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“For I will pour water upon him that is thirsty, and floods upon the dry ground.”  Isaiah 44:3

Holy Spirit, be poured out upon those who do not know You and upon those who have no desire for You yet. Chase down the dead in sin and raise them to living faith. Draw near to the brokenhearted, and come tenderly to those who have grown disillusioned, offended, or weary in soul.

Be poured out upon the dry bones within us, the hidden places where death still clings and old sorrow has not yet lifted. Be poured out upon the Word we have heard, studied, and prayed, and yet have somehow kept at a distance from our deepest places. Lay Your hand upon our barren fields where nothing seems able to grow. We are the dry earth, and You are the river. Amen.

I am like the mighty cypress; from Me comes your fruit. Hosea 14:8 

God is aware of the language barrier that exists between the spiritual realm and the physical. Because we are earth-bound and our ability to comprehend His greatness and glory is compromised by our mortality, He is willing to tell us what He is like in terms we can understand. He is quick, throughout Scripture, to say….“I am like a _____________.” He employs the use of illustrations and metaphors that are common to our everyday life. 

What is the significance of God saying that He is like the cypress tree? He is telling me something about His strength and permanence. The cypress tree is renowned for its durability. The doors of St. Peter’s in Rome are made of cypress and even after 1200 years, they show no decay. The cypress groves of Lebanon are well known and referred to in the book of Ecclesiastes as ‘trees which grow up to the clouds.’ 

And then He says something even more intimate: “from Me comes your fruit.”

Whatever fruit in me is alive with beauty and built to last does not rise from striving, but from His life flowing through mine. It comes from Him. What He builds in me will carry His nature. What He reveals will not decay with the passing of years. What He births in my surrendered life carries the scent of eternity on it.

I know what it is to lose sight of that. There have been seasons when my confidence in the eternal was shaken. Loss was stitched into my story, and at times I limped through my faith more than I walked in it. But God has been teaching me to lift my eyes again, to stop grieving as though decay gets the final word. He is inviting me not merely to survive, but to live with young-hearted confidence—to believe that what comes from Him in me is not doomed to wither, and that the deepest things He has spoken over my life are still alive.

Lord, You are everlasting—unchanged by time, untouched by decay. Let my life be rooted so deeply in You that whatever grows from me bears the mark of Your strength and the beauty of what endures. Amen

I have recurring dreams that take me back to school, and often, something is wrong. I’ve forgotten an assignment. Forgotten the combination to my locker. Forgotten to study for a test. The dream always carries the same emotional weight. I am unprepared.

At times, that same theme followed me into ministry. One dream in particular has stayed with me.

In it, I woke up one morning relieved to have an open day ahead. But then I glanced at the calendar on my desk and felt my stomach drop. I was scheduled to speak that afternoon at a church several hours from home. I had completely forgotten. There was no time to prepare. I threw on clothes, grabbed one of the Bibles from my desk, and hurried out the door. As I drove, I remembered the topic I had been assigned. I was to describe the Word of God using three words that began with the letter P.

I arrived just in time. I had fifteen minutes before the program would begin. I slipped into a side room, hoping to gather myself, pray, and sketch out a bare-bones outline. But when I reached into my bag for my Bible, I realized that I had grabbed a Bible with the tiniest print. Even with glasses, it would be difficult to read, but then I realized I had forgotten my glasses, too. Everything in me said, Oh no, this is a disaster.

The chairman of the event came toward me, smiling warmly, and said how much she was looking forward to hearing what I would share. I smiled back, but inwardly I thought, Me too.

There was nothing left to do but surrender. I walked to the front, sat down, and felt something unexpected settle over me. Peace. I realized that I was being driven back to the one place I most love to live ~ where I listen for the Spirit. What had been laid up quietly over the years would rise like water from a deep spring.

And it did. The first word came without effort.

The Word of God is priceless.

Then the second word came.

The Word of God is precise.

Then the third word surfaced.

The Word of God is personal.

When I woke up, I realized that some of the best sermons are not the overmanaged ones, polished to perfection and controlled from beginning to end. They are the ones delivered in complete dependence on the Spirit. Rivers of Living Water rise from the deep and saturate the parched landscapes of desperate hearts.

Holy Spirit, it’s not about my emptiness, but Your fullness. Not about my panic, but Your river. Amen

When I was four years old, I had a red pair of play glasses. I would put them on and declare that I could read any book. I couldn’t actually read a word, of course, but that never stopped me. I told stories for hours, believing those little glasses carried some kind of power. In truth, the glasses had nothing to do with it. The charm of it lay in the freedom of a child who had not yet learned to be embarrassed by her gift.

But because I was being raised in a world that felt traditional, measured, and reserved, that kind of bold imaginative expression seemed a little too much. I remember being teased about those red glasses, and in my child-heart I translated it as rejection. I threw the glasses away and pulled in the reigns to my free spirit. I morphed into someone more mainstream. I silenced what was wild and bright and God-breathed in me.

And yet God.

I had a dream a few years ago that has never left me. I was walking alone, and instead of staying on the main road, I veered off to wander where I pleased. Just beyond a stone wall was a large open field. Then suddenly, there it was—an open grave. Inside were the full remains of a dead man. I gasped and asked Jesus, “Who is this?”

He answered, “He’s my child.”

I said, “It’s too late for him, isn’t it?”

And then He said, “Wait. What am I teaching you? What are you to do when you enter a place full of dead men’s bones?”

I answered, “Speak the Gospel to the bones and let You breathe over them.”

“Right,” He said.

I have never forgotten that. Daughters of Promise is the field God carved out for me. It’s the place where I speak to bones:

~ To women who are technically alive but feel dead inside.

~ To women who have been functioning, serving, smiling, enduring, while something essential has gone silent beneath the surface.

~ To women who buried their red glasses years ago and have almost forgotten the sound of their own God-given voice.

What are your red glasses? Where have you traded your gifting for acceptability? Where have you surrendered your authentic self in exchange for belonging, approval, or safety? Where did you begin editing what God wrote, toning down what He made vivid, burying what He called good?

God is not intimidated by the distance between who you are now and who He created you to be. He knows exactly where that girl is buried. He knows how to call her forth. He knows how to reveal, validate, and strengthen the daughter He imagined before the foundation of the world. He is not asking you to become someone else. He is asking you to simply come alive.

Lord, help me stand up straight and let you rebuild what fear dismantled. Amen

When Jesus saw him and knew he had been lying there a long time, he said to him, “Do you want to be healed?”  John 5:6

A man lay beside the Pool of Bethesda for thirty-eight years, unable to walk. When Jesus walked up to him, He asked: “Do you want to be well?” That can sound strange until we remember how costly healing can be. For this man to be made whole, it would mean leaving the place he had known the longest and surrendering an identity shaped by ‘being the man who could not walk.’

And with that question, Jesus also exposed where the man had been placing his hope. The answer came back in logistics: “I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred.” He did not yet see that for thirty-eight years; he had fixed his eyes on the pool.  Jesus had to shatter his illusion that the pool was his savior.

The man thought his deepest need was obvious: I need to be healed so I can walk. But Jesus knew there was something more important, something beneath the visible crisis.  Forgiveness. That is often the way of God. What we call the crisis is usually only the surface ache.

Over the last three months, I have faced a health situation involving the potential loss of fingertips. They weren’t receiving enough oxygen. Painful ulcers formed, tissue deteriorated, and the pain was relentless. They are healing now, but only after God got my full attention and gently exposed a corresponding spiritual issue; something old that needed surrender. And when I yielded it, scabs and ulcers began to fall away. Pink skin emerged. Tender skin. New skin.

You will, most likely, see a difference in what comes from my pen.  More to come on all of this.  I’m able to type these words today, instead of dictate.  To God be the glory.

Lord, I am learning that when I come asking you for relief, You reach deeper for something I long ago set aside. I trust you.  Amen

The strongest thing a woman can do is to let herself be carried to Jesus by her sisters. 

Do me a favor and read that first sentence again, slowly. Let it sit with you for a moment. About a month ago, God brought that very truth to my mind, and I literally drew in my breath. I couldn’t stop circling back to it. Strength and being carried feel like opposites, don’t they? But the Holy Spirit kept whispering: you show real strength and courage the moment you allow yourself to be carried… the moment you allow yourself to be vulnerable.

I’m an introvert, and solitude feels entirely comfortable. I can easily slip into isolation and believe it to be critical for “spiritual growth.” And to a point, it helps. Self-reflection helps me notice that something is off. But I’ve learned that I usually need community to helps me name what’s off. Otherwise, I stay stuck inside the echo chamber of my own head. My narratives loop. My conclusions harden. And I walk around with half-answered questions that never quite land.

In the Spirit-filled company of safe sisters, something different happens. I’m invited to put words to the swirl inside. As I speak, the fog begins to thin. They ask questions, reflect back what they hear, and gently reframe. Things that were tangled start to separate. Clarity comes because God’s presence is in the room.

“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?”   Jeremiah 17:9

God used Jeremiah’s words to remind me that this isn’t a shaming diagnosis.  It’s a loving warning. I have blind spots, especially when I try to go it alone. If my growth depends only on my own insight, I will always plateau right at the edge of what I can see. My inner storyteller might be eloquent, but she is not a reliable theologian.

I tend to carry my issues by myself because I’m convinced I’m the only one who truly understands them. Underneath that is a quieter fear: If I don’t hold everything together myself, I will fall apart.

But here is the truth I’m slowly learning.  Falling apart in safe company is not my undoing.  It may be the doorway to my breakthrough.  Letting myself be carried by God, and sometimes by His people, is not weakness. It is a holy, trembling kind of strength.

Lord, let my unraveling in safe hands become the beginning of my healing.  Amen

Let them give thanks to the LORD for His loving devotion and His wonders to the sons of men. For he satisfies the thirsty and fills the hungry with good things. Psalm 107:8-9

My emotional well is deep and living on this earth leaves gaping holes that only God can fill.  It’s taken me a long time to learn how to hear Him speak.  Until then, I hid.  I blamed.  I misjudged.  But ah, when I connected, everything changed. 

I am not whole yet.  But I am not crippled anymore.  I often limp but I’ve found my legs and I feel God’s wind behind me. The healing journey of fully living as God’s child will take me the rest of my life but I’m grateful for what He’s taught me so far.  Each piece of instruction has felt like the golden whispered secrets spoken between two who love each other and can’t stop talking late into the night. 

Over the years, I’ve seen your faces in my dreams; curious, tentative, even a little hopeful that God’s love is for real and His power is available to you in all the places where powerlessness has snuffed out the promise of an abundant life.  My prayer today is that God will break through the fog of pain and misunderstanding so that you may hear His call to live. 

It is time to put down the sword against those who couldn’t, or wouldn’t, give us what we needed.  Our heavenly father has it all and is willing to share it all. Some of it is deferred, but it is ours nonetheless, and is waiting for us as we step into eternity and breathe celestial air.

“Your fame spread among the nations on account of your beauty, because the splendor I had given to you made your beauty perfect,” declares the Sovereign Lord.   Ezekiel 16:14

The secret of my spiritual success today does not reside in clever planning. The secret was revealed by a king. King David. “I do not involve myself in great matters, or in things too difficult of me. Surely I have composed and quieted my soul; like a weaned child rests against his mother.” Psalm 131

Resting in God is underrated. A rested and quieted soul is always ready to hear His voice. And in matters where it’s easy for me to fail, my Father’s voice is my assurance of victory. I will be still. I will draw close. I will listen.  I will do something different from the rest of the world, where noise and distraction dull good judgment and threaten righteous choices.

I will never outgrow the needs of a child who needs her Father for everything.

Whoever dwells in the shelter of the Most High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty. Psalm 91:1

There are not many truly safe places in this world. When you feel like you’re coming apart, when you honestly can’t hold it together anymore, you will start mentally scanning your places of refuge. As people come to mind, you wonder if all of your disclosures will be welcomed. Will they be received the way Jesus would receive them? Without shock, without dismissal, and without subtle judgment? Most of us know the answer. Partially. The relief is usually limited. So there are details you will still keep back, corners you will still guard.

Not so with God. He doesn’t simply provide a shelter; He is the shelter. We are hidden in Christ. With Him, no disclosure is too personal, too raw, or too desperate. As we begin to unburden our souls, Jesus does more than listen. He assesses the damage the enemy has inflicted and begins spiritual surgery. He reframes what we’ve lived through with perfect wisdom. He uncovers lies, clarifies the truth, and starts rebuilding weakened foundations.

His Word becomes the iron in the framework of our minds and emotions, the unseen strength inside a life that has learned where true safety really is.

The eternal God is your refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms. Deuteronomy 33:27