Welcome.

Everything you’ll find here has been part of my own journey. If I haven’t lived it, I don’t teach it.

There are few things I can say with certainty about my life.  But what I know without a doubt is that God pursues me in a relentless way – a way that I found to be painful and offensive in my earlier years.  I had such grand plans for my life; I was on my way to becoming a professional musician when God was finally able to get my attention.  

That’s when the thwarting began.

Now a Christian for over 25 years, I can look back and see his divine hand in it all, but at the time, it just felt like death.  And truly, that’s what it was, but not in the way I was interpreting his movement in my life.  God, in all his sovereignty, knew that the path I was on would bring about the death of my soul, so he orchestrated my emotional death.  The death of self.

I can look back now and thank him.

He knew musical success would become a prideful monster in my soul.  Relational success (the marriage I’d always dreamed of) would mean I’d have no need for his goodness and grace.  Material success would quickly turn into an insatiable hunger for more.  It’s just how I’m wired.

So, after a divorce at 23, an about-face on my music career which became an arduous journey into the world of Marriage and Family Therapy, more relational heartache than I thought one person could shoulder, and finally debilitating depression and anxiety, I surrendered.

It wasn’t pretty.  It still isn’t.  I’m not good at this surrender thing.  My mentor describes my personality as “high octane.” I’m an Enneagram 4w3 with the one-to-one instinct (SX).  I’m fiercely competitive, especially when it comes to relationships.  I feel life on a very intense level. When I’m angry, I shake.  When I’m happy, I laugh hard.  And when I fight for something, I fight with everything I’ve got.

But as a 4, shame is the ruling emotion in my life.  It kept me all bound up in silent knots, until someone came along and told me it was okay to untie them…and that I didn’t have to do it alone.  

Shame tells us that the things we keep in secret must stay hidden.  To expose them would surely bring about death.  But shame is a liar.  Yes, it feels like death to expose our shame, but the truth of the matter is that exposure causes the shame to shrivel up and lose its power.  Putting words to our shame in front of another is shame’s kryptonite.  

And so I learned to unravel the knots.  This is not always an easy task in Christianity.  While we understand in our minds that grace covers everything - every.single.thing - our hearts often aren’t convinced.  We go to church and feel the invisible pressure to put on a mask.

But when my mask meets your mask, what happens?

Nothing.

Nothing happens. Nothing is touched.  Nothing is changed.  

The Spirit is quenched.

More than anything, I long to see lives renewed, hearts touched, and souls formed in the ways of love and new life.

So if any of this sounds familiar, or even a little bit intriguing, I invite you to come and sit down at the table with me.  Join me in this fight for our hearts, for truth, for emotional honesty.  It would be such an honor to have you on this healing path with me.  I anticipate we’ll be great friends.