Reading Small Talk Podcast with Amy Julia Becker

I think about all the ways in which all three of our children are a means of grace in my life. Teaching me how to live with joy, with gratitude, with grace.Amazing Penny.Amazing William.Amazing Marilee.Amazing grace, how sweet the sound.

Stories of forgiveness in my life are often mundane. Forgiving myself after I snap at the kids yet another time. Forgiving them when they look at me with meanness behind their eyes. My kids don't fully understand the meaning of the word forgiveness....

Love for my children may begin and even end with sentiment, but the middle place of patience and dirt and sweat and kindness and wet beds—the middle place is filled with action and hard work. With agape. With something that comes from God and returns us...

Exhaustion filled our house. I was close to giving up on prayer altogether. Instead, I started to pray for laughter. For a long time, in fact, this was my only consistent prayer for our family. Laughter comes as an invitation to look for God's presence...

In the Beatitudes, Jesus singles out the people we would least expect to call blessed. They are the ones who know themselves to be dependent on God. The ones who don't have it all together. If true happiness, as Jesus tells us, is being out of control,...

I often need to slow down in order to listen to God. And while the past several months have forced many of us to slow down, am I listening? In today's episode I talk about how my children taught me to have listening ears, not a listening defined by...

We’ve endured a season of waiting as a nation these past few months. Waiting for stores and schools and churches to open up. Waiting for hugs and handshakes. Waiting for “normal” life to return. Today’s episode describes a few of the surgeries Penny...

This episode isn’t really about sin. It’s about mistakes. And limits. And crying out for what we need. And the ways we can understand our belovedness once we understand our neediness. It’s about all the opportunities every day gives us to admit our...

Is it even possible to pray if you are the parent of small children? In this chapter, Amy Julia remembers the way prayer unraveled and came back together again as she moved from a time of quiet, devotional prayer to the more unruly prayer of little...

Have you ever looked in the mirror and felt old? Have you noticed the lines on your face or the extra roll around your middle? This chapter explores that all-too-common experience. Instead of looking with critical eyes at ourselves, what if we looked...