Gather The Broken Pieces

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...