Kids love visiting the zoo, but what if we could connect what they see to scripture through these wild animals? By helping our children engage with their senses, they can come to realize God, though He is invisible, is MORE real than what they do see.

Valerie Ellis is a mom and teacher who understands how tricky it can be to help kids discover and develop a vibrant, authentic faith amidst life’s many challenges, which is why she is passionate about helping families find simple, everyday ways to engage kids in natural conversations, fantastic children’s books, and fun activities centered around faith and love.

Author of Wild Faith: 52 Amazing Animals that Point to Our Great God as well as others, she’s a former public school teacher and a member of Texas Library Association, Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI), and The MomCo (MOPS). Additionally, she supports her children’s book habit by writing grants for nonprofits in Houston, Texas where she lives with her husband, Josh, and their two boys.

Grab your FREE sample of the book and a fun activity book as a download here!

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Faith requires us to see differently. To help us understand this concept in a more concrete way, we’re talking with a good friend of mine, Dannah Jo, who has learned and continues to practice this through photography.

Dannah Jo is a Lifestyle and Wedding Photographer based in Oklahoma who strives to capture authentic emotion and connection. She loves taking a documentary approach to her photography and is passionate about using her artistry to tell a story through photos. You can connect with her at www.dannahjophoto.com

In the Old Testament, they used stones to remember God’s faithfulness. We believe photos can serve as modern-day stone of remembrance to help point us back to God’s nearness, His goodness and His faithfulness through the generations. We want to help you practice this, so check out my stories on social media this week to enter to win a free photography GIVEAWAY so you can be reminded of God’s faithfulness in your life.

Today, we’re talking about:

• Feeling God’s love in our relationships
• How photos can be used to remember God’s faithfulness
• Learning to “see” differently through the lens of a camera

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How can we see an invisible God? It’s not just a question from young hearts but one we may wrestle with ourselves. Though we cannot see God, we can see evidence of Him and His love for us and evidence of the truth of His Word all around us. God îș teaching us through His creation, we just forget to look for Him. 

My friend and author of The Growing Season: A Year of Down-on-the-Farm Devotions, Sarah Philpott, is joining to share what she has learned from living with her family on their cattle farm in Tennessee.

Sarah Philpott, Ph.D, is the ECPA Award-nominated author of Loved Baby: 31 Devotions Helping You Grieve and Cherish Your Child After Pregnancy Loss. Her other books include: The Growing Season: A Year of Down-on-the-Farm Devotions and her two children’s books: Moo, Moo Nap, Nap and Wake Up Little Seed. Sarah lives in Tennessee on a cattle farm where she raises her four children and is farm wife to her high-school sweetheart.

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How can we see God? How can we see Love? Can we see Him and learn more about Him through His creation surrounding us? Today, my friend, Susie Lipps, who has a background in theology from Fuller Seminary, a passion for leadership and after being “banished” to wine country, her eyes have been opened to understand the Love of the Father and Son for us in a deeper way.

Susie Lipps (MAGL, Fuller Seminary) is a missionary kid from Honduras where she lived in a mud hut and went to boarding school. After God sent she and her husband to wine country, Susie created a wine-country retreat for leaders called Conversations in the Vineyard. She loves speaking on leadership principles from the vineyard, women in leadership, emerging leaders and telling stories of God’s faithfulness. She is fluent in Spanish and loves coffee (or wine) accompanied by good conversations and yummy food. Also check out the Conversations in the Vineyard blog.

Susie is walking us through the passage of John 15, where Jesus tells his disciples, “I am the true vine, and my Father is the gardener.” She brings key insight from her background in Bible translation to help uncover misconceptions as well as context she’s learned and observed in the vineyard to help us see this passage of scripture more clearly. 

She’s helped bring this truth to life for me in a new way and I pray your love for scripture is deepened through this conversation too. 

Today, we’re talking about:

• A field trip to wine country - discovering truth in the vineyard
• What it means to abide with Christ
• Trading fear for the invitation to deep and loving intimacy with our Creator

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"... that is what life is really all about - our relationship with God. So it makes sense we will see God in everything when we learn to look for God in everything.

And that, my friend, is what I want us to practice together. Because I want to be us to be a people who are green thumbs, not necessarily with plants but with our faith. I want us to be keen observers, taking in every opportunity to see and experience the wonder of God's love in everything around us everywhere we go. I want the blinders to be lifted from our eyes and for us to learn to see what is hidden in plain sight - the great, great love of the Father for all of us."

