Grit and Grace Articles By Twyla Franz
| I’m excited to share I joined the wonderful team over at The Grit and Grace Project and will be writing regularly there as well as in all the places you currently find me. |
- 29 Life-Changing Books for Your Reading List
- Who Am I Beneath My Titles, Roles, and Labels?
- Why Trying to Be Perfect Is a Waste of Time
- 30-Day Gratitude Challenges Are Selling Us Short
- Hectic Schedule? How to Create a Morning Routine that Feels Doable
- How to Become Friends with Your Neighbors
- Ready to Change Your Life? Read These Books by Our Grit and Grace Life Writers
29 Life-Changing Books for Your Reading List
Life & Culture, Featured / By Twyla Franz
January waltzes in, dreamy and ambitious. Whispers permission to shred your list of what you haven’t finished, haven’t even started, from last year. She’s a bright new start and welcome friend.
Me? Just a girl who loves books, like you. I’ve handpicked my favorites from my bookshelf and I offer to you 29 of the most wonderful books sure to change your life. Let’s meander through my color-organized stacks and stop at these:
1. For the one holding her breath, walking faster, feeling the pressure to do more, balance it all, let no one down: Permission to slow and savor and grow.
Growing Slow: Lessons on Un-Hurrying Your Heart from an Accidental Farm Girl by Jennifer Dukes Lee
2. For the one trying to be superhero mom, worrying she’s messing her kids up, not taking care of herself: A better, freer way to live.
Remaining You While Raising Them: The Secret Art of Confident Motherhood by Alli Worthington
Who Am I Beneath My Titles, Roles, and Labels?
Faith, Featured / By Twyla Franz
Sometimes you’ve got to tell yourself what you’re made for. Because you forgot. Or it got lost in the loads of unfolded laundry, dishes stacked in the sink, papers from school in a messy stack of come-back-to-it-later.
If you’re like me, you forget that your roles aren’t you. Sure, you’re part mom, part wife, part daughter and sister, aunt and writer. But the way you fill your roles and the way they expose your lack says what you do, not who you are.
They define you in relation to others. Tell you how to show up. Who to love best. They’re important.
But your biggest purpose isn’t a title, a label, or a role.
It’s a name and a mission . . .
Why Trying to Be Perfect Is a Waste of Time
Life & Culture / By Twyla Franz
Let’s sit down, mama. Just for a minute. We both need it.
Your shoulders. They’re strong from carrying all the schedules, needs, preferences, expectations. But the pressure has formed knots that sent pain, dull and annoying, to your temples.
Take a long, slow breath, and as you exhale, relax your shoulders.
You don’t have to carry it all.
Be everyone’s everything.
Never forget a thing.
Show up early and prepared.
Be the last one to complain, ask for help, admit it’s too much.
You don’t have to be perfect.
In fact, as Alli Worthington explains in her new book Remaining You While Raising Them, “A perfect mom would completely mess up her kids.”
30-Day Gratitude Challenges Are Selling Us Short
Faith, Featured Article / By Twyla Franz
If gratitude is just for November, it will only change my life in November. But I’ve been wrecked by enough stories of gratitude deepening faith, restoring marriages, health, hope, replacing lies with truth, setting minds and hearts free to buy that gratitude is just for one month of the year.
As host of Begin Within: A Gratitude Series, I get a front-row seat to real people learning to practice gratitude and discovering the difference it makes. My goal for the series is to inspire ripple-effect, year-round gratitude. The gratitude challenges I create cast the same vision. Because what we cultivate inside our hearts turns our thoughts, our eyes, our steps. It seeps into our words and our tone. Our reactions and expressions.
The wide-reaching, life-altering impact of gratitude needn’t be confined to a single month. Rather, it’s a rhythm we can cultivate year-round.
Hectic Schedule? How to Create a Morning Routine that Feels Doable
Faith, Featured Article / By Twyla Franz
Before I tell you about the good and the doable of a morning routine, you should know that I’ve also been highly resistant to routine for most of my life. I’d dismiss the idea of a morning routine, a God-time routine, a bed-time routine because it felt restrictive. I got up every morning and went to bed at night all but a handful of times in my life, and spent time with God almost every day. But it always looked different and I preferred it that way. (And I got my fix of pulling multiple all-nighters in a row before I had my first kid. Honestly, maybe those times prepared me for parenting!)
But there comes a point when you realize what you’re doing isn’t working. That you’re half-living, and you’re not okay with it. For me, it wasn’t a sudden revelation, but rather, one that unfolded slowly, as is the way with many lessons worth learning.
How to Become Friends with Your Neighbors
Relationships, Featured / By Twyla Franz
It’s one thing to dream of neighbors gathering around your table when you have ample, decorated space, freshly cleaned bathrooms, and kids who keep their toys in their rooms and their crumbs on their plates. It’s a different kind of story when you’re renting a humble home with upside-down outlets. Unforgiving, flat-painted walls. Nicked linoleum. Then the dream gets turned round and round in your heart as you ask, “Why?” and “When?” and “How?”
But the best dreams don’t wait for us to be ready. They meet us in boring, over-tired, spilled cheerios, right-now moments. When we feel most inadequate. When we most need hope.
That’s where our family’s dream started. It’s also where it began to collect dust.
Ready to Change Your Life? Read These Books by Our Grit and Grace Life Writers
Life & Culture, Featured / By The Grit and Grace Team
“What you may not know is that many of our writers have dug a bit deeper and written books that can help you (or someone you love) on your journey. Are you ready to change your life? Below are a few to help you get started.”
The Grit and Grace Team