Want to Give Your Neighbors Hope for Christmas? Start Here

When you’re a first-generation Christian, a kid who didn’t grow up in a Christian home, who wasn’t raised in a home where the Word was read, you can end up as 7-year-old kid hospitalized with an ulcer, because your body has a way of telling your story that your words don’t quite know how to tell.   I was this scrawny, freckled-faced little girl, upstairs every night in a farmhouse bedroom, terrified to fall asleep because I was terrified of dying, of closing my eyes, and never seeing light again, of getting trapped forever in the pitch black dark.  This kid who never stopped trying to pretzel everything into good enough for everyone else… who became one terribly painful knot.  When your family is all about working for a sense of worth – how do you feel like you have any worth if you don’t keep working perfectly, relentlessly… hopelessly?  The question to ask is: What if I was more passionate about their salvation than concerned about my own reputation?  When you have no idea that this is our Father’s world, fear can become your world.  What if no one had ever shared that there was, right now, good news that […]