When a friend asked me to speak with teen girls at a workshop promoting purity I declined As a teenage runaway I struggled and had decades of scars caused by my immorality After getting married and losing our first child to a miscarriage I thought God was punishing me for my past sins When I finally surrendered my life to Christ at the age of thirty I confessed my sins and repented repeatedly Still guilt and shame consumed me How could I share about God rsquo s grace when I couldn rsquo t even bring myself to fully receive the [... more]

In my dad was diagnosed with a neurological disease that robbed him of his memory speech and control over body movements He became bedridden in and continues to be cared for by my mom at home The beginning of his illness was a dark time I was fearful I knew nothing about caring for a sick person and I was anxious about finances and my mom rsquo s health nbsp The words of Lamentations helped me get up many mornings when the light was as gray as the state of my heart ldquo Because of the Lord rsquo s great [... more]

I dropped to my knees and let my tears fall to the floor ldquo God why aren rsquo t you taking care of me rdquo I cried It was during the COVID- pandemic in I rsquo d been laid-off for almost a month and something had gone wrong with my unemployment application I hadn rsquo t received any money yet and on top of that the stimulus check the US government had promised hadn rsquo t arrived Deep down I trusted that God would work out everything I believed He truly loved me and would take care of me but [... more]

I can never recapture the splendor that was our daughter Melissa Fading from my memory are those wonderful times when we watched her joyfully playing high school volleyball And it rsquo s sometimes hard to remember the shy smile of contentment that crossed her face when we were doing family activities Her death at age seventeen dropped a curtain on the joy of her presence In the book of Lamentations Jeremiah rsquo s words show he understood that the heart can be punctured ldquo My splendor is gone rdquo he said ldquo and all that I had hoped from the [... more]