentioned:
More about my morning routine—read or listen
There is no denying the power of words to build us or break us, misguide the way we see ourselves or right our vision. Perhaps there have been words spoken to you in moments you were most vulnerable—words that wounded you, stuck with you, defined your moments since. It’s hard to love well when we don’t see ourselves as worthy of being loved. It’s hard to live given when what we’ve needed was withheld by those we trusted. Yet just as words can negatively impact us, so too can the right words heal our soul-holes and break us into freedom. Choosing the best words to believe can free us to love God, others, and ourselves well.
Listen in, or if you prefer to read, head on over to the blog.
More content is available at TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
If you want to live on mission but don’t know where to start, check out my brand new devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors.
The middle of the road seems to be the longest stretch, yes? When we face the unknown for endless days, it begins to wear away at our resolve, our patience, and our hope. What is it for you? School or school-events still on hold? Financial strain exacerbated by Covid? Singleness or loss or a terrifying medical diagnosis that seems to have you locked in a holding pattern? Waiting is hard. It just it. But in the messy middle of waiting, we need a way to still remain positive. To still live with our hearts open and our eyes lifted. To still be faith-filled, hope-fueled, and mission-minded.
Listen in, or if you prefer to read, head on over to the blog.
More content is available at TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
If you want to live on mission but don’t know where to start, check out my brand new devotional, Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors.
Link mentioned:
This 2-hour session of Dan Musselman playing Bethel worship songs.
I have a hunch that I am not alone in wishing it were possible to live a life rich with purpose and connection—one that involves getting to know my neighbors and living my faith in genuine, everyday ways. Collectively we are sick of feeling lonely, and sometimes even sick of being ourselves. The life we long to live may be a vague idea or drawn out with immense detail, but we still feel stuck. The life we want to live feels out of reach.
But maybe it doesn’t have to be.
Maybe there is a way to begin living that dream today.
Maybe, even if you’ve lived in your home for years and haven’t met many of your neighbors, you can still gently foster community and connection amongst your neighbors.
Perhaps there is an answer not only for the loneliness you feel but the way your neighbors also feel alone, distracted, and disconnected.
Listen in, or if you prefer to read, head on over to the blog.
More content is available at TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
Links mentioned:
Pre-Order Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors on through Amazon’s Kindle Store. (The release date is 9/18/20).
Subscribe to The Uncommon Normal to not miss when the paperback of Cultivating a Missional Life releases.
Our fast-paced culture forces a divide, it seems, between those all in and those wavering. It feels as if we must choose a path, and stick with it—charge full-steam ahead, or jump off the train. The things that require patience and a long-view perspective chaff our aspiration for efficiency and productivity. We want to grow and become all that we can be but rarely do we accept the slow progress of baby steps as acceptable.
But perhaps we’ve gotten it backwards.
Listen in, or if you prefer to read, head on over to the blog.
More content is available at TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
Link mentioned:
Learn more about Cultivating a Missional Life: A 30-Day Devotional to Gently Help You Open Your Heart, Home, and Life to Your Neighbors, which releases on Kindle 9/18
If Covid’s taught us anything, it may be that our need for community is more real than we ever realized. It’s accentuated how isolated we’ve felt. With our busy slowed, we’ve felt all the emotions that had been easier to ignore. Current times have shifted our priorities, and perhaps pushed connecting with other people much higher than on our pre-Covid lists. Yet while we know more surely our need to be connected and known, we may feel a little lost with how to get there. If it is possible to cure our loneliness with community, we want to know how.
Listen in, or if you prefer to read, head on over to the blog.
More content is available at TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
Links mentioned:
Vulnerability: The Key to Close Relationships by Karen Young
Knowing Who I Am in Christ, Joyce Meyer’s fantastic collection of verses that speak to our true identity
We talk about it often around here—organic discipleship—so this week we are going to unpack it a bit more. We’ll put practical steps to theory and leave with an actionable step you can begin to practice today.
Listen in, or if you prefer to read, head on over to the blog.
More content is available at TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
Link Mentioned:
Morning Routines
The months since Covid changed our lives have slid together. Jokingly I’ve called it a time warp, but inside I’ve had my moments of railing against the endless holding pattern. For over five months we’ve been home, and now school starts a week from tomorrow but still at home. Again, indefinitely. After sitting with uncertainty so long, it seems we should be pros at navigating its waves. But the honest truth is that I need to quiet my spirit and hold my hands open in new and intentional ways to survive the start of school this year. Perhaps you feel the same.
My top ten list for surviving the start of school year is the things that I am inviting God to work on in my own heart. They are relevant, however, regardless of the nuances of your exact school scenario.
Listen in, or if you prefer to read, head on over to the blog.
More content is available at TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
Links mentioned:
More on morning routines
Natalie Hilton’s post which includes more breath prayers
The fear of scarcity rattled us early on when the Coronavirus hit. Empty shelves mocked us, churned us, and prompted us to stock up on what we could, sadly at the expense of others. But rooted in our attempts to buffer our fear was narrow, self-focused attention. As numbers rise again and we face a fresh wave of not-knowing, let’s leave some toilet paper and cleaning supplies for our neighbors and stock up instead on things that will last.
Listen in, or if you prefer to read, head on over to the blog.
More content is available at TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
When so much emphasis is placed on what we do, it can be easy to repeat our learned pattern of thinking without giving it a second thought. We often describe ourselves by what we do for work, or if we are a SAHM, by our role of not working a traditional job. Yet what we do outwardly is an overflow of what is going on inside us; it does not define us, it merely describes what’s visible. When we begin inching our way into missional living, we find we must answer this question: what motive lies beneath what we do? To ensure it’s a pure motive that prompts us to live on mission, let’s pause our doing and reflect together on a few questions.
Listen in, or if you prefer to read, head on over to the blog.
More content is available at TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
The moment we step in the front door, especially of a home we have never entered before, all our feelers are on high alert. Our brain rapid-fires questions like Do I take my shoes off? Where do I put them? How long do I stay in the entry? What do I need to avoid touching? If we have young kids with us, we are also hyper-aware of where they are and what they could potentially break. Very quickly we gauge our level of comfortability and that first impression is often sticky. So how can we, as missional people, make our neighbors feel right at home when they visit?
Listen in, or if you prefer to read, head on over to the blog.
More content is available at TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
Link mentioned: How to Clean for Unexpected Guests
Learning to posture ourselves as open—open to loving our neighbors well, welcoming them into our home, and doing life with them—shifts our mindset. Instead of avoiding, we begin to expect unexpected guests. While we talk often about slowly embracing a missional lifestyle, taking baby steps and trusting that God is growing something rich and beautiful in us—today I’d like to dive into a very practical component of our response to mission: how to clean your house for unexpected guests.
Listen in, or if you prefer to read, head on over to the blog.
More content is available at TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
Do you have a friend, the soul-quenching, real kind? Or do you feel the longing, but are hesitant to linger long enough for the friendship to flourish? Perhaps you feel like you are on the outside looking in, always. Or maybe you want to push through the uncomfortable feelings of vulnerability but you just don’t exactly know how to. If missional living in our neighborhood means that we are slowly developing deeper friendships, let’s talk about how we practically get there.
Listen in, or if you prefer to read, head on over to the blog.
More content is available at TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
We live most of our moments in the messy, sticky, actual life realm. Life happens. Fallen pickle jars shatter against the concrete of the garage floor. Feelings get bent out of whack in the midst of neighborhood play. Conflict thuds with heavy feet on the airy moments. We juggle the important work of parenting with other demands, still present, still with their own importance. If being missional includes sharing the life-on-life stuff, it must be possible to move ever towards mission while we live our messy, actual lives. Perhaps the messiest moments are actually the greatest opportunities to engage in organic discipleship in our neighborhoods.
Listen in, or if you prefer to read, head on over to the blog.
More content is available at TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
God is near, no matter what tomorrow looks like. God is with me, even if normal will be forever re-defined. God is present, even when I don’t see it or feel it.
Perhaps it’s time to stop asking the question, “When will life go back to normal?” and ask instead, “What will my normal be?” What rhythms will flavor my life? Who will I be even when this is the only question I have power to answer?
Listen in, or if you prefer to read, head on over to the blog.
More content is available at TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
Links mentioned:
Free Printable of The Uncommon Normal Manifesto
“Courage doesn’t always roar; sometimes courage is the tiny voice at the end of the day saying, ‘I will try again tomorrow.” How true are these words about courage from Mary Anne Radmacher! A mistruth about missional living that once deterred me from getting to know my neighbors is that it was a life available only to extreme extroverts or insanely courageous people. I am neither. I’d choose peaceful harmony over adventure most days and still feel that twinge of hesitation at the beginning of so many conversations. Yet I know that doing life with my neighbors put together so many puzzle pieces I’d carried around for years. If you, too, feel less than courageous, like you are stuck between wanting to adopt a missional lifestyle and feeling horribly inadequate, there is hope. I know it’s possible to have courage even when we are afraid because I’ve experienced it.
Listen in, or if you prefer to read, head on over to the blog.
More content is available at TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
Much of life exists in paradox. The sun is shining as kids play with friends in the front yard and ride bikes around the neighborhood, and I answer a group Facetime call so my siblings and I can talk to our grandpa, many miles away, and encourage him to hold onto life so his daughters can make it in time to say goodbye. Pain and heartache juxtapose with joy and life, and we live in the tension. To be human is to experience both, and often as parallels. Today we will hold the tension of both/and while we talk about how to make a splash with our summer—because a missional life doesn’t exist in a vacuum.
To make a splash, we must get wet—and in terms of missional living, that looks like sitting with our neighbors sometimes through the messy and hard parts of life as well as those that abound with joy. It means we don’t shy away from or minimize the seasons of life that are hard to navigate. It means we invite God into all the pieces because only He can piece together beauty when brokenness is all we see. It means we embrace the both/and.
Listen in, or if you prefer to read, head on over to the blog.
More content is available at TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
Links mentioned:
Morning Routine Your Summer 2020
Cultivating a Life Worth Imitating
We could use a little more togetherness, a little less dividing us. As the sun beats down on the world slowly reopening around us, we can see more clearly the walls in places that never should have gone up. We live in a fractured world—fractured through a separation, a division, between God and humans. It was not supposed to be this way. Where love was meant to grow, it’s stunted and impeded. But there are places the light pushes through, and these are life-lines connecting the world of broken to the Creator who will one day restore. Today I get the honor of sharing a few of these stories with you.
Listen in, or if you prefer to read, head on over to the blog.
More content is available at TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
Stories contributed by:
Carolyn Pereira *also the originator of the idea to collect and share stories
Sherry Rotan Harvie
Sally Johnson *no link available
Angela Olinghouse
Casey Hilty
Rachel Schelb
So why talk about morning routine now, rather than the myriad of other ways we can lean into missional living when we are neighborhood-bound for the summer?
Here’s why. Summer is prime time for connecting with neighbors. It’s easier to spend time outdoors, and that visibility makes it simpler to get to know neighbors better. We will dive into conversation about how we can be intentional this summer with inviting our neighbors into our lives, but it’s equally important to let what we do overflow from who we are.
Listen in, or if you prefer to read, head on over to the blog.
More content is available at TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
Links mentioned:
Emily P. Freeman: podcast episodes 90 and 76 on The Next Right Thing
Filling my thoughts with what I’ve gotten wrong turns bitter my gratitude and stingy my praise. I can stay here, wallowing in regret, but it’s like quick sand. It will pull me in until I can’t see the way out. But filling my vision with Him helps me see the grace He covers me with and gives me the strength to reach up and grasp His hand.
Listen in, or if you prefer to read, head on over to the blog.
More content is available at TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
Can you tell me what is it that you do? No fluff, just the meat and bones version? Guys, this one’s just for you. Today we answer the question: What exactly is a neighborhood missional community, and how can I replicate it where I live?
- This episode is not solely for husbands, but written with husbands in mind. If you would like a straight-forward explanation of how we do neighborhood missional community, this is for you!
** Also, my voice was a little scratchy during this recording. My apologies, and thank you for understanding!
Listen in, or if you prefer to read, head on over to the blog.
More content is available at TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
Links mentioned (not affiliate links):
- Small is Big, Slow is Fast: Living and Leading Your Family and Community on Mission by Caesar Kalinowski
- Building a Discipling Culture by Mike Breen
- 123 Lifeschool Podcast
- Shared Meals Cultivate Community
- Cultivating a Life Worth Imitating
- The Road Forward to Missional Community
- Obstacles to Neighborhood Missional Living Series
If you are feeling empty and discontent, my prayer for you today is that you can move toward more than what you have known, more than what you believe, and more than what you see.
Listen in, or if you prefer to read, head on over to the blog.
More content is available at TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
Joining the mission of a holy God sounds a little intimidating, if I’m honest. Holy is a heavy word. The completeness of God’s holiness—His through-and-through pureness and awe-invoking presence makes me feel a little like Susan inquiring about Aslan in C.S. Lewis’s The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe.
“Aslan is a lion–the Lion, the great Lion." "Ooh" said Susan. "I'd thought he was a man. Is he—quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion". . . “Safe?" said Mr. Beaver . . . "Who said anything about safe? 'Course he isn't safe. But he's good. He's the King, I tell you.”
I feel small. And inquisitive--drawn to the exploding mystery of One who can simultaneously be good and not safe. So when I try to wrap my head around my purpose from my creation being to join the mission of this holy God, I find it both irresistible and unnerving. Possibly you feel the same.
Listen in, or if you prefer to read, head on over to the blog.
More content is available at TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
As we are beginning to experience or looking forward to coronavirus restrictions being lifted, we may find that we are feeling all the emotions, again. Anticipation couples with worry, relief is tinged with regret. We thought we were more than ready, but then the next moment we are not so sure. Whether the waiting has gotten old, the transition unfolds too slowly for our liking, or we aren’t ready yet for another change, the truth is that this is new for all of us, just as the onset of a world-wide pandemic also was. As mission-minded people, how can we prepare our hearts and minds for such a transition as this?
Listen in, or if you prefer to read, head on over to the blog.
More content is available at TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
Links Mentioned:
- Free download of the 6 missional rhythms
- Yes! Please send me the 6-day email series to unpack each of the missional living rhythms.
All the things we want fast—check-marks on our to-do-lists, digits on our direct deposits, accomplishments to pad our resumes, yes, even godly character and a mission-immersed life at microwave-speed—could we hold them with open hands? Could we dare to believe that something far richer could be won in the places our patience must grow most extravagantly?
Because when we are weak,
I AM is our strength,
but we may need a slower pace to see it.
Listen in, or if you prefer to read, head on over to the blog.
More content is available at TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
Links Mentioned:
- My quarantine playlist on Youtube
- The song I’ve been playing on repeat.
Do we trust that He is good, even in the midst of a world turned upside down and fear turned loose to whisper in our ears? Because before we can proclaim His goodness across the room, or across a driveway, or across the space of social media, we need to first wrestle with it in our own hearts. Is God good even through a pandemic like covid-19?
Listen in, or if you prefer to read, head on over to the blog.
More content is available at TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
Links Mentioned:
- My quarantine playlist on Youtube
- Sign up here to join my email list and receive a free download of six missional rhythms to cultivate during the quarantine.
These past few weeks we have been graced with ample opportunity to be beginners. Yes, though this time in history is hard and it’s heavy, and I am not negating the pain, grace-lines our floundering, our feeling like we don’t know what we are doing or how to respond. The breath of grace lingers on our up-ended schedules and overturned priorities, our now in-side-out proficiencies and side-ways routines. Why? Because when we acknowledge we are not in control, we can learn to trust the One who holds the whole aching, groaning world tender in His hands. Through this current season of us all feeling like beginners, I am discovering this as well: it’s when we feel we don’t know where to start that we may actually be most ready to begin living missionally in our neighborhood.
Last in the “Obstacles to Neighborhood Missional Living” series is “Neighborhood Missional Living When I Don’t Live in a Neighborhood”! Listen in, or if you prefer to read, head on over to the blog. From this page you can view the full topic line-up for the series and easily click over to the post on the blog.
More content is available on TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
Links Mentioned:
If your small seems impossibly small and you also relate to any of the following obstacles to neighborhood missional living, I encourage you to go back to the earlier releases in this series: my house is too small, I am an introvert, or I am just too busy. The entire series, Obstacles to Neighborhood Missional Living, is available both on the blog and podcast.
