Gather The Broken Pieces

Tomorrow is my first day at a new job. After five and a half months of not being employed, I'm finally able to return to office life. I'm glad about the job. It's a good position, the pay is higher than I was making before, and it seems like a nice place. Yet for the past few days I've struggled with a growing unease as anxiety crept up inside me. Doubts and fears began throwing questions around my mind. ...What if I'm not ready to go back to work? While I didn't leave my last job because of my emotional health, I know that I should have because I was not in a good place mentally. I had suffered the worst of a bad fight with depression while working, and afterwards my mind and soul felt incredibly fragile. I'm grateful for the unexpected break I had when circumstances demanded I quit my job. But now that I'm going back to work, fear set in that maybe I wasn't ready yet. What if I start the new job and I'm not emotionally healed enough to deal ...

When adult coloring first became a thing, I was beyond skeptical. I mocked it as a waste of time. I had been an avid colorer as a child, but the whole concept of an adult sitting down to color pictures seemed ridiculously lame. Obviously these people who claimed it was relaxing simply had nothing better to do with their time. Over the past couple of years, my judgmental annoyance of this "new" hobby of adult coloring gave way to acceptance and then finally took the leap into participation. Yes. I now color pictures. As an adult. And it IS relaxing. I'm notoriously good at being very wrong about things, and this is a perfect example. My current coloring book is filled with scriptures that have decorative backgrounds. Flowers are a common theme throughout the book. Something occurred to me the other day as I started a new picture.... I always color the leaves first. I always pick up a green coloring pencil and set to work on the leaves, vines, and branches before even g...

I saw a post on Instagram by Shelley Giglio almost a week ago that proposed a challenge: what if we read these verses from Psalms over our lives every day for thirty days, because in thirty days you can form a habit and if these words become habit for how we think of our lives, imagine what can happen. "Lord, You alone are my portion and my cup; You make my lot secure. The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; surely I have a delightful inheritance. I will praise the Lord who counsels me; even at night my heart instructs me. I keep my eyes always on the Lord. With Him at my right hand, I will not be shaken." - Psalm 16:5-8 I loved this idea and immediately took a screen shot of the verses and decided that I would indeed read these verses over my life each day. I desperately need this reminder, and not just when I happen to come across Psalm 16 during my quiet time. I need to intentionally remind myself of the truth in these words. Why? Because so much of ...

"My tears have been my food day and night, while all day long people say to me, 'Where is your God?'" - Psalm 42:3 "Raise your voice loudly. Raise it, do not be afraid! Say... 'Here is your God.'" - Isaiah 40:9b The dark will try to tell you that God is not near. One of the worst things about depression is how it tries to isolate you...not just from people, but also from God by making you feel like He is far away. The dark is lying. God is here...right with you, right within reach. He has not left, He has not turned away, He has not forgotten you. When I walked through my depression, one of the questions I continually wept-prayed (yes, that should be a word) was "Where are You?!" The darkness that surrounded my mind and heart made it incredibly difficult to know that God was near. Because if He is, why is it so dark? Why so much pain and hurt? How can He be near me when I feel like I'm drowning? But He was. He never left my side. N...

I saw this picture on Instagram a couple of weeks ago. It's a magnificent shot of a bridge in Vietnam. I think it's amazing the amount of time and effort that was put into designing and then building such a complex structure. But more than that, I think it's amazing that God can use a random picture of a bridge to speak life to a tired soul if I take the time to listen. Ever since I saw this picture, my mind keeps being drawn back to it. The hands captivate me. They remind me of God's hands. And the bridge itself reminds me of the road I walk and how it's held up by the hands of my God. Notice how the bridge turns. The people walking along on the far left or right of the picture can't see what's around that turn. Anything could be waiting for them around that bend - good or bad - and they won't see it clearly until they're there. Just like in life. The road we were on that we thought was straight starts to bend and turn in ways we didn't expe...

I love the idea of having a word for the year...a word that speaks something special to your soul, a word you want to chew on for that entire year. My word for 2018 has been "remain." I didn't choose this word; I believe God chose it for me. "Remain" has been pressing into me since the beginning of this year, even before I realized how much I would indeed need to remain throughout the coming months. John 15:4 records Jesus saying "Remain in Me, and I in you. Just as a branch is unable to produce fruit by itself unless it remains on the vine, neither can you unless you remain in Me. I am the vine; you are the branches. The one who remains in me and I in him produces much fruit, because you can do nothing without me." Remain... Stay with. Cling to. Abide in. Hide within. Even when my heart felt like it was breaking. Even when depression raised its ugly head and fought against my mind. Even when unexpected things came up and my life got flipped upside...

"God doesn't stop providing. He's constant in the provision, whether we see it or not. It's just that sometimes He starts providing differently, depending on what we need for the moment." - from Come Matter Here by Hannah Brencher. I've seen this truth playing out in my life over the past couple of weeks. I highlighted these words on the day I started reading the book, never dreaming of what was about to unfold in my life or how much I would have to trust this. On June 10th, my aunt fell and badly injured her hand. She lives with me, so I needed to take some time off work to help her since she was not able to use her dominant hand at all. I didn't really think much of taking the time off at the time. I assumed a week or two would fix everything, that her hand would heal quickly, and then life would return to it's normal flow. However, the injury was worse than I had thought. It led me to take more time off and then more again. Finally, still unable t...

