Right now, we need to be creative. We need to be creative with our workdays and hanging out with friends and birthdays. We need to be creative with a tired Tuesday and another Friday night of takeout. We need to learn a new way to choose champagne even when it feels like there is not ever a reason to. We need to find places to sing after the musicals we were in got canceled and reasons to dance because Shipoopi might never see the stage.

I am not and never will claim to hold all of the magical tools to positive communication, and I am a big proponent of continued learning. I do wholeheartedly believe, though, that by practicing the act of acknowledging, you will reap the benefits of more open, honest, and authentic communication in your conversations and relationships with others. And, who doesn’t want some of these in their life?! Here are just a few ways the act of acknowledging can transform your relationships and future interaction.

In less-than-ideal seasons, it’s practically effortless to focus on the bad, on all the ways this season isn’t what we want or hope. But there are a few things my new job and season have reminded me of that are better responses to a less-than-ideal season.

Hard feelings look different for everyone. For some, it’s paralyzing; you feel like your brain is put on pause from too many thoughts flying around. For some, it can manifest as physiological symptoms: headaches, stomachaches, fatigue, insomnia.

Several years ago I experienced the most pain I’d ever endured in my life. The kind of pain that envelops you, holds you just under the water while you gasp for air. It wasn’t a single incident, rather a series of events over the course of several years. My world felt like it had crashed in around me, and I knew my heart would never be the same.

And the best gift we can give is the gift of our willing and open selves in friendship.

Today, I’m sharing from my personal experience with Arabic, to encourage you to try out language learning and suggest some tools that have helped me. This post is mainly meant for monolingual English speakers in the U.S., but if you’re already bilingual or multilingual, or speak a different native language, I hope it can still be helpful!

We are never just one thing. Our identity is made up of hundreds of puzzle pieces. The bigger picture never stops growing. Every single day we continue adding to it because it demonstrates our story.

The month of August taught me how to say goodbye to the Everyday People.

Answer this question: Am I willing to do some unlearning and re-learn how to create a new narrative in my thought-life? If the answer is yes, keep reading.

As someone who’s dealt with anxiety for nearly a decade, I wish people in the Church had a better understanding of it because they often view it incorrectly and cause harm as a result.

Reading no longer fits this world. Because it requires a certain level of removal from society, I am stuck within the possibility of being caught unaware of danger, calamity, or breaking news updates. With the world pressing in on itself, I feel I no longer have the option to create the silence, space, or time it takes to read.

I stopped going to church several years ago. It wasn’t that we’d had a falling out. We just moved several times in as many years and never found a home church like the one we’d left.

As many of us prepare to end our summer by jumping back on the computer (for work or school or date nights), there are some ways we can be proactive in battling the endless cycle of cyber meetings:

We now live in a society where seeking mental help is normalizing and accepting. However, mental health in the Black community is neglected a lot. It is looked down upon to go to counseling or talk to a therapist.

I’ve been learning the fine art of balance in my life recently. Not necessarily intentionally, but life has a way of handing you what you need right when you need it sometimes.

With her characteristic nuance and care, Lore Ferguson Wilbert dives into this topic fraught with so much controversy and concern in her new book, Handle With Care: How Jesus Redeems the Power of Touch in Life and Ministry. Exploring what touch looks like in the context of different relationships, Lore encourages us to reframe how we think about touch and see it for what it can be — a beautiful, powerful gift and ministry tool to ourselves and others.

For pretty much the entirety of January 2020, I really didn’t feel like myself. I was crying every few days. I was having a hard time sleeping. Everything in my life felt boring, mundane, and generally unsatisfying.

Basically, I was stuck.

Here are three guardrails to help you show up on social media in the healthiest way possible.

One undergraduate chooses to practice gratitude when the global pandemic brings her college career to an abrupt end.