This new year, I'm unsubscribing to striving, planning, ambition, and goal-setting. And I am subscribing to surrender. Surrendering to the Lord doesn't mean you don't have any plans or goals. It means the Lord is the one guiding you. He is the one telling you which opportunity to say yes to. He creates new goals for you. He opens new doors for you. He gives you new ideas and desires. He will help you discern the right thing, the right one, and the right time. This year, slow

Sex, intimacy, and purity--these are all sensitive topics that aren't easy to talk about. But it's in the areas we keep private that the devil can easily slip in. I'm sharing my story so that hopefully you won't have to. Let there be light in dark places, words of truth and wisdom where there was once silence.

Single and Surrendered. You finally understand the beauty of God's design for mankind and marriage. You've established holy boundaries for dating and intimacy. You trust Him with the thing that was once the hardest to surrender. And yet...you're still hurting. You still feel the ache of your missing rib or missing mate. You fear missing out on love and intimacy if you don't settle. Being single and surrendered hurts. The price of hope is hurt. But without hope, there is only

Your hope is proof of the thing not yet seen. Your hope is proof of the harvest to come. Your hope is the seed of the harvest to come. Your hope comes from God. He's not asking you to give it up. Let your hope be proof of God's goodness, proof of His love for you. Let your persistent hope be a reminder that God is working behind the scenes, aligning things that will one day present a harvest He ordained for you before you were even born.

This past week has been hard. As much as I've engrossed myself in God's Word, embedded His truths in me, and rebuked the lies the devil has poured into me, I could only hold my ground for so long before the hopelessness tried to take root again. But what happened this week is so much bigger than the past seven days, so I'm going to back up to the beginning.