Grit 'n' Grace: The Podcast for Highly Sensitive Christian Women

In the first of the Holiday Break episodes, Cheri and Amy tease out the difficult issues of holiday expectations and traditions.

How do we decide what's worth keeping and what needs to go?

They come up with key questions to ask and a permission slip to enable you to move away from holiday dread and move toward more delight.

Cheri and Amy process lessons learned from Lucille Zimmerman about play and grief.

There are choices to be made in both: Will we choose the bonding play provides? Will we let time soften and redeem?

We've pinned negative labels on some very human processes like play and grieving. Play is often consider slacking and grief is sometimes seen as a pity party.

Lucille Zimmerman, author of Renewed, explains why both are essential to the full life and how they serve as powerful tools to creativity and healing.

Cheri and Amy process last week's interview with Sheila Gregoire through the lens of conflict and no-black-and-white circumstances.

It turns out that messy doesn't mean ugly. There is redemption and positive personal change that happens when we face the natural complications of life instead of ducking them.

For most reforming perfectionists, peace seems like the ultimate goal no matter how it's attained.

Sheila Wray Gregoire shares that true peace is often attained through painful conflict. She helps us to understand the difference between conflict and fighting.

Cheri and Amy discuss the hard but important work of developing new ways to develop greater happiness. As they examine their own happiness habits (and their opposites!), gratitude, hope, and choosing the positive emerge as ways to break out of the rut of our default to unhappy.

Jennifer Dukes Lee talks about ideas from her newest book, The Happiness Dare, that challenge our church girl preconceptions about happiness.

She helps Cheri and Amy answer questions we all have like:

• Does God want me to be happy?
• Do I have to act happy when I'm sad?
• Why do I find happiness in things that other people don't?

It's really ok—listen and increase your happiness quotient today!

What do you do when someone's perfectionism is driving you around the bend? When the relationship is about to end?

Valuing perfection over people shatters relationships, so Cheri and Amy tease out solutions for being on both the giving and receiving end of relationship-eroding perfection.

Failure can seem like a total loss. An unredeemable mess. A sum total of zero.

But what if we redefine failure? What if we start to recognize the growth opportunities in our failures?

Amy and Cheri talk with Michele Cushatt about her encounters with failure and how it's changed her view of perfectionism. Don't miss her rich wisdom!

God works His good plan in the midst of very imperfect circumstances and in the lives of flawed people. Cheri and Amy discuss the struggle of embracing failure in the reality of our messiness. Join with them and grab onto the hope of a Perfect God who redeems our failures!