5 Minute Friday and The Grove: Encouragement and Voice

Long time no writing, eh? Oh how I have missed the Five Minute Friday community! It's a long story, but here I am and so happy to be! Before my hiatus I was making a bit of a challenge out of joining with the FMF crew and the new Velvet Ashes community in The Grove on Fridays. Well, I'm back at it.

Curious about what I'm up too? Click on over to read all about it and then consider linking up. Also, are you a woman serving overseas? Are you craving community with women who get it? Velvet Ashes is the place! 

Here we go! My take on Encouragement (FMF) and Voice (The Grove)

That voice in my head can get awfully loud sometimes. The way it knows just where my weaknesses are and never fails to find me at my lowest. And I wonder sometimes why I feel more insecure as a thirty year old then my self confident, self assured eighteen year old self ever did.

We hear it from all sides as teen girls, "Be independent", "Follow your dreams", "Don't let anyone tell you that you can't!" and many of us take it to heart and we'll not be held back or down or up in the going places.

But then life happens and all that independence can have us feeling isolated and alone as mamas and then the voice starts. The voice telling us that we're failing on every front.

Our own voices can be silenced in the process. We think we don't have anything to offer another woman. No words of wisdom or pieces of hope to share. So we look the other way on the playground and we keep the other women at church at arm's length and we don't tell the un-fine stories.

We block the encouragement of others with trite sayings that make us look far more fine than we really are. Advice becomes the barrier to real heart healing encouragement and we talk about diapers, bottles and breastfeeding, but never move past to the real stuff.

Because that voice in our head tells us that they don't matter, we don't matter and it holds us back and down and up from all the places that we could go. All the women that could feel a little lighter and freer if we just used our own voice to silence the one in their heads.

Don't underestimate what the power of your own voice can do to encourage a heart. 

The only way to silence the voice in your head is to out talk it. Speak of God's goodness. Tell the truth about all the hard places. Make your life a safe place for others to silence the voices in their head.