Suggested reading from the Editor's personal library.

I love America! The land of the free, the home of the brave, and the amazing freedoms She offers. As this great land of ours celebrates 250 years of independence, I’d be remiss not to express my heartfelt gratitude for the untethered freedom to accomplish God’s holy calling on my life—to publish Living Real Magazine.

Have you ever experienced the magic of taking an adventure to faraway places simply through the pages of a book?

While I’m very concerned about what is and what isn’t happening regarding Iran, what keeps me up at night, and often on my face before the Lord, is the apostasy within the visible church. I ache for the souls of those who hear the Word of God but don’t intend to obey it. 

Every believer in Christ faces the same predicament— how to stay strong in difficult times. Living real in Christ carries the demand to live out the reality of who we are as Christians in a world where wars and rumors of wars seem to be the order of the day. 

Our window of time is closing fast. The Church Age is coming to an end.

One morning before dawn, my oldest son, Matthew, and my youngest son, Joel, crawled  into my lap during my daily Bible reading time. Joel, in kindergarten at the time, declared with excitement, “I see sight words, Mommy.” “Which ones?” I asked. He proudly replied, “Lord, God, Jesus, Savior.” Matthew interjected, “Those aren’t sight words!” This ignited an argument between them. Matthew’s final score was announcing, “Those words aren’t on any of our teachers’ sight words lists.”

After years of prayer, planning, perseverance, and faith, we are humbled and overjoyed to finally share this long-awaited news: the doors of Karis Home are officially open!

As a therapist for a little over a decade, I have had the pleasure of working with many individuals, couples, and families. The results of these encounters have varied based on where, when, and how the sequencing of patterns have reached fertile hearts. I can objectively say that the moment I allowed my faith to infiltrate the room is the moment I began to see more healing in the lives of the people I counseled. As a result, I continue to speak about faith and belief in therapy due to the underlying spiritual struggle that presents itself with each encounter. To understand why, allow me to share some of my story.

I thought I was prepared to speak to a group of teenage girls for our Youth Girls’ Friendsgiving. I mapped out and rehearsed exactly what I was going to say. However, the night before I was to speak, I was almost involved in a car accident. My mind immediately rushed back to the car crash I was in with my sister the year before. Due to that accident, we both acquired permanent injuries and conditions which continue to affect our everyday lives.

Spring arrives like a gentle invitation. The days grow longer, the air softens, and something stirs within us as the heaviness of winter subsides. As warmer months arrive, we beg for small, sustainable shifts in how we eat and how we care for ourselves.

In the last issue of Living Real, I shared a shift in my thinking about financial peace. I used to view financial peace as an accumulation of wealth. But with each financial goal reached, I set another and another. As I found myself treating the accumulation of money as the source of my peace and not God, my mindset changed.