Join the quest and Accept The Love Challenge!
![How to Love Your Enemy… [When Evil Strikes]](https://rachelwrains.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/80D7B089-0A6D-4727-A587-1B1EA131E7DA.png)
If God really does exist, then why do bad things happen? Putting aside the age old question, temporarily. Do you believe evil exists? I doubt anyone denies evil exists. I think enough evidence exists to prove otherwise. But surely, if evil exists, then goodness must exist, too. And if the battle of good and evil…
![How to Love The Unlovable… [in the wake of another tragedy]](https://rachelwrains.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/9916C315-6131-4A51-90E8-E3AA83992B54.png)
Every time I hear of another school shooting, I always return to the same, recurring thought. “Woe is the suffering/misery this person surely endured to have committed such an unfathomable act of horror.” Often you’ll read the words, “I hope the killer rots in hell.” But clearly they’ve already experienced hell. Hell on this earth….
![Talk to Your Kids… [Active Shooter Alert: The Call No Parent Wants to Receive]](https://rachelwrains.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/0F8C2CC7-7265-4C67-B4FE-DE28DE7A004D.png)
One fall morning in 2015, I received a call no parent wants to receive… An active shooter was reported on my daughter’s campus. And not only was the shooter in her immediate vicinity, but he was headed towards the College of Business. As she took cover in a professor’s office along with her classmates, we…
![“LOVE Makes You Do Crazy Things…” [Really!?]](https://rachelwrains.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/41E420DD-46A5-4490-950A-69EC10C017ED.png)
Love can’t make us to do crazy things as suggested by Will Smith last night during his acceptance speech at the Academy Awards. Crazy good things, maybe!? But God is LOVE and love endures all things. Perhaps the wisest words of the night [regarding the incident] came from Denzel Washington. “In your highest moments, be…
![I Am From poem… [Finding Hope and Healing]](https://rachelwrains.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/0191D615-E662-4543-AB5D-8533679CD733.jpeg)
I am from Gospel sounds. From Sunday dinners made from scratch. I am from parents who tried as best they could, but also lost their way. I am from magnolias tall whose beckoning branches encouraged me skywards—always. I am from hand-me-down dresses and scrapbooks full of girlhood achievements. From Jack and from Nellie. From as…
I try to live by two mottos. 1️⃣ Assume the best of people. Even when proven wrong, be cautiously optimistic! All of us are fighting hard battles this side of heaven at one time or another. 2️⃣ Never withhold a compliment. No matter who the recipient may be!? The world has enough criticism and harsh-ness….
![Letting Go… [and Choosing Forgiveness]](https://rachelwrains.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/4D3767FE-F460-4E0E-9863-4C9FCE66CEEF.jpeg)
Fall is a season for letting go… Although it doesn’t feel very Fall-ish here in Hometown, OK with temps hovering around the nineties—I’m desperately searching for autumn-ness. Maybe it’s because the temperatures refuse to succumb. Or maybe it’s because we’re sliding into my mama’s favorite season and birthday month. But a heaviness hangs in the…
![Prayers of Blessings… [and tears]](https://rachelwrains.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/66796F73-C7C9-40E4-8FE7-D9292EE0D441.jpeg)
Anybody who knows me at all, knows I’m a crier. As my family will attest, one risen lump in my throat and it’s ‘water works’ city. My grandmother, Nellie, was a crier. So much so, her crying became folly for a long-standing, ‘inside’ family joke… Around the late seventies, at the end of a very…
![How to Walk in LOVE in Hurt or Trauma… [learning to love those who’ve hurt us.]](https://rachelwrains.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/762FCE60-F649-4CCA-938D-0B959142E838-1021x1024-1.jpeg)
Acknowledge the Reality of Hurt. The reality is we live in a fallen, imperfect world full of messy, broken people and it’s only a matter of time before we are hurt by someone or we inflict pain on another. We are even told in God’s Word that we are to expect trouble in this world….