Best Of | The Grit and Grace Project

Do You Feel Abandoned by God?

A cool breeze cuts through the layers of my favorite sweatshirt and long sleeve t-shirt, causing my shoulders to shiver. I pull the sherpa blanket closer to my chin as I sit on our back deck, surrounded by the fading images of fall. Only a few golden and scarlet leaves remain on naked branches. The green grass of summer is hidden beneath a blanket of leaves that beg to be raked into piles. My husband stokes the fire pit, adding a log as embers float into the dusk sky. The sounds of a college football game drift from the patio TV, but I barely notice, distracted by my own thoughts. We Were Never Abandoned It’s been a hard season. A hard year…or […]

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Can Redemptive Love Overcome Racial Division?

By Allison McCormick / Life & Culture, Best Of

Early morning is my favorite time of day, and the best part of those special moments is time spent around the table with my husband. We share breakfast, cups of steaming tea, and discuss what is on our hearts. It is a treasured time that we try to maintain through the demands of our full schedules. During one of our morning chats, we reminisced about a recent trip: A drive from Oregon to California along a scenic byway that took us through open fields, along the edges of tall summits, and through a swarm of grasshoppers (I’ll save the explanation of the insect invasion for another time). An Unusual Confession We left the tranquility of Oregon and hit a wall of traffic

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I Made a Change—And It Brought My Prodigal Home

By Eve DeBardeleben Roebuck / Faith, Best Of

This is a story about me and my baby, who’s now 22, and the misery we walked through together to find a love connection. It’s a story of our mutual failure, but it’s a story with a happy ending. I lived the miracle. I watched it change me. And then I watched it change my prodigal son. Stone’s given me permission to tell it with all the sordid details—I love a blank check—but I’ll just hit the lowlights. How the Separation Started In the summers before his junior and senior years of high school, Stone got drunk on our family’s lake vacations. Both years, he also drank at his proms, letting us know his plans beforehand. He was proud he hadn’t drunk

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Are You Holding On to What You’ve Outgrown?

By Michelle Hurst / Life & Culture, Best Of

My teenage daughter has a birthday coming up. While looking through old photographs, I came across one with a big gap-toothed grin that almost wrecked me. There is something about gaps in a kid’s smile that tugs at my heart. A gap that will be filled with a tooth slightly too big for their five-year-old face. Adult teeth look so funny on a little kid and it takes years to grow into them. I remember snooping through my parent’s drawers as a kid and finding a few baby teeth. These old teeth both fascinated and disgusted me. One person I know took it one step further and saved her baby’s umbilical cord. Cords are smelly and scabby and I couldn’t wait for

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Who’s the Boss? 5 Ways to Be the One in Charge

By Darlene Brock / Motherhood, Best Of

Whether you have a two-year-old or a 10-year-old there are some days you may wonder who is in charge. It certainly doesn’t feel like it’s you. You won’t win every battle nor should you expect to. You can’t put it upon yourself to effectively crack the whip, so to speak, impeccably correcting each and every transgression any child is capable of. But there are a few absolutes you need to incorporate into your life just to keep peace on the home front, guide your kids toward acceptable behavior, and some days, to simply maintain your sanity. 1. Know your child. There may come a time when you find your child disassembling the new toy that you spent an hour on just successfully

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The Reality of STDs: Hard Conversations You Need to Have

By Darlene Brock / Health & Beauty, Best Of, Relationships

There truly are some conversations we would much rather avoid. The ones that create angst in both the discussion starter and the recipient, whose terrified expression is begging you not to continue! An honest talk about STDs (sexually transmitted diseases) has to be in life’s top five! This is definitely not sunny chatter over the dinner table, or light banter with the store clerk like you’re talking about the fair weather. But the reality is that our current societal statistics require us to have these talks. We absolutely must have them with our children. We absolutely must have them with our dating partner. Today’s studies tell us 1 in 4 females between the age of 15 and 24 have an STD*, currently a full

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Men and Women Are Equal, but Not Identical

By Darlene Brock / Life & Culture, Best Of

From the first moment a little girl announces, “When I grow up I’m gonna be a…” her parents tell her that she certainly will be. She can do whatever she dreams, and that’s true. If she loves sports—they’re all available. Education? Any field of study is obtainable. Career path? There is none blocked. This generation has all the “equal rights” created by the resolute females of the 20th century. Courageous ladies desiring the privilege to vote, to pursue higher education, and to have careers that matched their talents fought this battle. They changed our world. It is them we should thank for giving our daughters a future without limitations. Yet, as each daughter enters her teen years, most realize that the level playing field of opportunity

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If Your Kid is Being Bad, Does That Make You a Bad Mom 2

Your Bad Kid Doesn’t Make You a Bad Mom

By Darlene Brock / Motherhood, Best Of

You have just received your first phone call, the one every mother dreads and hopes to never receive. The preschool wants you to know that your child is hitting or biting or kicking. That little guy or girl, who has never shown this behavior before, has apparently turned into the class tyrant. It was in kindergarten when my daughter demonstrated her prowess in tormenting others. I dropped this sweet, little dressed up diva at her elementary school and all was going relatively well for the first few months. Then I received my first phone call. She had kicked a little boy. This led to discussion, punishment, and resolution. A week went by and then I got the next call; she had hit another student.

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Talking to Your Teens About the Grey Area

By Amy Saxby / Motherhood, Best Of

The Grey Area. It’s not black and white. It’s blurry. It’s the place in dating relationships that nobody talks about. While they may not act like it, our teenagers find safety in boundaries, and they want direction in defining them. As you know, it’s all too common that a variety of media platforms inform and shape our teenagers’ perspectives of what dating and marriage should look like. How do we step into this? Teenagers Want to Talk About the Grey Areas This past fall, a good friend of mine and I asked a group of high school girls if they would be interested in discussing these tricky topics. The group of girls consisted of about 12 high school juniors and seniors. We were delighted and

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10 Surprising Things I Learned About Cancer as an Oncology Nurse

By Dawn Seabolt / Life & Culture, Best Of

During my third year of nursing school I knew I wanted to be an oncology nurse. Not your typical route for a 20-year-old girl. When I started my major, I thought I wanted to do labor and delivery because how fun would that be? But those hormonal women were too much for me. Then I thought since I loved kids I should probably do pediatrics, but it was the kids’ parents that were so demanding and untrusting. And then, in my third year during my med/surg rotation, I had patient after patient with cancer, and I felt a connection to each one of them. Which leads me to the first thing I learned… 1. Cancer patients are the best patients in the hospital.

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If You Want To Get Healthy, Do These 5 Things

By Rachel Hagstrom / Health & Beauty, Best Of, Life & Culture

For a girl whose dietary and lifestyle choices once included generous amounts of Cheez-Its, menthol cigarettes, and energy drinks mixed with vodka, the desire to get healthy was overwhelming at first. I’m not going to lie…doing a massive overhaul on my (not-so-healthy) habits was downright hard. I wasn’t sure what foods my body would benefit from, so I tested popular diets and eliminated trigger foods. I wanted to find cost-effective ways to incorporate more organic produce, so I found good deals and discounted products I could add to my recipe rotation. I began exercising on a consistent basis, and instead of automatically reaching for my former go-to substances during times of stress, I explored spiritual practices that seemed to calm my mental

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The Thief I Let In: A Day in the Life of a Working Mom

By Carolyn Gordon / Work & Money, Best Of, Motherhood

It was a typical morning. The alarm went off at 6:40 a.m. Snooze was hit once. There was a sleepy, teething baby girl that took over the spot of my husband, who had left for work. Our son was already up, sitting on the couch and watching cartoons. His pleading for pre-packaged blueberry muffins woke up his sister. Ready or not, it was time to kick it into high gear and get ready for school and work. Sounds of the blender, breast pump, and electric toothbrushes filled the house. A computer charger, matching sock, and school folder couldn’t be found. Then, the realization that I didn’t have a sitter for my daughter for that afternoon’s work meeting, the lab stealing the last

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When Life Gives You a New Normal

By Clare Marlow / Best Of, Life & Culture

I wouldn’t have given it a name, the gut-wrenching, upside down and inside out change in my life. But I was at a weekend women’s retreat led by a well-known author and speaker whose son had been sentenced to life in prison for killing a pedophile, and she called the rocking of my world my “new normal.” At the time, all I could think was, “What the heck could be remotely normal about transforming in an instant from being a wife to a widow and single mom? I don’t want a new normal!” Many of us squirm over the term “normal” for implying that we’re all alike and our lives are parallel. Nothing is further from the truth; we’re all amazingly unique

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Daring to Go Filterless: How Social Media Is Impacting Women and What We Can Do About It

By Caroline Beidler / Life & Culture, Best Of

Scrolling social media, I see women who are painted like porcelain dolls with tiny waists and thick-alicious hips. I see images of perfection that are totally disproportionate and unattainable. And what is worse: this dangerous trend now compels me. I find myself searching frantically for the perfect filter before I post a pic, the one that looks “natural” or like I’m just the right age (younger than I am). If I can’t find it, then I spend way too much time adjusting the lighting and color saturation; maybe I’ll even add one of those funky (and slightly creepy) filters that make me look like an extraterrestrial, flower child, or naughty pirate. I do this, I play along, even though most days all

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Filterless—Let’s Get Real About Social Media

By Laila Schell / Life & Culture, Best Of

My kids love Instagram. They love it like a mom loves a Sunday afternoon nap, and if they ever have a chance to grab my phone, the first thing they do is hit the reels. Which, if I am being honest, I had no idea even existed. It didn’t take long for them to start spamming me with all kinds of nonsense, and although most of them were super annoying, there were a few where I was like, “Okay, some of these are clever.” Apparently, so is Instagram. They quickly figured out my style and started showing me only the ones I appeared to enjoy. It wasn’t long before I too was sucked into a deep hole, and a quick check of

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Challenges to Conquer? All You Need Is a Growth Mindset

By Katie Cress / Best Of, Life & Culture

Ever find inspiration in the most unexpected places? A TV show? A friendly cashier at the supermarket? A good book? I love when that happens, when fate just seems to throw you a signal, grabbing the attention of your heart just when you need it most. Well as fate would have it, I was in desperate need of some encouragement, and I found it when I was least expecting it. Just When I Was Starting to Lose Hope, Something Told Me to Hold On I was going through the growing pains of real adulthood in my mid-20s. In conversations with friends, I described this stage of life as a domino effect where, whether in my personal life or the lives of my

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Divorced and Remarried: The Life I Never Wanted and the Life I’m Blessed To Have

By Adina Larson / Relationships, Best Of

I often find myself in a weird place. It’s a place where there is a push and pull between what has happened, what could have been, and what is happening. Divorced and remarried. And I often find myself feeling guilty or ashamed when I experience this juxtaposition of happiness and sadness. I Am Divorced I am divorced. My ex-husband and I have three sons together. When I got married in 2011 at the age of 24, all I saw in front of me was a happy, hopeful, exciting life that he and I were beginning together. We had a lot of good, fun times together; and, of course like any relationship, but especially marriage, there were some really tough, tense times. Those hard

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