Category: Inspirational
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The Healing Arts: Stress Weaving
I haven’t painted since January. For someone who has spent much of her life creating, that feels almost strange to say. Art has always been part of me. I learned to paint when I was young, along with sewing, crocheting, knitting, and weaving. Creating things with my hands was simply part of childhood, and those…
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Peace in the Storm: Overwhelmed by the Blessing
“Lo, children are an heritage of the Lord: and the fruit of the womb is his reward.”—Psalm 127:3 Sometimes the very thing we prayed for can overwhelm us when it finally arrives. That may sound ungrateful, but I do not believe it is. A blessing can be beautiful, long-awaited, and unquestionably given by God—and still…
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Tea Time with Mandy: Twenty Years in the Making
It has been a little over two months since I last sat down to write, and in some ways it feels as though an entire lifetime has passed in that short space of time. There have been seasons when writing came easily to me, when I could sit down with a cup of tea and…
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Help and Hope: Stop Walking Around the Furnace
Most people pray for God to remove the furnace. Few stop to consider that sometimes God is waiting for us to walk toward it. And if we’re being honest, most of us spend a great deal of our lives trying to avoid discomfort. We avoid difficult conversations, grief, doctor’s appointments, forgiveness, change, we even avoid…
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Life’s Lessons: The Gentle Things Still Matter
Sometimes healing enters our lives with very small paws. I did not fully realize that until recently. After months of hospitals, exhaustion, difficult conversations, uncertainty, grief, sleepless nights, and emotional storms that seemed to arrive one after another without much space in between, I found myself sitting quietly one evening watching a litter of tiny…
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The Healing Arts: When Creativity Becomes a Lifeline
Some of the most creative people I have ever met… were also carrying some of the heaviest burdens. Not always visibly. Not always in ways the world immediately recognized. But quietly, beneath the surface, many of them were navigating things most people around them never fully understood. Things like chronic illness, rare diseases, disability, grief,…
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Peace in the Storm: The Voice That Came at the Right Time
The rain had been falling most of the afternoon, though from inside the hospital it was difficult to tell where one hour ended and the next began. Everything there seemed suspended in artificial light and exhaustion. The halls were too cold, the chairs too stiff, and the silence somehow never truly quiet. Machines hummed. Elevator…
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Tea Time with Mandy: The Quiet Between Words
The room was quiet, but not peaceful. It was the kind of quiet that settles in slowly, almost unnoticed at first, until you realize it is not absence… but restraint. Three of us sat at the small round table near the window, the late afternoon light stretching long across the polished wood floor. The tea…
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Help and Hope: Learning to Stand After the Storm
When Life Doesn’t Pause After the Storm The storm ends… but life doesn’t slow down. That may be one of the most disorienting parts of walking through a difficult season, because somewhere in us, we expect a pause. We expect a moment to sit, to breathe, to gather ourselves before stepping forward again. But life…
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Theo Talk: The God of the Storm
There is a question that does not get asked nearly enough. Who commands the wind? We tend to think of storms as natural things—patterns of weather, collisions of pressure, movements of air that follow predictable laws. And in many ways, that is true. The world we live in is structured, ordered, and governed by systems…
Country Girl Gone City 