In the midst of our world-wide efforts to flatten the curve of covid-19, missional living may have drifted off our radar. To compound the apparent disconnect, today we are talking about neighborhood missional living when we don’t even live in a neighborhood. Strike two. Yet I’m choosing to believe that because you are here, reading or listening, something in you also believes that living on mission is not only still relevant, it’s all the more needed. Non-neighborhood dwellers, today you may feel small, alone, insignificant—like an outsider looking in. I can relate. The weight of wanting to live a missional life yet thinking that it can only happen in certain scenarios is one I lived with for years. And I wish I had known then what I now know: many of the same principles of missional living in a neighborhood apply to missional living outside a neighborhood.
Next up in the “Obstacles to Neighborhood Missional Living” series is “Neighborhood Missional Living When I Don’t Live in a Neighborhood”! Listen in, or if you prefer to read, head on over to the blog. From this page you can view the full topic line-up for the series and easily click over to the post on the blog.
More content is available on TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
Links Mentioned:
Rain is an Opportunity to Share an Umbrella
The Turquoise Table (Kristin Shell)
Leslie Verner
Ann Voskamp
Caesar Kalinowski
“How can we possibly add everyday mission to our already-packed fifteen-to-nineteen waking hours of each day?” ask the authors of A Field Guide for Everyday Mission. Perhaps this is a question you and I have asked with similar words—one that haunts us and simultaneously offers us permission to dismiss the nudge to live on mission. They continue: “The very thought is enough to overwhelm us and keep us from even trying.” We nod in agreement. But their next question is unexpected: “But what if that’s the wrong question?” The statement that follows hit dangerously close to home for me, a former we-need-to-say-yes-to-all-the-things type of mother: “God’s mission cannot be added into our busy lives; our busy lives must wrap around God’s mission” (Connelly and Roberts, Jr. 117). In this post/episode we are going to unpack how neighborhood missional living can take place in the midst of our busy lives.
Next up in the “Obstacles to Neighborhood Missional Living” series is “Neighborhood Missional Living When I Am Too Busy”! Listen in, or if you prefer to read, head on over to the blog. From this page you can view the full topic line-up for the series and easily click over to the post on the blog.
More content is available on TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
Links Mentioned:
- Creating Margin
- Margin Meets Mission: The Gift of Availability
- The Paradox of Rest
- Summer in a Picture-Frame: Nos and Yeses
This series, “Obstacles to Neighborhood Missional Living,” was spurred from a desire to reach into the crevices and shed hope, light, and truth on that reason that for you keeps you from connecting with your neighbors in meaningful and life-giving ways. Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought that a scary and invisible virus would be closing us inside our own homes, nulling proximity even in neighborhoods, by the time I would write this piece. So I struggle with whether it is still relevant, whether it best serves you, the reader or listener, in the current life we are trying to right our hearts and minds within. But in all earnestness, I believe that when we are ripped of the option of in-person community in our neighborhoods as in times like this, it peels back the layers so we can more clearly see how much we hope for, long for, and need community. So please bear with me as we unpack how we can live missionally in our neighborhoods when our neighbors are NOT interested, because while doing life with our neighbors currently has to take on some creative initiatives, we need community near us now more than ever before.
Next up in the “Obstacles to Neighborhood Missional Living” series is “Neighborhood Missional Living When My Neighbors Are NOT Interested”! Listen in, or if you prefer to read, head on over to the blog. From this page you can view the full topic line-up for the series and easily click over to the post on the blog.
More content is available on TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
Links Mentioned:
- Caesar Kalinowski
- When to Share Our Faith with Words
- When Age Difference Bring Us Together
- Enneaneighboring: Forming Community in My Neighborhood Out of Different Types of Normal
- Featured On
There are many things my husband and I are both on board with. Our food preferences are very similar as is our taste in furniture, décor, music, and perfume. But when we don’t agree, I am quietly stubborn and he bristles at any attempt to control him. He wants to air the conflict and I would much prefer to wish it away. He sees in black and white and I point out how the same thing could be seen from multiple angles. He is decisive, and the less important a decision is, the harder it is for me to make it. If you haven’t guessed it by now, we are in a lot of ways polar opposites. Perhaps you can relate. But what happens when you and your spouse find that you feel very differently about something that is pretty important to you? This week we are going to dive into the question of how do we live on mission in our neighborhood if our spouse is not on board.