There was something I felt like God was showing me the other day, something that would have a real impact on me and my journey. I thought I should write about it and share what I had learned, because after all, that is the purpose of this blog. I sat down to do just that, thinking this something had the elements for a powerfully real blog post. I picked up my pen to write and...nothing. Then when my words did come, they were jumbled. And my thoughts kept straying from my main point. Now, my pre-programmed thought patterns instantly want to shout "failure" in my face. "Look at you!" they scream. "You can't even write down what you're feeling! These are important words that need to be said and you're wasting time! Pathetic! Useless!" But instead of listening to those lies, I'm choosing to learn something. Because if you learn something, even if it feels insignificantly small, then you're making progress. So here's this...I'll ...

Last year, I thought I finally had my stuff together. I wasn't quite where I knew I should be, but I thought I was on the right track. I was doing the right things, saying the right things, posting the right things on social media, even praying the right things. I was proud of the progress I was making, and I thought surely my life had turned a corner and things would finally start lining up and God would soon give me the desires of my heart. Brokenness knows how to hide itself well.  Sometimes you don't know how broken you are until something forces you to look deep inside yourself, past the veneer of "I'm okay." Down deep in the dark corners of my soul, brokenness was lurking. Sometimes we're so busy trying to do the right things we forget to take a long look at our heart to see WHY we want to do the right things. Was I doing and saying and posting because I was in love with Jesus and wanted to share His message with the world? Or was it so that...

In a previous blog post, Checklist To A Healthier Me, I posted about how I had begun reading better books that I felt could help inspire further growth in my heart and soul. No self-respecting blogger (even a newbie like me!) could make such a claim and then not follow-up with book reviews on the better books, now could they?!  For the first review, I'm sharing my thoughts on 'Breaking Busy' by Alli Worthington. My simple one sentence review is this: READ IT! My first impression as I decided to read this book was "Well I don't really know if I'll get much out of this, or that it can apply to me. I'm not really THAT busy!" But since I had read articles by Alli before, as well as following her on Instagram and enjoying her posts, I thought I'd give the book a try and maybe get one or two things out of it that I could apply to myself. (Can you hear the pride in that? Yeah, I can too. Note to self: never assume you can't learn somethin...

I came across this quote last week, and its simple brilliance is one of those things that lodges in your heart and makes it a little easier to breathe.  "Maybe it's okay if it takes time to be okay. Maybe healing is a road that is lined with endless grace." - Morgan Harper Nichols Too often, we tend to place unrealistic expectations on ourselves on how long it should take for us to heal. We think healing should fit on a timeline; we feel like there's an acceptable time to struggle with what has hurt us and then that's it, time's up, get over it and get better, or something's seriously wrong with us.  Maybe you had a friend who fought depression, and three months later she's fine and back to normal. But it's been longer for you and you're not fine and not back to normal. Maybe you read a post on social media about someone who came out of the darkness of grief and now she has a 5-step plan for you to follow. But that plan doesn't...

I recently walked through a very difficult time, both emotionally and spiritually. It began a long overdue healing process in me, and helped me to see that my heart and soul were not in as healthy of a place as I had previously thought. I realized for the first time that I needed to actively make changes in my life. That old quote "If you always do what you always did, you'll always get what you always got" does in fact have some weight to it. I'm going to share some things I've started doing to get my heart in shape. This is not a how-to post. It's just me sharing my heart on some things I've found that are helpful to me. ❤ 1. Listening to worship music . And by "listening" I mean drowning myself in it! I listen to music all day at work and for the past few months, the majority of what I listen to is worship. It may sound cheesy or like I'm trying to be ultra-spiritual, but I can FEEL the difference in me. The lyrics remind me that God i...

It's never been in my nature to talk about myself. I'm an introvert; I internalize everything and rarely share what I feel even with my closest friends. I'm Olympic level good at hiding my feelings. That being said, the fact that I created this blog is truly astonishing to me. It's also frightening. Allowing my heart to be seen on this level is by far the most uncomfortable, out of character thing I've ever done. Yesterday I introduced the blog on my Instagram account, and immediately felt doubt, self-consciousness, and fear begin to creep in. What if no one reads my posts? What if no one likes it? What if I have no business doing this? I'm not Ann Voskamp and never will be, so what do I think I'm doing? What do I have to say that could matter? ...What if I fail? Later, I opened my devotional from Christine Caine's book Unshakeable and read this: "I had to overcome my fear to fulfill my calling - and so will you. ...We're not directed to...

The title of this blog comes from something I feel like God showed me recently. I was crying my eyes out, feeling broken by life and love and everything that's supposed to make you feel whole. I told God "All I've got to give You is these broken pieces of me." And this pressed into my heart: "Gather the broken pieces...let nothing be wasted." I knew the verse pulsing in my heart, I knew it well and had read it countless times. But I had never applied it to anything but the literal meaning. The words are found in John 6. It tells the story of how Jesus multiplied a young boy's lunch of five loaves and some fish, causing it to feed a crowd of 5,000 people. When everyone had eaten their fill, Jesus instructed the disciples to "gather the broken pieces." (Amplified version) So why is it that at a time when I'm feeling broken, this is the verse that comes to me? I think it's because I needed to be shown in a very visual way what God wa...