A reprinted post by my talented and beautiful friend Willow

What an amazing, awestruck, beautiful, intense, engaging day! We are almost two weeks out from our last day-of event for women and I am still hearing stories of life change! Nothing, absolutely nothing is better than that! At the day’s end, after hearing stories of God helping women get unstuck, after exercises and reflection, after reading scriptures that help unstick us, after being honest with ourselves, after breakout classes that covered everything from getting unstuck from all the clutter to getting unstuck in fear and a myriad of other options, after hearing from Erik Johnson, an amazing counselor who challenged us to think about thinking, we opened ourselves to Let God love us.


As a team, we had prayed and sculpted, planned and sewed, shopped and crafted, and at the day’s end we knew the greatest favor we could give ourselves as women was time to just simply be loved by God. For it is His love that ultimately chases us down and unsticks us if we allow Him to enter our stuck places. So we planned for a time of worship to allow Him to meet us where we find ourselves. And we even planned for these beautiful red hearts to float out of the lofty and high ceilings of First Presbyterian Church. But what we didn’t plan for was this….

As women were crying out to God to meet them in their marriages, in their pain, in their complacency, in their stuck dreams, these red hearts began fluttering down out of the sky while the worship band led us in song, singing “Oh what love…” And in a moment of spontaneity, little Everly, a daughter of one of the women on the Collide team, lifted her face toward the hearts falling out of the sky. It was like they were calling her. She put one foot in front of the other and slowly walked up to the stage. At one moment she looked back at her mama as if to ask “Iiiiiis it ok?” Both her mom and I nodded a yes, go, having no idea what she was going to do.

She stood on the stage and allowed the hearts to fall upon her. She stood unabashedly as if the hundreds of other women were not even there. With no care in the world she stretched out her arms and received them. She danced under them. She grabbed them and threw them up to fall upon her again. It was the most beautiful moment. Almost as if God Himself was inviting every women in that room to be like a child again, free of fear, free of insecurity, free of all the reasons we struggle to believe we are loved, and to just stand under His love and let it fall on us. We couldn’t have planned something more beautiful than this spontaneous moment that left us all wanting more. I am blessed by these days and am in awe at how God shows up in ways I do not expect, nor deserve. He is a God who loves His daughters and His love is here, present for us to dance under.

May we stretch out our arms, and by faith believe His love is for us too. And then may we dance unabashedly.