• Devotionals,  Faith

    What's Your Story – Rayni

    [Guest Post by Rayni Peavy] I’d never been afraid to fly. From the time I was a baby I’ve been flying on a regular basis. Even flying across the country a few months after 9/11 didn’t scare me because I trusted God with my life. And then it happened. Several years ago, out of nowhere, I began having anxiety attacks. Unfortunately two of them came back to back on a long plane ride overseas. It was a traumatic experience, to put it mildly. From that moment on stepping onto a plane was a trigger for extremely high and almost unbearable anxiety. But, I have found that when I trust God…

  • Devotionals,  Faith,  Relationships

    What's Your Story – Ashley

    [Guest Post by Ashley] I always had a close relationship with God, and felt I could always lean on Him. In high school, I got a job at a leather store in the mall. I was a trainer on the football team and fell head over heels for popular guy on the team. I had my whole life planned out. I wanted to be a stay at home mom and be an active part of a church. I knew I wanted to save myself for marriage, but I started to drift from God. He wasn’t into going to church or praying. I ended up dating him and we had a…

  • Devotionals,  Faith,  Relationships

    What's Your Story – Brittany

    I want to introduce to Brittany Erbaugh. She was my first roommate ever! We met in San Antonio, TX because of a nine-month discipleship-training program, “Ambassador For Christ.” She was my roommate and classmate. Because of her influence, she made me watch all three of Lord of the Rings movies. And to get her back, I hooked her on the CBS show, “Survivor (she still watches it). And, one thing we did agree on was Blue Bell Ice Cream, Chick fil A, and ABC’s Lost. But, enough about our relationship! Brittany is all too familiar with her spiritual battle and mine. I left Texas before I had the chance to…

  • On Writing,  Relationships

    Singleness Is NOT A Disease

    [Guest Post] American culture values independence. Somewhere between my twenty-fifth and twenty-seventh birthdays, my status as a single man in the church downgraded from laudable to questionable. People stopped celebrating my singleness as a gift affording me undivided focus on performing God’s will (see I Corinthians 7) and began seeing it as a problem. They also began analyzing why I had failed to solve it. The message was clear: My “malady” of being single was somehow my fault. It wasn’t anything I did. It was what I didn’t do enough of. I didn’t do enough to prove my independence. American men who cannot demonstrate enough independence begin to feel weak…

  • Relationships

    Marc's Thoughts on Dating

    My husband and I were discussing the release of my book. I happened to ask him what his thoughts were on dating. He said he’d have to think about it, and knowing my husband, I knew he’d come up with something deep. Here are Marc’s 5 Thoughts on Dating: “If you pressed me to provide thoughts on dating you might be surprised on how little I would have to say. Of course men do not think in the same ways women do about these matters. Most of us guys have not dreamed about marriage since we were young, constantly thought about our knightness in shining armor, or kept a notebook of…

  • Devotionals,  Faith

    The Spirit of Forgiveness Part V

    Today’s blog post is the fifth and final post in a series on The Spirit of Forgiveness by Marc Fisher, my husband, for the week of Advent. “There I will meet with you and, from above the mercy seat, from between the two cherubim that are upon the ark of the Testimony, I will speak intimately with you of all which I will give you in commandment to the Israelites” (Exodus 25:22, AMP). And what comfort. One place I will be available to you in counsel, in whatever situation, here is where I will be and in no other place. I will meet with you in the place of conflict…

  • Devotionals

    The Spirit of Forgiveness Part IV

    Today’s blog post is the fourth of five in a series on The Spirit of Forgiveness by Marc Fisher, my husband, for the week of Advent. “And the cherubim shall spread out their wings above, covering the mercy seat with their wings, facing each other and looking down toward the mercy seat” (Exodus 25:20, AMP). God continues, facing each other, or as the King James says, their faces shall look one to another. What a magnificent thing! Being married this has become even a more enlightened truth for me now! It takes two on either side, the polarity of everything that is in nature, God, the church, and the callings…

  • Devotionals

    The Spirit of Forgiveness Part III

    Today’s blog post is the third of five in a series on The Spirit of Forgiveness by Marc Fisher, my husband, for the week of Advent. “And you shall make two cherubim (winged angelic figures) of [solid] hammered gold on the two ends of the mercy seat” (Exodus 25:18, AMP). But we must also realize that “And thou shalt make two cherubims of gold, of beaten work”, that it is all beaten out of gold! The willingness to bear tension is the willingness to suffer pain. Don’t miss that! God is the author of that tension. Pain is to defer immediate gratification for something distant and to wait on it…

  • Devotionals

    The Spirit of Forgiveness Part II

    Today’s blog post is the second of five in a series on The Spirit of Forgiveness by Marc Fisher, my husband, for the week of Advent. “And you shall make a mercy seat (a covering) of pure gold, two cubits and a half long and a cubit and a half wide” (Exodus 25:17, AMP). Can you live with incompleteness knowing it precedes something whole that is yet to come? It is here but not yet here. It is like the kingdom of God is here yet not yet here. We have it in part but will have it in full. Man tends to not like things in part. But the…

  • Devotionals

    The Spirit of Forgiveness Part I

    Today’s blog post is the first of five in a series on The Spirit of Forgiveness by Marc Fisher, my husband, for the week of Advent. “Yet now has [Christ, the Messiah] reconciled [you to God] in the body of His flesh through death, in order to present you holy and faultless and irreproachable in His [the Father’s] presence“ (Colossians 1:22, AMP). In 1994, in the course of only 100 days, the world sat back as it witnessed one of the more cruel and inhumane episodes in human history, the slaughter of over 800,000 people in the African country of Rwanda. Almost 20% of the country’s population was wiped out…