My kid casually mentioned she may want to move out.
That’s okay!
That’s a NORMAL milestone! Hello!? Of course I don’t care!
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Of course, we all expect our teen children to hate us, be embarrassed around us, talk down about us to their friends, and find every way they can to show that they are rebelling against everything we stand for as the authority figures in their lives.
We wag our fingers at them and say, “YOU SHOULD do this or that!” even though we didn’t do this or that when we were their age, and getting up off the couch to talk to our kids is hard for us sometimes because our snacks and our devices call us to do more important things.
What if there is a different reality to parenting?
Even if we’ve rolled up our sleeves over the last nearly two decades and gotten “Good Parent Points” on our clipboards for throwing balls with our kids, giving them birthday parties, and teaching them to drive, what if even then, deep down, we still expect our teens to be embarrassed around us, spend as little time with us as possible and talk disrespectfully about us behind our backs until they are finally “Free.”
What if the expectations we have of our teens are too small?
It turns out they are.
Check out this NEW1 research.
Lecture 17 of Your Best Brain: The Science of Brain Improvement by John Medina says:
“[The scientist] makes several important observations about the powerful effect of culture [on teens] . . . [He] points to a study . . . looking at adolescent behaviour in 186 pre-industrialized societies. The research did NOT find lots of classic impulsive, obnoxious, get me away from my parent’s teenage behaviour in ALL of them. In fact, they found the opposite. More than half the young males exhibited no rebellious behaviour at all. Teens in these cultures spent most of their time hanging around their parents. They often helped with the chores both in family and in broader social activities”.
We saw an example of this kind of teen culture in reality at the homeschooling conference we recently attended.
It was a culture shock because not all the teens were jerks!
Consider the following:
(1) At the homeschooling family barn dance (Can I stop there?) . . .
(2) In which parents and all ages of family members, including teens, danced in the same big hall (Can I stop there?) . . .
(3) Often a very young child would join in the fray. Partners switched every few seconds sometimes, in a (deliberately) Jane Austen style. EVERY SINGLE TEENAGE BOY that I saw whose turn it was to dance with the 3-year-old, hunched down, smiled and spun the little girl in time to the music. EVERY SINGLE ONE.
Watching teen after teen do this was so sweet – It made me tear up.
(4) These are not the teens skulking in corners, hoping for a chance to get outside and smoke more pot.
Entering this homeschooling culture, even through reading this newsletter, may be enough to destroy culturally low expectations of today’s teens.
Check out this site for teens for another example: The Rebelution – Rebelling Against Low Expectations
So friend, now that you feel empowered to refuse low expectations of your teens, I recommend you go home, yell at your kids, throw some stuff around the house and make your point VERY clear that now you KNOW they don’t HAVE to be jerks anymore!
You’re welcome!
Good luck!
After that advice, consider asking God how you may need to throw out the way that you see that child and see them instead through the glasses that God gives you, the way He sees that child.
God can do anything, you know—far more than you could ever imagine or guess or request in your wildest dreams! He does it not by pushing us around but by working within us, his Spirit deeply and gently within us.
Oh, and by the way, the expectations of the Father for your life are greater than you imagine for yourself, too.
Do you have time for coffee and fresh vision?
Thank you for liking me! I like you too! Let’s journey together!
Photo Credits: Teen by Микола Тонкодуб on Unsplash, Barn Dance From Logos Online School Website
1This book by John Medina is over 10 years old, but “New” is a relative term, and let’s admit that we all have forgotten half the stuff we need to know to do well in life, anyway! Related, consider the following quote:
If you want a new idea, read an old book.
Ivan Pavlov
This quote proves that you have no idea what you are doing, either, as you parent your kids, and any information, whether new OR old, will help you!
I’m mad at you! At all of you with a child over seventeen years old who left home! I hate you all! Why didn’t you tell me it would be this hard to say goodbye when they left for college!?
And all of you with babies too, babies that are older than my oldest baby, I hate you all too!
Before we had babies, why didn’t you tell us that looking after babies would be so hard!?
Ah, yes . . .
It is because we wouldn’t have believed you even if you would have spoken up.
And if our teens truly understood the depth of our loss, many of these kids wouldn’t leave home. They are good kids. I relayed these thoughts to my husband, processing them aloud through my tears.
“And we want them to leave,” I cried out. “Yes, we do,” my husband comforted. Then he shoots me a sideways, knowing look. I remembered that this morning, our teen was DEFINITELY right when she was DEFINITELY wrong, and instead of bursting into tears, I burst into laughter.
I feel some joy mixed with some sorrow.
And so, “Goodbye!” we say as we wave.
Except it’s not kindergarten, and they are heading to school on a bus. We homeschooled, so we missed that milestone. It’s 600 km away, and the tearing, the necessary, painful cleaving continues.
Reflecting God’s nature, He created them male and female. . . Therefore, a [person] leaves his father and mother
I told you it would be that way, Jesus reminds me softly. Many years earlier, in prayer, Jesus showed me a picture of my daughters, one after the other, ready to board a plane to soar off on their journeys of independence. He began preparing my heart to say goodbye many years ago, even then.
Many of us homeschooling parents pushed the love boundary of our hearts a little further than expected when we cracked open those brand new math texts on day one of homeschooling.
The depth of love surprises us all and surpasses the boundary markers we set up to protect ourselves. If we love what we know, we will get to know these kids, and our love for them will transform us. Love always does.
I’m not saying that homeschooling is one domino after the other of perfect days.
I have homeschooled for 4,745 days (I’m convinced you don’t have enough math skills to figure out how many years I have spent homeschooling- Who does?). Of those days, I have NEVER yet had one perfect day.
Nope.
Not one. Just daily joy mixed with daily sorrow. Master storyteller J.R.R. Tolkien explains it this way:
The possibility of [sorrow and failure] is necessary to the joy of deliverance . . . giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.
And so saying goodbye to the teen as she flies off to college is just another homeschooling day: some joy mixed with some sorrow.
We are used to that. We’ve gotten stronger over the years. It’s just another part of the daily homeschooling rhythm.
We will be ready because we have been practicing daily for this: some joy and some sorrow, repeat tomorrow.
We’re going to be OK.
And so, as we watch them soar, we nurse our grief a little and then flap our baby wings and listen for the call from Him into a new adventure.
And in the same way that we invest in our future by putting aside a few dollars each month, is He asking us to invest in our spiritual future by putting aside a few minutes each day to listen to Him calling us, comforting us, asking us to set aside the old, and to pick up the new?
How is he calling you to wake up?
Where to next, God?
I can’t quite fly yet, but I am sensing another adventure.
Yes, I’ll follow!
(How about you?)
It finally clicked in that God was speaking to me about this person, and then I wondered if God wanted to say something to him through me. I quickly remarked about his T-shirt and rambled on, trying to connect. I couldn’t get eye contact, and his back remained to me, a grunt in reply.
“Oh, wait. I need to stand back a moment.” I thought. “If God wants to speak through me, I need to listen to God to see what He wants to say.” (!)
It was a moment of genius when I remembered that God doesn’t need me to be a little goddess for him by letting my mouth run away with my brain. Instead, what is He saying?
I felt God say to ask him where he goes to church.
Now, I live in a community where less than 4% of adults go to church regularly. And by regularly, I mean once at Christmas.
The exponential growth bell curve for “churchgoers” is reversed for teens, so exponentially fewer teens in our area attend church than even the infrequent adults. I was about to change my question to this youth, slightly, to WHETHER he attended church instead of the incredibly obnoxious WHERE he goes to church.
I sensed again a nudge from the heart of God tugging at my sleeve, asking him WHERE he goes to church.
I guided the topic as naturally as possible, from Las Vegas, the city name on his hoodie, to our small local community, “Isn’t it better to live here than in Las Vegas?” I attempted lamely. He grunted in reply. “Better opportunities exist for a good community here, and I have found a church community. There are so many great churches with amazing communities.” I had crossed the bridge.
Would I end up on his side of the road? “So, where do you go to church,” I asked as non-violently as possible. My husband did a double-take, and I could almost see him rolling his eyes under the coffee cup as he sipped it.
The young man said that he goes to the Gospel Chapel when he goes, but he hasn’t been in awhile. A land! The airplane landed! A connection was made.
I had several experiences with that church, so we bonded over these experiences for a bit.
Tell him what I told you, I sensed. Was that God, or no? Well, I was in this far…
“You know, as soon as I saw you, I felt God say that you are one of His,” I began. This teen, who purposely put his back to me as often as possible earlier and issued only a few grunts for conversation, glued his eyes to mine. He leaned forward.
Again, I felt an overwhelming wave of God’s love and perhaps empathy – for that young man. It was a sense that God understood him, understood his struggles, and loved him so very much.
“I feel that God loves you so very much,” I tried to spit out. I was nearly crying, and the emotion overwhelmed me. “He is pleased with you.”
Adding a notch to this weird experience, I sensed God nudging me to ask to pray for him. So I did. And he accepted.
And it was the most natural thing in the world for a woman in her forties to pray for a teen recluse she had never met at a random coffee shop.
It’s not weird. It’s perhaps, a glimpse again of authentic Christian living.
I was thirsty for more.
The need to worship was overwhelming, and I needed to do this before speaking with my husband. We drove home together. He and I were side by side in the car, sipping our Americanos.
“What was that about?” he finally asked.
“Nothing weird. Just a glimpse of authentic Christian living,” I replied, taking a bite of my energy ball. He nodded, and we drove on.
Where to next, God?
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Halloween is around the corner, so I thought I’d post about the last time I dressed up.
No, it wasn’t Halloween then or a holiday of any kind. Why do you ask? But this got me thinking:
What if people HAD to love us (no matter what we wore or how silly we acted)?
The good news is that depending on what your friends and family believe, they do!
For example, we homeschool our kids, so we read to them from books that say things like this:
Most of all, love each other as if your life depended on it.
Then, we go to a church where they read the same stuff.
At church, they HAVE to love us, too! If we find people who don’t love us there, we can find some others to love. We’ll all find true followers of Jesus who promise to love us no matter what our personality – even the “unusual” ones – whew!
So we can finally relax and have fun.
We’re loved!
This is good news for me in particular because I figured out what my family REALLY thought about me lately, and it was a bit of a shock.
Here’s what happened.
We were reading an excellent book together as a family.
Caveat: Before you get the wrong idea of us all drinking hot chocolate and stringing popcorn and cranberries by the fire as we each take turns reading aloud together, singing a song between each chapter, aka Little House on the Prairie style, no, it wasn’t like that. It was an audiobook played in the car during our day-long drive to visit extended family. The book just helped us not to want to kill each other.
Setting the mood.
Anyway, the book was excellent. It was called Jesus Revolution. I would highly recommend it*. We all got into the story, and even the child we initially had to bribe to listen to the story with us asked for more!
At one point in the book, the author, Greg Laurie, is described as having something like “deep spiritual depth and a bit of an unpredictable, crazy personality. You never knew what he was going to do next.”
My husband looked at me sneakily out of the corner of his eye, smirking. “WHAT???” I asked. “What are you smirking about??”
“Oh,” he replied, looking away casually, “just something said in the book.”
“What??” I protested. “I’m not…!” And then he laughed, and there was a muffled chuckle, I think, from the back seats.
So I guess my family thinks that his personality describes me!
And this reminds me of what we did last night! I bought a gift for my family – well, sort of. Okay, yes! I did buy it for myself and pretended to give it to the family!
It is called The Adventure Challenge. You scratch off an “Adventure,” and then the family HAS (Yes, teens, that word is “HAS”) to do the Adventure together. Last night, we strung out yarn as an obstacle course through the basement, and we had to go through it as fast as we could, being sprayed in the face with water each time we accidentally touched a string.
It was fun.
And my superhero outfit? Yeah, I am wearing a bathing suit over the top of my leotards. And yes, the big “S” on my shirt WAS made a spur of the moment. It helped me go faster!
I even got first place!
(Before any of the others went, I was ranked first, that is.)
So relax! Make your teens do fun and crazy stuff with you! If you’re unsure how, try making “fun” a prerequisite to “food,” for example! They’ll thank you later! (When they’re old they may thank you – At least that’s what happened to us!)
Your kids are loved, too!
And that was the message of the Jesus Revolution book, actually. It was about a bunch of crazy hippy kids who were overcome, in some cases literally, by the love of God. That love overflowed to others and transformed a nation (Even Time Magazine did a cover article about this movement on June 21, 1971).
So go ahead and be the real you, whatever that looks like.
And then, after you’ve let your stomach fat and the rest of the real you out a little bit, if you’re desperately looking for a way to improve your self-esteem, spend a few more minutes with the kind of people who believe they HAVE to love you!
You’re welcome!
Good luck!
Footnotes
*If bribing your kids to watch a movie with you is less expensive than bribing them to read a book with you, the movie Jesus Revolution can be rented here.
“Wait, what are you doing right now?” he asked me.
I was melodramatically pretending to cry as the youth left the party.
“Oh, I’m just pretending I’m sad to see him leave,” I explained. “I made fun of him a lot tonight, and so now I’m building up his self-esteem.” The youth listened, mouth agape, staring at me.
As I’ve said before, my magnetism to youth is remarkable.
But unfortunately, we’re not supposed to make fun of millennials anymore. In fact, we’re not supposed to make fun of anyone anymore. So, at the next party, I tried to conform.
I stuffed snack after snack into my mouth in an effort not to speak.
The problem is that if we really want to do this self-esteem thing right, we shouldn’t say anything true at all. Millennials, for example, have self-esteem that is 1/4 inch thick. If we accidentally blow the truth in their vicinity, they cry or get upset. “How dare you assault me with the truth?” they retort. “Don’t you know I’m sensitive?”
And so we apologize and cower to the needs of their egos.
“You’re doing great!” we assert, every time they look up from their iPhones or get out of bed.
“I can see you are trying to do some math! You get a star!”
“You ran in a race that you didn’t even train for? You get a medal! Everyone gets a medal!”
And with all of this self-esteem and encouragement, and “Well done!” floating around, you’d think our youth would be boyoed up by all this praise and floating happily on their circumstances in life.
Of course, we all know that youth depression and mental illness are at an all-time high.
So why not try another approach?
What if we tell everyone they’re losers?
It’s counterintuitive (like all my best advice), but we can finally let our stomach fat out and relax! We can stop pretending to be someone we’re not. We can get on with enjoying the party games, popcorn and time together.
“What are you talking about?” you ask.
Well, if we could relax and let our kids relax, I think we’d have a lot more fun. We don’t have to, in fact, shield our kids from the fact that they’re messed up and that we are, too. There is surprising freedom in realizing that we are all losers.
If we are at the bottom of the pit, there’s nowhere to go but up!
Since we’ve compiled this long and sorry record as sinners (both us and them) and proved that we are utterly incapable of living the glorious lives God wills for us, God did it for us.
Hope abounds because things can only get better!
Once we stop showering accolades on each other, and accept that we are all dorks, lost on the ship we call life, the adventure can begin!
Anyone around here seen a Captain? We could certainly use some help getting cleaned up a bit, and figuring out how to work together to get all of our oars on this boat pulling in the same direction.
And so, how do we feel better?
1. We realize we are a directionless loser.
2. We find someone to help clean us up a bit.
3. We follow this person and therefore, all grow together in the same direction.
He got us out of the mess we’re in and restored us to where he always wanted us to be. And he did it by means of Jesus Christ.
And life gets a little easier!
Spiritual people, for example, those who know that they are losers because they desperately need someone to clean them up, lead them and help them all row in a similar direction, tend to struggle a bit less frequently with their mental health.*
So stop building up people’s self-esteem! Trash them instead, knowing that this is the best way to build them up! They’ll (eventually) feel better!
You’re welcome!
Good luck!
Blogpost Footnotes
*Of course, many people within the church struggle with mental health, and research is based on averages.
Crumbs of hope that whisper or nudge from God can be found in the oddest places.
Sometimes even through strangers.
It seemed that God wasn’t finished speaking to this clerk at Tim Hortons yet, but I had some pressing paperwork to do. Would I trust Him to interrupt my more essential tasks again? Was I too busy?
My bagel was burned.
I could eat a bagel, slightly dark at the edges. Tell them it seemed God may have been saying. Really?
I already had one interaction where God somehow fed this young man a crumb.
Why did I have to ruin it by criticizing the food? I obeyed, and co-incidentally, perhaps, it was the same young man whose turn it was to speak to me. Several others were working the till.
I showed him my bagel and explained that I recently learned that burned food contains carcinogens, substances capable of causing cancer.
I apologized for the nuisance. “Maybe I should come to you for advice,” the clerk called loudly across the restaurant, as I walked away. I smiled.
He thinks he is drawn to me, but he is drawn to You in me.
May he learn the difference.
As I was about to leave, I thought the Lord said to buy another coffee. But I didn’t want another coffee! “Maybe my life is not entirely about what I want,” I reminded myself.
I stood in line.
Clerks were running everywhere, and many different people were taking orders. Again, I wasn’t surprised when I got the same clerk because this felt like a God appointment. Ask him about his church, God seemed to nudge as I ordered coffee.
“Hey, you said you are a Christian. Have you found a good group of people at a church around here to belong to?”
I wasn’t surprised when he said no. Theology that revolved around the type and frequency of product he smoked, the topic of our earlier conversation, didn’t seem completely orthodox. “Even though my mom is an atheist, I used to go to church. But I don’t have a ride right now,” he said as he gave me my change.
Again, a nudge from the Lord.
Do you have a car? God seemed to ask me, tongue in cheek. I offered him a ride to our thriving church. He declined, and I presumed there were deeper reasons why He wasn’t in a church community.
I walked away, carrying a bagel I was too full to eat.
Use me, Lord. There is so much food here at Your table. I pray this young man’s hunger pains will be satisfied one day.
May he truly know he is accepted and thus seek his next step in a relationship with You and other believers.
May he find another who can lead him to the feast.
Teach us more clearly to scatter a bounty of crumbs from Your voice, and with Your love, we pray.
After gabbing it up with my teenage daughter as they waited in line that day, the stranger grabbed my arm and whispered, “You did a great job with her. She is so kind. Well done, Mama.”
After I picked my ego up off the floor, where it has been the last two decades, trampled by societal expectations for a productive life (Hint – Homeschooling is not a candidate in this employment contest), I pinned my self-esteem back onto my chest, and thought, “Yes! You are right! She IS amazing!”
But the thing is, she didn’t come out of the womb this way
Even after 10,893,231 conversations in which I turned blue in the face and explained how to fit into society (i.e. NOT by wearing pasta in our hair when in a restaurant), she STILL wasn’t that easy to be around.
The POINT is that homeschooled kids are often well-adjusted because:
(1) Parents KNOW what is going on, in terms of that naughty behaviour we would rather not deal with, but that we have to address because we are spending 10,000 minutes (almost all the time) with them again this week,
(2) Parents can’t ship them off on a bus every morning, even BECAUSE they know what is going on (They would say “Thank God” if they would go on a bus SOMETIMES), and,
(3) Parents are confronted day after day, hour after hour, minute after long minute some days with the FACT that they are spending INORDINATE amounts of time with unsanctified humans.
Worse, parents are confronted with the reality of OUR need for sanctification, and this is humiliating for us. So, we run to God and beg for help on our knees BECAUSE we are ALL such desperate losers. But the sweat and tears of our prayers eventually sanctify our kids BECAUSE they receive this message of grace through our lives, as God sanctifies us.
Translation: We ADMIT we parents are losers, and then we gently reveal the truth to our child that she, too, did the wrong thing again when she smacked that kid on the head with her firetruck because she wanted HIS cupcake too.
But this grace in our lives, this deep understanding of our need for forgiveness, softens our speech a little.
do not provoke your children . . . by the way you treat them
And this broccoli seasoned with the melted cheese of our own desperate need for forgiveness becomes a food our kids can swallow.
And we both grow a little more today, our plant’s roots grasping a little more of the water that truly satisfies, and so fruit in our lives and our kid’s lives will begin to grow.
It’s a law of nature.
So let’s not allow ourselves to get fatigued doing good. At the right time we will harvest a good crop if we don’t give up, or quit.
And when they compliment you again for having kind kids?
You can sit back, relax, take a sip of a cold summer drink and know that the path of life you chose was a good one, which is bearing fruit in your life, too.
Pick some fruit from the tree of your life and enjoy it today.
Well done, Mom and Dad.
God sees your investment in your kids. His praise that you followed His lead is the food that truly satisfies. Nothing good comes without sweat and handing over our fears to God.
How are you choosing to invest your life?
Why does it always have to start with trust?
Was that a whisper or a nudge from God as we live our lives in the mundane ordinary? Will we listen? He speaks, and it can seem so small and easy to ignore.
Will we obey?
The Father trusts those with big things to those who have been faithful in the small stuff.
Make some for yourself, too, God seemed to whisper to me that day several years ago. God had been nudging me to make fleece pants with my kids and their friends. Now, he seemed to be nudging to make fleece pants for me, too.
So, I was online ordering fleece fabric.
A particular type of fabric seemed to stand out to me as joy bubbled from the inside. I bought the fabric with the golden retrievers stamped all over them (true story). I made my pants.
And now, I will try to convey something challenging to articulate.
These doggy fleece pants are like a key opening a door between another culture and me. Once, someone exclaimed jubilantly that she loved my pants and then recounted a surprising quantity of her life story as I stood listening, stunned and speechless, my to-go coffee cup waiting in my hand mid-air for her to finish. This kind of thing happens often.
It happened today.
The teenage guy working at Tim Horton’s spent five minutes before he took my order telling me he loved my pants, told me a story about his dog, and then spoke with the lady next to him about whether she liked dogs or cats better.
I listened mutely and smiled.
My table was laden with crumbs, so I asked for a napkin to clean it. The young man leaned in to confide that they are understaffed but insisted on cleaning the table for me. As he wiped, he said, “People really surprise me sometimes.”
“How do you mean?” I asked.
He was quiet, so I offered, “You mean how people are always making messes?”
He nodded.
I wondered what I could say in the several seconds left of our interaction that could be like a crumb to feed him just a little. “Well, it’s a good thing that God forgives us after we create our messes.” I looked innocently away, waiting for the metaphor to nourish his soul.
The crumb nourished, and his hunger pangs caused him to sputter forcefully.
“I can’t believe people don’t know I’m a Christian,” he exclaimed. “I don’t smoke.” My brain was overheating as I was trying to deduce the connection between not smoking and being a Christian.
He was in his own world, however, and felt the need, for some reason, to be honest with me, a perfect stranger.
“Well, I do smoke weed.”
Where do we go from here, God? Clearly, he was being nourished, somehow, by the crumbs from Your table. What do I say in the 30 nanoseconds before he departs?
I settled on, “Well, if we can truly understand that God loves us, that’s the important part, right?”
He stared at me, fumbled, and then dropped his cleaning cloth. His hat fell off as he bent over to pick up the fabric. He stared at me a moment before picking that up, too.
He was deep in thought.
Eye contact one more time before he walked away.
Was there a nanosecond of redemption, a glimpse of light lit for a moment, so that You redeemed this ordinary day for the clerk at Tim Horton’s, God? May this generation find messy tables wherever they go, we pray. And may the crumbs somehow, by your grace, be multiplied to nourish the soul.
There is more, there is more, there is more, He is saying to the teenage boy working at Tim Hortons.
I’ll continue this story another time.
We were discussing the more profound things of life, unearthing the cultural assumptions that keep us in bondage.
And this is what she said: “Homeschooling gave me the confidence to try new things.”
She said it matter-of-factly, confidently, as if she believed it. She was homeschooled, and then homeschooled her kids. So she had many years to mull over homeschooling.
I was struck by her confidence and creativity to try new things, but she brushed me off, attributing these traits to being homeschooled. For example, she is a self-taught photographer and took these photos of our daughter, assuring us that her red dress would “pop” in the pictures at this location. She was right.
She explained her homeschooling philosophy to me as her camera clicked, “When you are homeschooled, there aren’t as many kids hovering over you, making fun of you for trying something different. So I felt free to try new things.”
She painted her family’s camping trailer with flowers and a mountain scene and then was commissioned by her city to paint a mural.
“I’m mostly self-taught,” she explains, but she’s having fun, exploring the talents God endowed her with, instead of burying them in fear, as so many of us accidentally do.
“I was afraid I might disappoint you . . .”
(Jesus) was furious. ‘That’s a terrible way to live!”
But we’d rarely seen another way.
She reminds me of my kids, who are also homeschooled.
For example, today, our family is in Salt Lake City, Utah, attending a “Reborn” doll conference.
Our 15-year-old daughter had the confidence and time to explore the God-given gifts endowed to her, too
Last week, she sold one of her dolls overseas for over $400.
“I didn’t know you could do that!” I exclaimed from my public-schooled worldview.
She didn’t know either.
But she’s not afraid to try.
Our other daughter wrote and self-published a novel by the time she was 15 years old.
What would we do if we weren’t afraid to try?
I would keep writing even though you may laugh at me. How is God calling you to awaken? What do you imagine the next step is on the life adventure He has mapped out for you?
Ready to take another step, friend?
Let’s hold hands because I’m afraid, too.
I prayed to the Lord, and he answered me. He freed me from all my fears.
The definition of courage is NOT “Not being afraid” but “Doing it anyway.”
What is God whispering to you?
What’s the next step?
Let’s go!
Restoring Life 