Fall has always been my favorite season. Perhaps because I didn’t grow up with it. I grew up in the Philippines, where the seasons don’t change quite the way they do here. We don’t have that familiar autumn when the green slowly gives way to gold, orange, and red. The trees don’t put on one…
Category: finding self
The Greatest Fumble
I came across a thought recently that made me pause: The biggest fumble doesn’t come as a bag. It comes as a person. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized how easily we can misunderstand what a blessing looks like. Sometimes we imagine God’s favor arriving as something obvious. An opportunity. A…
Loving Like Christ
I recently came across a question that stayed with me: What does it really look like to love your wife like Christ? My first thought was my father. I don’t know if my father ever thought about marriage in those theological terms. I don’t remember him talking about what it meant to love a wife…
The Cracks We Keep Patching
On my last trip home, my suitcase came back with a crack. It wasn’t completely broken, but it was enough for me to worry about whether it would make it through the next trip. Before I headed back, I put some heavy-duty glue into the crack. Then I did it again. And again. I wasn’t…
The Prayers We Outgrow
This morning, I found myself thinking about some of the prayers I used to pray. Not the prayers I pray now. The old ones. The ones I prayed when I was younger and life looked very different. The ones that felt so important at the time that I couldn’t imagine being okay without the answers…
Come and See
There is something about the story of the Samaritan woman that I keep coming back to. Jesus knew where He was going. He knew Samaria. He knew the woman He would meet there. He knew her story before she ever stood at that well. And still, He went. He didn’t meet her by accident. He…
Let God Handle What I Cannot
There was a time when I thought understanding why God allowed certain things to happen would finally bring me peace. I wanted to understand the pain. The disappointments. The seasons that seemed to stretch far longer than I thought I could endure. I wanted to know why some prayers seemed to take so long to…
Fluent in Silence
Some nights I pray with words. Some nights they come easily. Gratitude spills out before I even know what I’m saying. Hope feels natural. Faith feels effortless. But there are other nights. The kind that arrive quietly. The kind where the day has taken more than it gave. Where disappointment lingers a little longer than…
The One He Saw
I wonder if one of the saddest questions we can ask ourselves is not, “Who have I become?” But rather… “What happened to the person God always saw?” Not the person others expected us to be. Not the person shaped by disappointment. Not the person hidden beneath fear, betrayal, or years of trying to survive….
The Shape of Love
I have been thinking lately about how easily we say the word love. We love coffee. We love summer. We love a favorite song. We love a place we’ve visited once. We love people. We even say we love God. The same word carries everything from a passing preference to the deepest commitment a human…
Charina.Writes 