Today, I am providing a podcast that I hope will help and encourage you right where you are. Tomorrow, I will have a blog that speaks directly to the importance of decluttering our souls—taking away the doubts, the guilt, the fears, the stress and making a plan of how to stay close to our precious, loving Father, whatever befalls us during this new year, 2021.

As I look back through the years, I realize that what I needed as a young mama and wife is what I still need—friends and community. In this very strange time of unusual isolation and separation from our normal commitments, activities and communities, we have all felt hollow in our hearts. A longing for someone to understand, someone to celebrate life with.

God is looking for our heart-love for Him, not our perfection. In the midst of invisibility and times when no one sees or knows what is going on in our lives, the stresses from challenging children, the loneliness of a struggling marriage, the cleaning up of one more mess amidst the crumbs of our life. Yet, God wants to companion us through these places and show us His love.

Most of us are entering into the Christmas season and trying to figure out how to take care of the needs of our loved ones, keep feeding the masses, maintain our responsibilities and stay sane. Yet, there is a part of me, through the years, that has learned to “give in to the Christmas Season.” I don’t mean the commercialism or being too busy and over committed. But learning to enjoy the gifts given, however simple, the simple celebrations of home, the lights and the mystery of imagination that can be so much a part of the joy of life.

Sensing God is a discovery of Jesus in all of the sensory points embedded into each of us. It shows how the holiest acts in our daily lives are often the simplest: reveling in the beauty of nature; listening to our favorite music; eating a nourishing meal with family. These are potentially heartbeats of a living faith, and when we learn to recognize and respond to God's goodness in them, it draws us into redemptive participation with Him, the source of all beauty.

Long after each year's gifts have been forgotten, if we give to our loved ones a joyful, loving heart, we will have given them a gift that will be with them their whole lives. They will come to us again and again for the "Life" they need to feel, hear and be comforted by during every season.