Ripple-Effect Faith with Twyla Franz

When one of those "unfixables" happens–a relationship strain, health complications stacked on top of a financial drain, an irreversible injustice–it can feel like you're in a battle zone. You vs. the world. Like the implications of what you can't do are strapped to your back.
Makes you feel unmoored and helpless. Because you'd change the situation if you could, but it seems there's no easy path forward, no win-win resolution within reach, no reversing the hurt.
I'm thinking of this–thinking of you–as I read Deuteronomy 1. 
 
Links mentioned:
Get a FREE, 5-Day Email Course: Turn Your Loneliness into Ripple-Effect Faith in 5 Days.
Read the written version of this episode HERE.
Neighboring Tip of the Week

I relate to the way the Israelites prayed. When something terrible happens, I want God to take it away. To make life go back to how it was. I expect God's rescue to look like reversal or extraction.
But threaded through this ancient story is a new way to pray.
Links mentioned:
Get a FREE, 5-Day Email Course: Turn Your Loneliness into Ripple-Effect Faith in 5 Days.
Read the written version of this episode HERE.
Neighboring Tip of the Week

40 quietly laps you when you're more bent on running, writing, and preparing for fall break in New York than recalling how old you are. But all of a sudden, you're the age your teenage self remembers your parents. So you begin a list of little learnings you've picked up the past four decades. Fundamentals, you title it.
At first it's a dare. Can you write down 40 life lessons? Then it's a whittling, as you narrow to just 40. 
While revising and rearranging, you realize how much you need each reminder to stick to the essentials. Because we tend to overcomplicate what it means to live like Jesus, right where we are. We add in extra criteria until a mission-minded life–including actual friendships with our neighbors–feels out of reach.
So let's stick with simple, shall we?
 
Links mentioned:
Get a FREE, 5-Day Email Course: Turn Your Loneliness into Ripple-Effect Faith in 5 Days.
Read the written version of this episode HERE.
Neighboring Tip of the Week

I leave leaves on my writing table–small ones that landed soft on my laptop last time I wrote in my front yard. They nestle next to pumpkin pistachio and it's cheery woodwick flame. 
Fall.
I'm already ready, and it's not even here. 
There's a comforting conjunction of crisp and cozy that enters with autumn. A deliberate extension of the both/ands that offer hope along with the hard.
 
Links mentioned:
Get a FREE, 5-Day Email Course: Turn Your Loneliness into Ripple-Effect Faith in 5 Days.
Read the written version of this episode HERE.
Neighboring Tip of the Week

It's one of those mornings the sunrise peaks as I walk up the hill from my house, trees and power lines and houses towering between me and the sky. I take pictures of the remnants of color gently grazing the horizon when I reach my typical sunrise viewing spot. It's lovely, but not stunning. 
I stretch and check my shoelaces, but before I hit the record button on my running app, I turn around. I'm glad I do, because God's glory hovers over an ordinary parking lot, and I almost missed it.
I'd been bent on the angle, trying to situate the sun just so between the trees or over the vanishing point of the white fence. But I'd been too close to see the white streaks and glow of color up a little higher.
From the middle of the parking lot, I catch patched blacktop and a swingset in my camera lens. If I omit the less-aesthetic, I also miss the majesty exploding above it. 
Isn't it like that a lot in life? We zero in on moments that feel inordinately spiritual and miss the intersection of the sacred and the mundane? 
 
Links mentioned:
Get a FREE, 5-Day Email Course: Turn Your Loneliness into Ripple-Effect Faith in 5 Days.
Read the written version of this episode HERE.
Neighboring Tip of the Week