The Heart in Training Blog

My daughter's friends think she's lucky, because instead of just sending her to therapy, I go myself.

Moms need friends who help them be present with their children. Here are some tips to recognize these precious people.

If Mother's Day is painful, it may be because we are expecting superlatives instead of realistic human moms and relationships with them.

I want to point out a couple of things that make cuss words in the mouth of Jesus followers an unholy alliance.

“Crazy” has become the word we use for unprecedented events, tragedies, and unforeseen circumstances. The first part of Why Words Matter.

We've been invited, in so many ways, into people's personal space. Let's work on respecting that privilege.

I started reading about Post Traumatic Growth in the summer of 2020, because I was feeling, well, traumatized. Rather than lament all...

This is Part Three of a Three-Part Series I set out this week to write about what I learned about being an extrovert during two years of...

Part One of a Three-Part Series Growing up in church, Sundays meant we were going to church service and then fellowship on the patio. Our...

I am one of those moms to whom their children have to give instructions before they walk into a social setting. “Mom, don’t dance in...

If you’ve read my long enough or heard me speak, you know that I eventually understood myself to be codependent: a helper, fixer, and...

This Is Part Three of the Series: Why Risk Real Relationships. Lately I’ve been finding myself nostalgic for the communities of my past....

I'm convinced that no one is capable of seeing how weird they are on their own. And knowing you are like, unhealthy weird, is pretty...

This is Part One of a four-part series: Why Risk Real Relationships. For the last year, I’ve been going through a bit of a complex...

Last week I called my friend Jodi to check on her. Jodi is one of my favorite people, one of the J’s I dedicated my book to. (See Chapter...

The pandemic continues, but we’re also processing part of the pandemic. We went a year with no weddings, no kids’ birthday parties, no...

Parenting an introvert is awkward. For example: For years, I hosted a number of annual neighborhood gatherings. If they were “supposed”...

It’s advent season and all my wonderful writer friends are writing deep posts about spiritual things, and I love reading them. But I’m...

My husband and I like to say that we broke in two sets of grandparents. Jeff and I are the firstborns in both our families. We got...

In, Anne of Windy Poplars written by L.M. Montgomery in 1936, a character I’ll simply call Old Lady, said, “This is a degenerate age,...