Category: Insightful
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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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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…
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Life’s Lessons: The Storms That Draw Us In
There is a question I have found myself returning to more than once in my life, and it is not as simple as it first sounds. Why are we drawn to what can destroy us? It is a strange thing to admit, but I have always been fascinated by storms, and particularly tornadoes. Not in…
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The Country Girl Who Really Did Go City
Caregiving Between Two Worlds When I first started writing under the name Country Girl Gone City, I meant it in a lighthearted way. A girl raised with mountain air in her lungs and dirt roads under her feet suddenly learning to navigate city streets, hospital corridors, and airport terminals. A country soul learning the language…
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Covenant, Loyalty, and Guarding What God Has Joined
“Therefore what God has joined together, let no man separate!”Mark 10:9 TLV The past two weeks have stripped everything down to what is real. Major surgery. Physical weakness. Long nights in hospital rooms. The kind of vulnerability that reminds you just how fragile the human body is — and how sacred marriage truly becomes in…
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Life’s Lessons: Power Under Control
There is a moment in every heated exchange when you can feel it rising. Your pulse quickens. Your thoughts sharpen. Words gather at the edge of your tongue, fully formed and ready. In those moments, using language can feel like swordplay. We parry. We defend. We anticipate the next move. We prepare to strike before…
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Literally Literary: The Snow Goose
In the early 1940s, the world was at war—and not only on the battlefield. Children were losing fathers, brothers, uncles, and friends. Homes were quieter. Chairs sat empty. Questions went unanswered because the answers were too heavy to carry in plain words. Some authors understood that children did not need explanations, but rather they needed…
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Theo Talk: Replacement Theology, Antisemitism, and Why the Church Must Get This Right
Theology is never neutral. What we believe always bears fruit. Theo Talk exists because there are theological conversations the modern Church often avoids—either because they are uncomfortable, controversial, or demand historical honesty. As a junior-year bachelor’s student in theology who has worked across multiple denominations, I’ve learned that doctrine is not merely academic. It shapes…
Country Girl Gone City 