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.

As far as the disciples go, Peter is probably the most well known. He’s memorable, he’s relatable, and he’s known for both his passionate faith in Christ and his antics. He walked on water, but he almost drowned because he got wrapped up in the moment and took his focus off Jesus. He was a fisherman, the “rock” on which the early church is built, and one of Jesus’ closest friends. He cut off the ear of one of the soldiers who showed up to arrest Jesus. But probably most notably, he’s the guy that denied Christ three times mere hours after the whole group was together in the upper room at the Last Supper. It’s hard to imagine, but it took less than a day to go from that intimate Passover meal to Christ’s arrest and the subsequent scattering of all the disciples. By the time Christ’s trial in front of the Sanhedrin took place, only Peter was left to follow Him, and even then, he followed at a distance.

Reverence. It’s a big word, and one not to be used lightly. It is a deep respect and awe for something or someone. Lately, I’ve been asking myself: do I have reverence for the Lord in my every day life? I think between social media blurbs, quick and snappy sermon titles, and TikTok devotions, the American church has lost what was once its highest priority: to revere and regard the Lord with deep love and trembling.

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.

Faithfulness. To me, this seems like a big one. Like love, it is one of the building blocks of the Christian walk. Many will say that God is love, His very countenance drips with it and every time He acts, the action operates out of it. And yes, over the past weeks, we’ve been seeing how each Fruit of the Spirit is an intrinsic piece of who God is. To that degree, none should be discounted. But to me, God is faithfulness. He wouldn’t be who He is without His steadfast reliability. And maybe that’s not a great word for it. Reliability makes it seem so responsible or obligatory, but to me, God’s faithfulness is the fact that He has never once relented in His pursuits for His people. He is faithful because He loves, but His love for us is because of His faithfulness.

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.

It’s a perspective we all understand, as it’s a basic experience we’ve all had to live through if we’ve been born and grown up. No matter who you are or where you are in your Christian walk, the sentiment is easy to understand. God formed you in your mother’s womb. When no one else knew you, not even your parents, God knew you. There is nothing about you that could be hidden from the Lord. All through the standard nine months your mother was pregnant with you, she wondered: what color would her baby’s eyes be? Their hair? Would it be a boy or a girl? What would your personality be? What would you grow up to do?

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.

My mom has been cleaning out the basement of her house. How do I know? Over the past week, I’ve gotten numerous texts asking if I want her to keep or send me certain childhood items to pass onto any children I may have one day. Disney VHS tapes, college decor, you name it. Well, one item she texted me, she knew I’d want to keep: the picture Bible that I’d always kept as a child. What I didn’t remember, was that someone very special had gifted that Bible to me: my Nana Jennie.

For the past few weeks, we’ve been discussing what Paul really means when he tells wives to be submissive to their husbands in Ephesians. It is my deep desire that, if you’ve been reading along, you have found peace surrounding the subject and that the Lord’s character has shone through. This week, I want to further delve into the subject by taking the key verse through which the other side of the argument stakes its claim to validity. And I’m not talking about those that just flat out renounce God and the Bible. I’m talking about Christians; those that believe that wives being submissive to husbands is an “antiquated cultural ideal” that died off with tunics and the Roman Empire. The thought process on that end of the spectrum is that there should be no submission between genders when God has declared us all as one.

Husbands and wives are addressed many times throughout the New Testament, and it seems that one doesn’t receive a command without the other. I find it interesting that when people bring up “Wives submit to your husbands,” there is not conversation in the same breath about a husband’s obligation to love his wife as if she were his own body. And that’s not some prosaic prattle from Paul to the Ephesians. He’s not giving the women a literal command to submit and then giving the men some flowery metaphor to live by. Sit and consider this with me for a moment: Paul commands husbands to love their wives as if they were a part of his own body. Not a thought, nor a suggestion. They are morally obligated to do so by scripture.

The Book of Ephesians is one of the most beautiful letters Paul writes to the church. It’s a favorite among many, including myself, and Ephesians 1 is the overture that sets the tone to this awe-inspiring encouragement to the church. Within chapter 1, verses 3 through 14 is a dense preamble that touches upon things like grace, adoption, inheritance, blessing, redemption, glory to God, and truth. There is too much to say about it in one devotion, and if we did, we could be here for weeks and weeks on that passage alone.

CANCELLED. That’s never a word you want to see next to your flight number at the airport. This past weekend, my husband and I flew up to New York to watch our friends get engaged. We flew in Friday night, hung out this weekend, and the plan was to fly back home Sunday night to be back in time for work on Monday morning. But clearly, we were in store for other plans.

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.