What if nature offers more than just resources and fresh air—what if it offers something for our mental and spiritual lives? In this essay, I’m writing on The Secret Garden and how important nature is for the formation of every person while drawing on my own personal story and the writings of Charlotte Mason and George MacDonald.

Have you ever felt like motherhood completely swallowed you whole? Like your identity, life, and passions all evaporated? I did, and as I neglected myself, I slowly fell apart. Yet God led me to stories, and used them to piece my heart back together.

How good, true, and beautiful children’s books can help us move from childishness to childlikeness, and renew our hope when we grow jaded by the world.

Do you struggle with a mental illness that you still have yet to be healed from? I do, and here are two books (and a guided journal) that have helped me weather the storm of anxiety and depression. This is my review of Jennifer Holmes’ books He Has Not Turned Away and When Mountains Do Not Move.

In wisdom we look to a future that is promised, not a future that is proven by our past.

A look at how fiction can reveal realities in our own hearts through the novel The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey.

Book review of Tim Challies book Seasons of Sorrow.

A book review of The Arrow and the Crown by Emma C. Fox, and reflecting on the battle between love and fear.

A book review of Operation Lionhearted by Maribeth Barber—a sci-fi book about memories, courage, and friendship.

You know Bilbo Baggins. After his long journey, he returns a different hobbit. We were made to do the same.

Being a mother has humbled me. Weekly I’m faced with my own questions and failures. Yet our Heavenly Father is the perfect parent to us all the time. And being our perfect parent, we can look to him and image his love to our children. In her latest book, Christina Fox reminds us of how God cares for us as his beloved children and how we can reflect such care to our children through our parenting.

A book review of Zach Keele’s book, The Unfolding Word. The Unfolding Word seeks to help us see how the entire Bible unfolds as one unified story held together by the gospel.

As I grieved our losses and trials, I, like Elisabeth Elliot, realized not all suffering falls into neat and tidy boxes. We can’t simply assess our pain and drop it into the right category and then deduce the results that should follow. Some, if not most, suffering is beyond our understanding.

What Corrie desires to show us in her book is that God is greater than any suffering we walk through, that the love and grace of his gospel permeates even the darkest places, like a Nazi concentration camp.

This is when I picked up Glenna’s book, The Promise is His Presence. In her book, Glenna took me by the hand and led me through her story of suffering, waiting, and unanswered prayers alongside the redemption narrative of Scripture from Genesis to Revelation.

Christina Fox’s book Sufficient Hope came to me during one of those waves of floundering and showed me what I truly needed: to be reminded of the gospel. “Whatever experiences we face in motherhood, we all need Jesus—and he is sufficient.” (p. 14).

In her book Idols of a Mother’s Heart, Christina Fox sets out to help mothers recognize the idols they have stored away in the corners of their hearts. But she doesn’t leave us mothers there with a pile of idols to clean up on our own—she guides mothers how to turn from those idols and back to God.

God has taught me to love the Psalms and rest in them. In weary times when my mind is too tired to focus and my heart is jumbled and distracted, I have found rest in studying the Psalms. I didn’t believe that a study of the Psalms would challenge me like it has and cause such growth. I was a fool to doubt God’s beautiful and inspired Word. 

“Morning Times, Nursery Rhymes, and My Journey Towards Sanctification.” Motherhood is sanctifying, and Cindy Rollins displays this through stories of laughter, tears, and celebration.