Tag: community

  • Preparing Our Hearts for Joy and Love

    Advent invites us to open our hearts to the joy and love revealed in the arrival of Jesus. Joy is not always loud or exuberant. Often it is a quiet strength, a steady gladness rooted in the nearness of Christ. Love is not simply a warm feeling but the very character of God poured into…

  • Preparing Our Hearts for Peace

    Advent invites us to pause in the middle of a season that often feels hurried, noisy, and full. While the world around us moves quickly toward celebration, many of us carry a quiet longing for peace. Our minds feel scattered, our schedules stretch thin, and our hearts grow tired beneath the weight of what this…

  • Preparing Our Hearts for Hope

    Advent invites us into a season of waiting, listening, and watching for the God who comes near. Hope is not a fragile wish or a thin optimism about the future. Hope is the confident assurance that God is who He says He is and that He will do what He has promised. For many of…

  • Surrendered Seasons, Eternal Seeds

    There is a moment in the sunflower’s life when it stops turning its face toward the sun. Its petals fade, its bright crown softens, and its head begins to bow low to the earth. This is the stage known as senescence, the final phase of the sunflower’s life cycle. It begins only after the seeds…

  • Beholding the Light, Becoming the Light

    There is a moment in the life of a sunflower when all the quiet, hidden work beneath the surface begins to reveal itself. After months of rooting, stretching, strengthening, and turning toward the sun, the flower enters a phase called anthesis. It is the season when the sunflower fully blooms. Its face is open. Its…

  • When the Soul Forgets to Turn

    Every sunflower begins its life by learning to turn toward the sun. In its young and tender stages, it follows the light faithfully from east to west, letting the warmth guide its growth and strengthen its stem. But there are times when a sunflower becomes weighed down by weather, wind, or the sheer heaviness of…

  • Following the Son

    There is something quietly beautiful about a sunflower’s daily rhythm. At dawn it lifts its face toward the light, and then, without hurry or strain, it follows the sun as it moves across the sky. Scientists call this heliotropism, but the spiritual parallel is what captures me because underneath that gentle turning is a truth…

  • Preparing the Soil

    (Matthew 13:3–9, 18–23) While preparing to lead a women’s retreat up in New Hampshire – a gathering themed around sunflowers – I’ve found that God has just as much to show me about my own heart as He does about the beautiful plants we’re learning from. Sunflowers may be known for their bright faces and…

  • Gather

    Do you long for a safe space? Connections with other women who love Jesus and a place where you can come to engage with others without fear or shame? A space to be heard and to listen? Where people ask good questions and wait patiently for your answers?  If that sounds like something you crave, you…

  • Prayer Moves Mountains and Changes Towns

    Three and a half years ago if someone asked me if I believe prayer “worked” I would have answered yes. I would have done so honestly; acting in faith on the thing I knew to be true through scripture. Today, however, I KNOW that what the Bible says in James 5:16 is TRUE. The faithful…