Next up in the “Obstacles to Neighborhood Missional Living” series is “Neighborhood Missional Living When My Spouse Is Not on Board”! Listen in, or if you prefer to read, head on over here to the blog. From this page you can view the full topic line-up for the series and easily click over to the post on the blog.
More content is available on TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
Links Mentioned:
- Cultivate your relationship with God. Links: Cultivating a Life Worth Imitating and Better Than a Roller Coaster High
- Objection: Why does it matter—missional living seems irrelevant. Link: What Is My Mission?
- Objection: I’m not comfortable talking about Jesus with other people. Link: When to Share Our Faith with Words
- Objection: Money is tight—can’t share food all the time. Link: When My Offering Feels Small
- Objection: I don’t have anything in common/no relationship with any of our neighbors. Link: When Age Differences Bring Us Together
- Objection: I feel we would be judged because we don’t always live Christ-like. Link: Real Talk: What We May Not Know We Are Missing
- Objection: I just want space and quiet. Links: Neighborhood Missional Living When I Am an Introvert and The Me That Is Needed
- Objection: I need to finish these projects with the house first. Link: Befriending the Awkward
- Objection: We already have friends/church/small group—can’t invest relationally in another arena. Links: When My Neighbor Lives Next-Doorand Word of the Year: Open
- Objection: We are just too busy! Links: Margin Meets Mission: The Gift of Availability and The Paradox of Rest
Recommended Resources List:
The Road Back to You by Ian Morgan Cron and Suzanne Stabile
The Path Between Us by Suzanne Stabile
Love and Respect by Dr. Emerson Eggerichs
The 5 Love Languages by Gary Chapman
Small is Big, Slow is Fast by Caesar Kalinowski
A Field Guide for Everyday Mission by Ben Connelly and Bob Roberts, Jr.
The Turquoise Table by Kristin Shell
Start with Your People by Brian Dixon, especially chapter 6, “Spouse: From Kryptonite to Superpower”
My house is small, we think—yet for some reason that ache to foster community right in our home is not easily brushed aside. Practicality has its place, we justify—and yet we hope there is another option besides saying no to community or yes to a different house. I invite you to consider the possibility that your desire to connect is a beautiful part of being human. Brené Brown, researcher and New York Times best-selling author, offers us this: “We are biologically, cognitively, physically, and spiritually wired to love, to be loved, and to belong” (26). It’s ingrained deep in our veins—to be part of community. Instead of stuffing our need to connect, let’s unpack some ways we can foster community with our neighbors even if our house is small.
Next up in the “Obstacles to Neighborhood Missional Living” series is “Neighborhood Missional Living When My House Is Too Small”! Listen in, or if you prefer to read, head on over here to the blog. From this page you can view the full topic line-up for the series and easily click over to the post on the blog.
More content is available on TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
What is the unbreachable obstacle you feel stands in the way of missional living in your neighborhood? Perhaps you are an introvert, your spouse is not on board, your house is too small, or you simply don’t know where to begin. Friend, I am so glad you are here because this series is one you won’t want to miss!
First up is “Neighborhood Missional Living When I Am an Introvert”! Listen in, or if you prefer to read, head on over here to the blog. From this page you can view the full topic line-up for the series and easily click over to the post on the blog.
To read my friend Amber Adrian’s full post, “introverts and telling people about jesus,” click here.
More content is available on TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.
Living as a disciple-making-disciple in your neighborhood doesn’t have to feel intimidating, and that is why I started The Uncommon Normal. My vision for the podcast is that it will be a space to steep in truth that combats the faulty messages we have believed about our worth and our purpose. A space that will inspire both a dream of what it could look like to live missionally right in your neighborhood and the courage to take baby steps in that direction. A space to be life-long learners together.
Friend, I invite you to join me through listening in.
If you are excited about the Uncommon Normal being released in podcast form, I’d love for you to share the trailer with a friend.
More content is available on TheUncommonNormal.com. I would also love to connect with you on social media. You may find me on Instagram, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter.