On today's episode: "Listen, if God closes a door, you really don’t want what’s on the other side of it. If He closed it, there is nothing on the other side that’s for us. We try to sit at tables and with people we’ve been rejected from and consider it a loss, but if God shut that door because that’s a table Jesus would’ve flipped, is it actually a loss?"

On today's episode: "Who wins when we decide that our story is not good enough or our past is too tarnished to qualify us for Kingdom work?"

On today's episode: "One month after, her youngest brother very unexpectedly passed away. One month after that I got the first initial headache that would end up staying with me 24 hours of every day for the next 2 years. That headache would be just one of many awful life altering symptoms. It felt like we couldn’t exhale for fear that the moment we let the breath out something else might sweep us away."

On today's episode: "As followers of Christ, we’ve been commanded to look different than the world. We live different for the promise of the coming of an upside down Kingdom marked with love, generosity, forgiveness, grace, and mercy. We have our part to play in this, but unlike our goals we aren’t on our own to solely do the work."

On today's episode: "There should always be a sense of urgency when it comes to getting our stories out, but the panic that we’re not doing enough has no place. That panic is not a far reach to me putting all the work and all of the burden on me alone, as if I could ever have enough power or influence to do any of that on my own. No, it’s Jesus. It’s all Jesus."

On today's episode: "After three years, I heard the words from a doctor that I’d longed to hear. “You’ve had this your entire life.” This was the final answer to the long list of questions that plagued us while I suffered from a mystery illness for nearly two years. We had a diagnosis, but even in that diagnosis it opened Pandora’s box of wanting to understand so deeply the root cause as a hope to ward off a relapse. How could a person go their entire life and then suddenly be struck with a debilitating illness that doctors couldn’t explain or offer durable treatment to solve?"

On today's episode: "The last set of text messages they’d sent to me over two years ago had been awful, abusive and unrelenting, at a time when I was at my lowest. Text messages that came out of nowhere and for no reason other than to hurt me. But now, they were hurting, deeply, and sometimes kind, supportive words with a whisper of “you’re not alone” can be just the thing we need when we hurt the most."

On today's episode: "Each time one of these trials rendered a verdict of suspicious or unbelievable, I found myself beginning to doubt my own experience. Was I making it up? Was there some part of me that wanted to be sick? Maybe I was just anxious and this was a manifestation of some deep-seated mental illness. But then at the root of everything I knew myself well enough to know that none of that was true. I was truly suffering and it was only a matter of time before we found the right person or team of people that knew enough about the right set of things to unlock all of the understanding we needed."

On today's episode: "Over and over he cried and wedged himself into a corner making it all but impossible to pull him out to wrap him in a hug so he could feel the depths of our love and security. All pleading was met with deaf ears as he continued to cry and speak the anxious and panicked thoughts racing through his head. “How do I know it will hurt less than an ant bite? How do I know it will only hurt for a very short time?!!! HOW DO I KNOW?!!” His cries reaching crescendo as I fought with the reality that even after sixteen years of parenting, I was at a complete loss as to what to do."

On today's episode: "But God. He’s just different. He is not like us and even on our best day, on our own, we cannot love like this. Maybe we get close, but even still, I just don’t think we really have it in us to love like this. I know people who’ve gone their whole lives never really knowing what it must be like to be loved in a faithful way, and so can any of us even begin to unlock what this must truly mean to be loved with a faithful love that endures forever?"