Category Healing & Restoration

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10 Things to Avoid Saying to Someone Struggling with Porn

If you don’t think porn is a healthy habit (and research would back you up, there), you may have to have some hard conversations about this potentially awkward topic. And not only that, but it can be difficult to know what to say when you’re talking to someone about something as personal as recovery from a porn habit—especially when you care about that person and are being hurt by their porn consumption. You want to be able to encourage them into getting better rather than shame them back into their hidden habits.

Soul Ties

Tom Crandall and Cole Zick address the reality of what happens when you form an intimate sexual connection outside of marriage, and the strong influence that can have on us and our life choices. How can we become free from shame? What can we do to move past attachments that we have with people from our past that we’re tied to because we’ve had sexual experiences with them?

How to Thrive This Christmas

Christmas is a beautiful season of giving and spending time with the people we care about, but sometimes it comes with the realization that life did not turn out the way we expected it to. We look around at family or friends or people we’ve known forever, and it’s hard not to compare our life to theirs. It’s hard not to remember where we thought we would end up or how we thought things would be at this point in our life.

How to be a Friend to Someone Walking in Shame

Shame seduces us into secrecy, insists on silence, and results in judgment. When we begin hiding, and are afraid to be vulnerable, we begin blaming others and ourselves for the disconnection that we feel. Instead of pulling people towards us, we push them away, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy that we are not worthy of love and acceptance. So then, disconnection is the result. What can we do to help people who are stuck in this cycle?

Boys, Girls, Adults, and Porn

We can often feel the most intimidated by things we don’t understand. The fear of the unknown can lead us down paths of thinking that cause us to over-emphasize the worst-case scenarios while losing hope that good is possible. Pornography and sexual addiction, in general, actually falls into this category for most. It is hard to understand something that is so damaging and yet those who find themselves in the cycle of it see no way out.

Why Women are Oppressed in the Church

Many believers have developed a theology that proactively uses the Bible to disqualify women from the most formidable roles of leadership, especially in the Church. I am appalled by the number of Christian leaders who are convinced that women are not as qualified, called, and/or gifted to lead as men. The argument for disempowering women is illogical, unscriptural and beyond-outdated!

If You Really Knew Me

I believe that shame grows in the dark. We begin to question ourselves, “if they really knew me…. then what?” The things that we believe no one would be able to forgive, look past, or overcome cause so much fear, we choose to hide. As shame grows in the dark it begins to own our thoughts, our identities or we simply bury it so deep we are in denial about it altogether.

Where is God in My Darkest Season?

When you’re in the middle of what feels like a debilitating trial, it’s easy to think that God favors others more than you, or that the situation that you are going through is somehow beyond God’s ability to fix it. I know these feelings all too well…

Restoring the Heart of the Father

Understanding God as our Father and truly leaning into a relationship with Him through that paradigm has many challenges in our generation. It is clear that God wants to engage with us in this way because in the book of John alone God is referred to as Father over one hundred times. I, myself, have been on a journey to truly see God this way and understand what it means for Him to love me as His son. My personal challenges have been the walls I created as a child to protect myself from the pain of disappointing people.

Your Broken Relationship Was Not a Waste of Time

I know what you’re thinking: these last eight months were pointless. The emotions, the time, the dates, the gifts – useless, wasted, the stuff you throw away like scraps of paper. Except the scraps are your heart, and the wasted time was your life. He’s gone, you’re here, and though you know how to move on and you’re walking forward with the Lord, it’s hard to see the purpose in an ended relationship.