Soul Sister Time

              I feel I spend half my life encouraging others to develop spiritual disciplines.  I have quite a few that are firmly established.  I never realized that my own spiritual disciplines could become detached from God until I followed the Holy Spirit’s leading recently.  It was very revealing and so good for my soul.               I was led to develop a class around spiritual disciplines that have had a great impact on the women and men who have gone through the class.  In the class, they are introduced to the Christian Classics, have an overview of the entire Bible and are asked to try out a spiritual discipline for a week.  After the class is completed they write a rule of life, choosing the spiritual disciplines that help them remain most connected to God.  It’s not the class itself that has the impact.  It ...

              It’s been half a decade since my husband of 27.5 years died suddenly of a brain bleed.  My life turned upside down that weekend, and nothing will ever be the same.  Someone commented to me that I had moved-on .  It was meant to be a compliment, and I totally get the affirmation that was intended.  The truth is I have not moved-on, nor do I ever expect that I will.  I love this quote sent to me in a sympathy card and have shared it over and over with others.  St Bernard of Clairvaux wrote: I can never lose one whom I have loved unto the end; one to whom my soul cleaves so firmly that it can never be separated does not go away but only goes before .               Grief should have a beginning, middle and end; that is true.  That first year or two I would have done anything to diminish my pain.  I was in...

              When I surrendered my vocation to God back when I was seventeen-years-old, He called me to a life of walking through the most broken realities that people face in a first-world country.  The verse that led me to this life was 2 Corinthians 1:3-4.  Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort,   who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God .  I began counseling others at the ripe age of 23.  I looked like I could have still been in high school, and the patients given to me rightly had their doubts.  I had my doubts too.  I knew that I didn’t have the wisdom to counseling people double my age.  I didn’t have a lot of experience of deep wounds either so I couldn’t talk to them from my own experiences of deep brokenness....