So I guess it’s Memorial Day weekend – already!! That means the pools open here in the south. Do they open pools on Memorial Day weekend in colder places? I’d love to know. If you live in a cold place, let me know in the comments.

I can’t tell you that I’m ready for pool season. I wish I were, but I’m not. I have much to say about the whole eating, dieting, exercising saga (for me it’s a saga), and I plan to write about it soon. But for now I’ll just leave it with – I’m not ready. But then again what is “ready”? I know that even if I was the perfect height and perfect weight – whatever that means – I still wouldn’t be ready. Again, more of these ongoing battle to come . . .

However, we are planning to go to the beach in a few weeks, and I did find the cutest ever swimsuit at Target. Well, I think it’s the cutest ever, plus it was inexpensive. It’s been years since I’ve been in the market for a one-piece swimsuit. You can read more about that in this post and in this post at MoretoBe.com. Do you remember that YouTube video, The Evolution of the Swimsuit, that went a little viral last year by Jessica Rey? Well, these are the swimsuits she designs. In my opinoin, they are so classic and glamorous, and I absolutely love them! I am not buying one yet mainly because they are more expensive, but a swimsuit from her is on my wish-list.

Join us for a Summer Online Bible Study!

Speaking of “perfect bodies” and swimsuits and the beach . . . what about those lies we tell ourselves? As you can tell, I’m still struggling with believing lies about my body image. But the timing couldn’t be more perfect because this Wednesday we are starting a Summer Online Bible Study right here at Triple Braided! We will be reading Lies Women Believe by Nancy Leigh DeMoss, and we will meet here in this private Facebook group. Will you join us?

Even though the book will help you go deeper, you don’t have to buy a book. Join in the discussion anyway!

(more…)

There’s this delicate tension I have always felt here, writing at Triple Braided. I’ve told bits and pieces of its journey before, but I think I’ll tell some of it again because it doesn’t seem to go away. I say tension, but it’s not a bad tension. It’s a tension to want to serve all my readers with my words.

You see, I am obviously married. But I desperately want to disciple single women because no one discipled to me properly when I was single. And I was single for longer than I wanted to be. And it was painful. And now I know there was a better way. At the time I just didn’t know that way. I want to be for others what I didn’t have myself.

However, even though I’ve written here inconsistently at times and without a focus much of the time, I have found that I also have married readers. This is where the tension lies. I don’t think single women want to read about marriage and baby topics just like married readers probably don’t want to read about dating.

So there’s my delicate tension.

I bring all this up because recently I asked you to take a short survey. Personally, I love taking surveys. I don’t know why except I think they’re fun. Maybe it’s because I get to talk about myself. Anyway . . .

The results of the survey are just wonderful! All of you actually wrote out sentences to the answers! I know that takes more time and thought than just clicking an answer, and I want to tell you “thank you” tons because they have helped me tremendously.

So here is some of what I’ve learned about you, the readers of Triple Braided.

62.96% are single.

37.04% are married.

33.33% like posts about your relationship with Jesus.

29.17% like posts about mentoring younger women because you’re married.

16.67% like posts about singleness.

16.67% also like posts about dating.

4.17% like posts about current hot topics.

Most of the readers are in their 30’s with the 20-age-range coming in second.

So where do I go from now? I’m going to continue to write for both of you – single and married – to hopefully serve both of you well. Jesus is my favorite person to write about, so that’s good most of you like that, and the great thing is He’s for ALL of us and relationship neutral!

Mentoring is also very close to my heart, and so I am going to probably start adding in some of those posts. One reader mentioned that she’d like posts about preparing for marriage. That sounds like a good idea to me. I know some single women really don’t like to talk about marriage at all. If you stop by on a “marriage day”, please just come back another day. There will be something for everyone.

And in closing, thank you for being here above all else! You do not know how much joy you and this blog brings me!

(more…)

It’s hard to believe that it’s Friday again. I don’t know if the week seems to go by fast because I mark the end of each one with this post, or if it seems to go by fast because it’s truly going by fast.  Having a little 18 month old mini-me walking around the house, noticeably changed every single morning she wakes up, I have a sneaking suspicion it’s the latter. Time is going by fast.

On Tuesday this past week I took my toddler girl with me to vote. There was a Senate and House seat open here where we live in North Carolina, along with a Supreme Court Associate Justice seat. Typically I don’t think much about voting. It’s one of the many American things I take for granted. But this past Tuesday was different. As I walked out of the small church fellowship hall, the voting location for our area, holding my female toddler, and me of course a female too, the hundreds of girls taken captive in Nigeria flashed across my mind. I smiled at the three people handing out campaign flyers, two men and a young woman, told them to have a nice day, got in my car and started to cry. I couldn’t help it.

Here I was a woman – by the world’s standards, and even history’s standards as far back as the Old Testament, just merely a woman with no real worth or dignity – walking out of a place where I exercised my God-given right to a voice in our country’s political system. And there, on the other side of the world, young girls are enslaved primarily because they were going to school.

Pure grace.

That’s all there is to it. Pure grace reigning down on me from Heaven. Pure grace for being born in a country where the goal is for women to be treated with the integrity that God gave them. No, our country hasn’t always gotten it right. And no, in some ways it’s still not right. But at least I’m not enslaved for going to school. And not only that, I get to vote.

(more…)