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Barely alive living beautythat day you ranand the sun huggedyour shoulders andlaughed and the sweetgrass tickled yourtoes and the doglicked your face andyou lay down, downin green blue goldbursting, bursting loose all binds. No, no you arenot far away,away from here, not tied down, downto any thing. This post appeared originally at jenniferjcamp.com

We don’t need much to serve God – we need willing hearts and open minds, but as with most things we complicate it. Recently, it feels as if I’m spinning plates and failing miserably. As long as I have breath, I plan to live my life to the fullest with God’s help. So there’s new goals, new adventures, new tasks even at this stage of the game. One thing I’ve learned, I’ll never perfect my walk with Christ this side of heaven. It’s one of the only things I know for sure. I realize that I need to keep leaning on Him. That abiding in Him produces fruit in a way that I can’t explain (John 15:1-15). This is my secret.  I want to be so desperate for God, that the only thing that quenches my thirst is Him – His word, His pea...

Doubt queries her,hawk eyeing its prey.Is this good enough?Unique enough?Lovely, worth noticing?Her very life a question,wingless bird in her hands.And yet majesty of truth,strength in being small,are Poor in Spiritturned right thereon its head.Pivot! Breathe!Open your fists!And the bird,its wings solid andstrong, turns its faceto the sun and flies. This post appeared originally at jenniferjcamp.com

                                                                          www.insideoutwithcourtnaye.org  I’m going to start this post by saying that managing marriage and ministry is NOT easy. Yet, it can be done. Personally, I’ve been married for nearly 16 years and been saved and active in ministry for over 20 years. So, I know from experience that this can be done. However, no matter how long we’ve been married and in ministry, for you and me, it’s still going to take prayer, personal discipline, love, and respect to manage them both, well. In this post, I’m going to be sharing with you so...

                Freedom is in knowing who you are in Christ and being able to let things go. It’s refusal to walk in offense and being quick to forgive. It is in the being slow to speak and even slower to anger.  Freedom is in knowing that you don’t hold a grudge from a wrongdoing in the past that would potentially weigh you down.  It is truly, truly, truly a freeing feeling to know that you don’t need to always be right. My precious elderly aunt once told me that her more than sixty year marriage had lasted because she long ago gave up her right to be right.              Sadly, when I began this article, I realized I could write about twenty or thirty thin...

You see the crack in the cup,the jagged scar like lightning piercing stormy sky.Fingers trace the lines etched from collisionof counter and ceramic and stone.But it holds still, my coffee steaming,and I remember how beautiful are scars that tell a storyfor I like the way you tell it, the untwisting oftruth until it straightens outand it is all I ever see. —jennifer j. camp This post appeared originally at jenniferjcamp.com

                                            www.insideoutwithcourtnaye.org I can admit that trusting God is not always as simple as it seems when things are uncertain (especially when you’re staring the problem right in the face and you can’t see your way clearly through). I know, because I’ve been there so many times. I’ve been there in marriage. I’ve been there with my children. I’ve been there in finances. I’ve been there with life’s circumstances. Are you there now, sis? Are you facing uncertainty right now? Are you struggling to trust God, because you don’t know what He is doing? There are so many situations and circumstances that occur in our lives as Christians where Go...

We sat at a stoplight as the children engaged in trivial debate behind me when dizziness invaded. I tried to shake it off, but the adrenaline had already been released. My pulse quickened; looking for the danger my sub-conscience had decided was imminent. Breath was hard to catch, ache diffused across my chest, and my eyes struggled to find focus. I pulled over at a park – our commute home interrupted by trepidation. “Surely if I just sat in the crisp air for a minute while the children played all would return to normal.” Or so I thought. I get off-balance sometimes, and had just discovered I was anemic after two years of extreme fatigue. I was on a new medication to help relieve some of the symptoms created by my body’s lack of iron; I knew it was most likely the cause of this chaotic epi...

It is your way I follow whenthere are no parents aroundno sages, no wise mento direct the cause of conviction– just a meandering bumping towardsome place unnamed and unbargained for. For you make paths for my feet,my heart soon to follow.And the mountain casts shadows herethat are remarkable, and I am small.I will not be afraid when my toesstumble and the turns don’t show up on any map.I yet follow, convinced it won’t be long ‘tilyou find me behind you, not even strugglingso hard to keep up. —jennifer j. camp This post appeared originally at jenniferjcamp.com

abducted and tortured A Christian mother from Sudan had deep cause for worry November last year once her Muslim brother visited her church in Cairo, Egypt with a photograph of her husband andasked members if they knew his whereabouts. Muslim extremists from Sudan had abducted and tortured her but 2 years earlier in Cairo, and that they threatened to kill her husband and girl if she refused to come backto Islam. The 42-year-old Ebtehaj Alsanosi Altejani Mostafa was tied to a chair in a darkened room with no windows when her abductors gave her that ultimatum in February 2017, she told Morning Star News.“I won’t return to Islam – I hate Islam,” she told them, as they continue beating her, Mostafa said. She had fled to Egypt in 2005 once being imprisoned 5 times for her...

From the Beginning The third line of Genesis reads, Then God said, “Let there be light.” It goes on to tell us that the light was good. Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. God saw that the light was good, and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light day, and the darkness He called night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day.~ Genesis 1: 3-5 ~ We understand that, from the beginning of creation, light was not only good but vital in keeping us from darkness. Luke 11: 36 tells us,  “If therefore your whole body is full of light, with no dark part in it, it will be wholly illumined, as when the lamp illumines you with its rays.” So, we are taught that, in order to follow Jesus, we must stay on the path of His light and in this, w...