Not long ago, I learned that when I was a baby, one of my primary caregivers regularly told me that my mother didn’t love me and that’s why she left me to go to work every day. Of course, when this was discovered, my parents found a new babysitter, but the invisible damage had already been done. Although I...
When I’d accepted Jesus into my heart, I’d allowed my driven personality and my wounds from the past to inform my faith, and I became a works-oriented Christian. Somehow, though I’d been wooed by God’s unconditional love, once I was in His Kingdom, I was driven by performance, not by love. This, I was discovering, was contrary to what the...
God works because of love, not obligation, and it is this reality that He invites us into when He calls us co-heirs and rulers with Christ. Paul describes exactly this quality in the believers in Thessalonica: “We remember before our God and Father your work produced by faith, your labor prompted by love, and your endurance inspired by hope in...
I grew up in a fairly normal American Christian family being the youngest of five children. A couple of times a week as a family we went to a mainstream evangelical church. At the age of nine I was baptized because some of my friends were but I didn’t really understand what it meant. I...
When Deb Mileur said, “I do” to Jesus in 1988, she fell so in love with the Bible that she began sleeping with it under her pillow; she read it, highlighted it, memorized and taught it. In 2009, during a friend’s visit to India (where Deb and her family lived as missionaries), she learned about...
Anne Armstrong unofficially joined the Growing in Grace Ministry (GGM) family in December of 2010 after receiving her first SOZO there. Anne was referred to GGM by a former ministry team member after sharing her heart and struggles about feeling “stuck” in certain areas of her life. Even before finding healing for herself at GGM,...
Before coming to Growing in Grace, my life was a mess. I was in pain, I was angry, I was confused and I only knew God through religion’s eyes. I was raised in a very conservative and strict religion and that is how I saw God. I always felt His eyes of displeasure on me...
About three and a half months into my husband Richard’s out-of-state job, I realized I had been internalizing my resentment about being alone. On the weekends, we focused on being together, but during the week I focused on keeping busy with ministry and activity. Inside, I felt depressed and tired. These feelings were an old default that I had become...
Though Jesus had become my Savior, the walls barricading my heart remained. Some of them softened, but many of them were my closest allies. It’s hard, even for Jesus, to have a relationship with someone who has walls like I did. I only had so much capacity for His love. Because I didn’t believe He really loved me unless...
We are new creations, filled with a new belonging and a new power—all because of Christ’s work in us. In Ephesians, Paul painted a beautiful picture of this: I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith....