up in sacrifice.” Elisabeth Elliot makes this statement in her book, Suffering is Never for Nothing. How simple, and yet how difficult to truly come to grips with.

God is love, love is sacrifice, and those sacrifices in the name of love cause us to suffer. Love and suffering are inextricably bound together. You can’t have one without the other, and our best illustration of it is the cross. Jesus went through just about the most suffering a person possibly can go through on the cross. He was humiliated, beaten, bloody, and broken. He died very publically for all to see. He was spat on, betrayed, and completely crushed.

Is Jesus precious to you? Don’t just knee-jerk answer that. Don’t just give it the answer you think makes you look good to other people. Really think. Do you value Jesus as precious every moment of every day? Do you treat him the way He deserves? Do you regard Him above all else in everything you do?

Dear God,

Thank you for being everything I’ve ever needed. Thank you for being my friend when I am lonely, my heavenly father when I need guidance and direction, the lover of my soul when I need to be held and seen, my shield when I need to be protected, and my defender in times of fear and uncertainty. You have never let me down or given me a reason to not trust you.

I haven’t mentioned this in a long time, but if you were keeping up on Soul Deep in February, you found out that I am currently pregnant. Right now, as I write this, I am 34 weeks along, so coming into the last home stretch. At this point, we’ve painted a nursery, set up the furniture, celebrated with a shower, and now Sam and I are nesting in full force. Every day, I tackle a small project getting ready for our daughter. One day, I wash, fold, and put away all her clothes, the next I set up her changing table, then sanitize and find a place for her bottles and pacifiers– every day is a new chore and I’m excited to do it. As I break down packaging, sort, sanitize, decorate, and find a place for everything, I pray. I ask God to grow her healthily inside me– body and mind. I ask Him to make my body ready for a safe delivery. I ask Him to give Sam and I the wisdom to raise her and the grace to teach her how deeply she is loved by God; to hold her close to His heart every day of her life.

The Fruits of the Spirit remind me of Sunday school lessons. No matter where you go to church, odds are, if you were a kid there was some kind of poster or coloring sheet that had pictures of apples, oranges, bananas, grapes, etc. and they all were labeled with a different fruit of the Spirit. There are songs that we learn in order to memorize them, and maybe you were given a piece of candy or a prize if you could list them all off the top of your head. As we get older, the term “Fruits of the Spirit” feels like a Christianese phrase that is glossed over and never really thought about beyond that Sunday school lesson from decades ago. It’s kind of on the same level as the armor of God, or the Ten Commandments: really, it’s a foundational idea to the Christian walk, but it’s reviewed so often that we forget the precious values these things hold for us to spiritually mature past the Bible basics.

When you were little, did your school do a grandparents day? Mine did, and I always loved it. It was always a special day where you got to have some of the most important people in your lives come to school, listen to you sing a song, have a snack, and show off your best art projects to. And I think I was probably more lucky than most kids, because I had more grandparents than the average kid. You see, both my parents’ parents are divorced and remarried before I was born, so I never knew the norm was to have only two sets of grandparents. Plus, I had two great-grandmas, so I had quite a pack to choose from.

So because my husband and I now own a house and don’t live in a basement apartment anymore, I’ve recently become a plant mom. Up until now, my understanding of plants has been minimal; you plant it, water it, give it the right amount of sun or indirect sun, and let it do its thing. Seems like a simple equation, except it’s not. Because obviously, a plant can’t tell you what’s wrong, you have to troubleshoot it and wait for a positive result.

Hey Pops, I’ve been thinking and praying a lot about wanting to really understand what it means to be the Bride of Christ. Maybe it’s because I can look on the sentiment with my own experiential sentimentality, but I want to truly realize what it is to be your bride. Because now I know in the physical what it is to be one. I know the anticipation of a wedding celebration where everyone in attendance is there to look upon and witness a love great enough to don its very best and meet at an altar to profess that love.

I’ve been leading us up to this moment for a few weeks now. First, we got to see Abram and God lay out the terms of the contract; Abram needing a son, and God promising to give him that son and make him into a nation. Then, we got to see the making of a contract, seeing the beauty in the seemingly bloody and violent covenant.

I think any Christian that has a real grasp of the Bible has this down: God made a covenant with Abraham at the beginning of the Old Testament, but Jesus died to create a better covenant at the start of the New Testament. The old covenant was specifically for the Jewish people. The new was for Jew and Gentile. The old promise was the law and the new promise was grace.

I think this passage in the Bible is one of the most well-known ones. Even if you’ve never gone to Sunday school, never picked up a Bible, and never had a faith of your own, chances are, you’ve heard fragments of this verse someway, somehow. Whether it’s a scripture reading at a wedding ceremony you attended or printed on some trendy home decoration at Marshall’s, 1 Corinthians 13 tends to be one of those Bible verses that crossed over into secular culture at one point or another.

There is no fear in love. All of God’s promises to us are awesome, but there is something about this one that catches my heart. Anyone who knows me, knows that this is one of the verses I try to live by, and model my heart after. It’s a verse that has been a banner over my relationship and a mantra through some really hard decisions. There is no fear in love.

Do you ever forget who you are? Before you know it minutes turn into hours, hours into days, and days into weeks, causing you to lose sight of your identity, and purpose, through Jesus Christ. That is a place that many of us have passed through before. You may also be someone who feels that you've never known who you are. You have just been wondering since you have been able to wonder. Maybe you have never found the “right” answer or the answer that gave you the most purpose. I feel that I can confidently say that most likely almost everyone has been in that place of wondering, and if you are a follower of the Lord than you have most likely forgotten even if it has been minutes rather than weeks.

Hey Pops, I can’t help but praise you when I think back on my life. I can’t believe all the goodness you’ve poured out on me; I hold each signal of your great love for me against my heart and worship you. I didn’t deserve any of the kindness you’ve shown me. There have been so many days where I doubted that you were working; that I turned away because I was fickle and immature. There have been so many moments that I’ve doubted your will to come in and save me again and again and again.

“It’s not a holiday. It’s a day of chocolate bunnies and eggs.” Those were the real-life words that came out of a coworkers mouth in my office this week. It was one of those things that pulled my mind straight out of what it was doing and into the world happening around me.

Most of us struggle with being compassionate towards people that rub us the wrong way. In a culture where everyone is so concerned about themselves, it’s hard to lead a life of putting others first. The secret is, if we can keep our eyes fixed on the One who loves us the most, loving others will become easier and easier, even those that we don’t see eye-to-eye with.