Our Generosity Framework: A Financial Strategy

Bailey Lenzen 5 min read

A Snail Mail Lottery I’m sure it’s not just me, but I still get a thrill out of checking the mail. You never know what you might find! This held particularly true for me one day when I was home for a summer in college. There was a letter addressed to me by a wealthy man who used to work with my mother. This man happened to the instigator of my interest in attending Texas A&M, and I had never received anything from him before. Enclosed in this envelope was a letter wishing me well at A&M – and a check for $2,000.  Two. Thousand. Dollars! From a man I had not seen or spoken to in two years.  Growing up as an only child of a single parent, we often found ourselves the beneficiaries of generosity from my mom’s coworkers. Usually, it was a gift card at Christmas or […]

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Read Scripture Before COVID-19 Headlines

Bailey Lenzen 5 min read

How many people were diagnosed today with COVID-19? How many deaths have there been today? Which celebrities have been diagnosed today? Had you asked me this last week when COVID-19 was beginning to spread rapidly in the United States, I would have been armed with the answers because I have been watching the news so closely. My husband and I would wake up in the morning, open our phones, and look at the news to see what we missed since we went to bed. A similar story followed throughout the day as we anxiously waited to see what exciting new headline would become a topic of conversation. It made it even easier when people we passed by sitting on benches, at the tables next to us at restaurants, and most of our friends were talking about it as well. I noticed two main responses when people began to opine on […]

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Laying Down My Life (Do I have to?!)

Bailey Lenzen 5 min read

“Lord, I lay down my life for you.” “Really? Will you lay your life down for me?” Jesus asks Peter in John 13:38 (NLT).  Will I lay my desires for my career, my free time, my ambitions, my relationships, my reputation for Our Father? Well, I don’t know. I’m willing to lay down maybe one of those, maybe I’ll give one night a week to serve a person or a community. Maybe I’ll begrudgingly accept that the reason I didn’t get those jobs over the years: God didn’t want me to have it.  See, Lord, I’m sacrificing my will!  So I thought. I thought this could the extent of the sacrifice. Except that once we pray the prayer, we have asked God to do more than what we may realize. When fear debilitates us or anxiety overcomes us, and we question God’s will for our lives. For me, it’s at […]

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Why God Requires Our Vulnerability

Bailey Lenzen 4 min read

Anyone who knows me knows that I am always armed with a Brene Brown quote. While she is accepted by a wider secular audience, in many ways her research on shame and vulnerability has many inextricable links to how God created us. Our brains are wired by emotion and the capacity to make connections with others. He asks us to see every person with compassion because He sees us this way (Exodus 34:6). In high school, I went to this megachurch in Fort Worth. One day the pastor was preaching on Matthew 9:36-37: When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few.” He tied these verses to this main message: “Lord, help me to see what You see and feel what You feel […]

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Can faith really move a mountain?

Bailey Lenzen 4 min read

Recently, I have felt overly burdened by the little details as it relates to the coming changes in my life. I am frustrated that regardless of the area of my life, I feel unlike myself. I can rationalize to myself, let others who are close to me help me cope, but at the end of the day, the fox in the garden returns. The wedding venue calls because they wrote the wrong time down, or the bureaucracy called the state government makes it quite inconvenient to get a marriage license for people who don’t live in the same city, or some marriage paperwork went awry, or… you get the drift. I find myself somehow stressed again about some likely unimportant thing that is causing me to worry and work feverishly to organize and control in an effort to mitigate the problems. I think somehow underneath it all I am under […]

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I’m pretty scared to get married

Bailey Lenzen 5 min read

I’m getting married!!!! This is the point where you respond with, “CONGRATULATIONS!!!” It’s at this moment when my former pastor’s voice echoes in my head from when he announced to us all in a sermon in 2016 that “Marriage is like dying a thousand small deaths every day.” I was never the gal who pined about her future husband and kids, so adding on the higher calling as a married Christian couple, that learning only seemed to further reinforce that I’m in no rush to get married. I’ll start thinking about that in about 5-10 years, I told myself. Three years later … and I’m getting married. And the dying a thousand small deaths is near…! “You may have learned where problems typically exist for you as a couple, and you may have learned how to solve them together. You may have identified places where you and your marriage need […]

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Remembering Whose Daughter I Am

Bailey Lenzen 3 min read

See what great love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God! And that is what we are! The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. (1 John 3:1-2)

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Experiencing the Word

Bailey Lenzen 4 min read
Photo by Aaron Burden on UnsplashPhoto by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

When I first came to truly understand what the gospel says in college, that understanding was primarily as a result of discovering the joy of digging into Scripture. Throughout high school, I never understood why we were asked to mull over what deep meanings were tucked away in the books we had to read. Yet when I was taught later that the Bible had many different meanings that were discoverable if only we take the time to meditate and search the Scripture (Acts 17:11), I was overwhelmed with excitement and curiosity. I knew I would never be able to understand it all, but I would seek to do so as much as I could.

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