What do Dobie pads (kitchen sponges) have to do with talents? Do even I have talent? How do we use our talents? Are there consequences of we don't use them? So many questions for a very important topic in our lives. God made us ALL with specific talents on purpose, He knew exactly what He was doing. While we don't have the same ones (which is a good thing!), we all have something God designed us to do. It's time to start figuring out how to use them instead of just hiding them away.

To better her marriage, Jenn decided to understand herself better. After struggling with being mad at God for making her different than her type A friends, she realized that her strengths are unique to her and have purpose. God made her this way with intention. Now her goal is to help others on their quest of studying themselves and finding ways to use the talents God gave them.

Relationships are hard! And in this social media driven world, I feel we've lost the art of making and maintaining them. The holidays especially bring to light old wounds revisited, unrealistic expectations, high emotions of all kinds, or elevate the ache of our loneliness. All of these can bring about pain and friction and make us want to retreat away from all things related to people. That is exactly what Satan wants us to do: be alone and vulnerable. Despite all of that, I'd like to argue that relationships are worth the fight; even how we are created to be. This episode will hopefully help you start to change your perspective on how you view them.

God wants us to take the time to remember His faithfulness. So much so that Leviticus 23 talks about seven different annual Feasts of Remembrance. Why is it so important to do this? Because when we take the time to remember God's faithfulness in the past, it gives us the strength and the courage to trust His faithfulness in the future! This episode is a summary of God's faithfulness in the past seven years in our family. It's a story of how God took the pain of infertility and job loss and turned it into a journey changing our hears and lives forever.

When I ask people how they're doing, the answer is so often "busy" or "tired." In our culture we feel that we need to have so much on our plates, we need to go and go and go. Needing rest seems to have become viewed as weakness, the proverbial "I'll sleep when I'm dead." But that is not what God intended for our lives! He designed us to rest, He put rest in the plan from creation. Even Jesus knew he needed rest and took those breaks. He still managed to save the world! This episode is an encouragement to take a look, see where we are sacrificing parts of ourselves to the gods of busy and tired, and to also see where God provides our rest and strength when we can't get it from anywhere else.

Why is identity such a huge issue? In our culture we are often told through the media to "just be you" or "find yourself." We need to make sure we anchor our identity into something solid: Jesus. We use veils/masks to hide or distract from the identities that we are ashamed of. But Jesus lived and died to take that veil away and replace it with the identity that he created us to have, in His image. The Bible is full of so many promises of what we get to identify with, as new creations in Christ.

In our culture, finding identity is extremely important. We look to find it in relationships, talents, titles, and ideals. This puts us at a high risk for losing our identity instead. We often look at ourselves and think "I'm not enough." But we're looking in the wrong spot. JESUS is enough, and that's what matters. One of the biggest and best parts about finding our identity in Christ is that he is the one thing we just can never lose. If our identity is protected and defined by him, it can never fall into identity theft!

The key to trusting God's faithfulness in our future is by looking at what He's done in the past. When God led the Israelite rescue from Egypt, He also proved His superiority to any other "gods." Even though the road seemed impossible and the Israelites felt betrayed, God still worked to not only rescue them but destroy the very past that was trying to destroy them. All this to prove that God keeps His promises, all we have to do is stay calm and watch Him work.

I am not an expert in this area, however I also feel that the Bible is not silent on the...

An introduction to the next three episodes, which all have a similar theme: Is it OK to Question God? The short answer is yes, but we can't just question, we need to listen for the answers. In this series, we will discuss God's faithfulness through those deep and painful valleys, see a personal story of the journey to find God through trials, and to figure out if God is still good even when the answer is no.