For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities - his eternal power and divine nature - have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse. - Romans 1:20

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Growing up, I remember watching Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. If you’re not familiar with this book or movie, it’s about 4 teenage girls whose stories and lives are all so different, and though they are forced to spend their summer apart, a pair of jeans somehow fits each one, though their figures are as different as their stories. Reflecting on our unexpected friendship, I think I’ve found my own version of this Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. Our stories, backgrounds, ages, hurts, habits and hang-ups are all so very different, but our common thread is not denim. It’s the decision to surrender these cares to Christ and walk with others who are doing the same.

As we practice engaging our sense of hearing to experience God, we’re focusing on hearing God as we share vulnerable conversations in safe, Christ-centered community. I’m truly honored to bring you into a circle with a few of the voices who have shared their stories with me. Today, a couple of the ladies I have had the pleasure of meeting through Celebrate Recovery whom I now call dear friends, Kayla and DeLana, are joining us.

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Hard times are no respecter of persons, we all experience these, and like my friend, Sarah Freymuth points out, there are no instructions for times like these and no platitudes or forced positivity will bring us the peace we crave. Sarah is the author of All the Hard Things: 50 Days Through the Valley and is offering truth to help reinforce our faith in God’s intimate goodness. She writes:

“When we stare into a cavern of grief from the loss of a beloved one, or a medical diagnosis with a wicked track history, we’re faced with a faith that either holds up or unfolds, collapses or expands. It can get muddy when the platitudes we’ve held don’t seem to hold up under the sheer force of what’s threatening to knock us down.”

Sarah Freymuth is the content and storytelling manager for Fellowship of Christian Athletes, and she writes for numerous platforms, including Proverbs 31 Ministries, YouVersion, (in)Courage, and She Reads Truth. Sarah loves unearthing God’s goodness in places that don’t feel good, with a heart especially for faith and mental health. She enjoys a simple Wisconsin life by Lake Michigan with her husband, Eric, and Beaglier pup, Alfie Hitchcock. Connect with her at SarahFreymuth.com and on Instagram at @sfreymuthawake.

Today, we’re talking about:

• Hearing God through other believers

What if the theology you believed as a kid doesn’t hold water for you now? What do you do then? Kristen Neighbarger is joining us and sharing her journey to faith and finding a sturdy hope, the kind you can build a life on.

Kristen is a recovering fundamentalist who believes that truth, faith, and the sovereignty of God will survive deconstruction and are critical components of healthy reconstruction. She loves literary analysis and reading scripture with an analyst's eye. She lives in rural Ohio with her husband Russ, daughter Kate, faithful dog Lucy, and her grandma's cat Butters. When her parents aren't snowbirds, they join the party in their mother-in-law's suite, affectionately referred to as Cabin B.

Writing weekly on her blog and social media channels, Kristen helps survivors of church hurt, religious trauma, and spiritual abuse heal and find peace in their faith again. She balances deep dives into scripture with narratives from her own life and church experiences, always connecting with her reader and making faith, the bible, and her teaching relatable and applicable to today’s world. In her book, Breathing Again: Finding Peace While Navigating Faith Reconstruction, Kristen guides her readers through their reconstruction journeys while sharing the details of her own. 

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If you’ve wondered if God loves you, if life is worth living, if God has a purpose for your life, Johnnie wants you to know the answer is yes, for he’s asked these same questions too. His is a powerful story of how God pursues us. His reckless love, which we know leaves the 99 in pursuit of the one, even when that means riding through a rolled over humvee with him, visiting you in a hospital when he were under intense isolation, sitting with him while he grieved deep loss and questioned the meaning of life.

And God is pursuing YOU, too. 

While serving in the U.S. Army, Johnnie Williams had a terrible humvee accident, leaving him paralyzed and unable to walk. He eventually recovered from his injuries and competed in the 2016 Paralympics in Rio. Through all of his ups and downs, he can now see how God was with him all along - and drawing him near.

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What impact could a whisper hold? Do we dare listen to this whisper we’re hearing? My friend, Kathy Izard, admits, “I worried that listening might mean making a huge mistake by veering off my carefully constructed life plan. It turned out, however, that listening would not be a detour but rather my destiny.”

Today, we are practicing engaging our sense of hearing to hear God in the quiet but insistent whispers and tugs on our hearts. If you caught my 12 Books of 2025 Recommendation, you may be just as excited as I am today to get to hear from my friend and author of The Hundred Story Home and Trust the Whisper - Kathy Izard.

Kathy Izard is an award-winning author and speaker who helped bring transformation to Charlotte in homelessness, housing and mental health. Her first of five books, The Hundred Story Home, received a Christopher Award for outstanding inspirational nonfiction. In Trust the Whisper, Kathy shares compelling true stories of twenty people who listened to their “whispers” and the extraordinary events that followed. Kathy inspires people to be change-makers in their communities.

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