Don't Mom Alone Podcast

What would it look like for you to live your best life? What if someone told you that you already are living your best life? Not because you’ve accomplished and arranged things just how you want, but because not only is God with you exactly where you are, but because he purposefully placed you there. My guest this week, author and mom Vaneetha Risner, encourages us with her harrowing story of intense suffering and God meeting her right in its midst. Frustrated by circumstances and eager to...

What does strength look like to you? Does it look like white knuckling it, holding your breath? Or does it look like putting your oxygen mask on first, and then attending to the needs of others? We all want to, need to be strong for those around us. But my guest this week reminds us there is a cost to being certain kinds of strong. Aundi Kolber is an author and therapist and her new book, Strong Like Water, helps unpack what true strength looks like and feels like and how to get there. In...

12Where do you turn for answers? Answers in parenting, answers in your career, answers when you encounter the negativity that seems to be lurking around every corner of life these days? My guest this week is a mom who came to a crossroads early in her parenting journey - what will I teach my kids about God? What do I even know about God? In the hiddens years of mothering her small children a deep relationship with God was forged that would serve as the foundation for Candace Cameron Bure’s...

Join Bruce and Heather for a Q + A episode where they talk about the importance of connection and communication in their marriage (Happy 24th Anniversary! 🎉🥳) and what it looks like to be in the thick of parenting teens. Links Mentioned: Nancy Houston "Then God Made a Woman" Champion Tribes Feeding the Mouth That Bites You: A Complete Guide to Parenting Adolescents and Launching Them Into the World by Kenneth Wilgus, PhD. Townsend Sheet of Emotional Needs (scroll down below the show...

What does a child need to flourish? There are a million answers to that question, but in all honesty, it’s a little different for each child. We have so many tools available to us to help us see our own personalities and tendencies more clearly. My guest this week is mom and author Karen Stubbs. She challenges us to be students of our kids’ personalities - to tell them the way they are wired is a good gift from God. She encourages us to learn our kids. Not just to correct or discipline...

Why do you think God created women? We know from Genesis that God didn’t say, “We have all these fish, we may as well have women too,” but instead he said, “It is not good” without women. Women take on all sorts of roles in our society, but it can be particularly difficult to suss out what exactly is our role in church and leadership. My guest this week is theologian Joel Muddamalle. Joel serves as the Director of Theology and Research for Proverbs 31 Ministries among other teaching and...

With phrases like “you complete me” our culture idealizes connection between spouses or even friends that has no boundaries. This brand of intimacy sounds appealing but it doesn’t work well practically. Our desire for connection is innate, but vulnerability is messy and risky. My guest this week, Kimberly Galindo, encourages us instead that the point where “I” end and “you” begin is the point where we’re different, but it is our real point of connection. In our conversation Kimberly gives us...

Some of our precious kiddos live with their sensitivity and intensity turned up a notch from the rest of us. What we think should be simple or routine can trigger big outbursts from our kids. Daily life might feel chaotic or unpredictable. As a mom of a sensitive or intense child you probably have a good idea of what doesn’t work, but it can be hard to discern what will help in those moments. My guests this week are Lynne Jackson and Lydia Rex of Connected Families. Together, they have...

Who saw all that you’ve done today? Anyone? A mom’s work usually goes unacknowledged. We want to measure our work by how the house looks or how the children behave, or by how put together we look when we go out. But my guest this week, Ann Voskamp, invites us to prioritize the unseen. She dares us to prioritize things like the riches of Christ, the promise of an eternity in his presence that is “utterly and completely fulfilling,” and our relationships with those around us. She helps us see...

What’s the first word that comes to mind if I say, “Describe your body”? It wasn’t “good”, was it? Fellow human, it should be! Because that’s what God himself says about your body! He says it is good. Just the way he created it - not some past or future version of it, how it is right now. My guest this week is Alisa Keeton and she has spent the last 10+ years serving others through her ministry, Revelation Wellness. She wants you to understand not only that your body is good, but just how...

You know what you’re seeing of someone else’s life as you scroll isn’t the whole story and yet we all find ourselves longing for that perfect vacation, that look of pure delight on their child’s face, or the silent moments they were able to enjoy. We all know “comparison is the thief of joy,” and we should run from it. But what if, rather than try to immediately silence or distract whatever we’re feeling in those moments, we got curious about what’s going on inside? What if we could filter...

“As parents our job is to be kinder and stronger, and wiser.” Those words are simple and sensible, but that directive can be deceptively hard. How do we mother - how do we live even - as our roles change hourly, monthly, yearly? In this second part of our conversation with Kari Kampakis she encourages us that if we are finding our identity in Christ and our joy in Him we can more easily navigate our ever-shifting roles as women. We can be free to teach and guide our children through life...

“I’m not a regular mom, I’m a cool mom” are the words of Mean Girl Regina George’s mom. We know she’s not a great example of a mom, but it can be difficult to sort out which moments are for connecting and which are for correcting. You want to be a valid voice in your daughter’s life as she enters their teen years and not just maintain, but grow your connection with her. It is possible to break from what society says and enjoy the teenage years. Mom of four girls and author, Kari Kampakis,...

We are all theologians. We may not be formally educated experts, but we all have beliefs about who God is and how and why he interacts with us (or doesn’t). All of our assumptions, presuppositions, opinions, and ideas make up our theology. The question is, where are we getting our information? What do we base our theology on? My guest this week is Phylicia Masonheimer, founder of Every Woman a Theologian, and her goal is “to teach [women] how to discern truth, know what (and Who) [they]...

The origins of our word vulnerable are found in a Latin word that means “to wound”. We all know that to be fully known is to open ourselves up to the possibility of being wounded. When we let down our armor, when we expose the wounds of our past as part of the healing journey is risky and scary, but my guest this week, Toni Collier, says, “Be brave.” Be brave enough to be just who you are before God - he knows you already and loves you unconditionally. Be brave enough to be just who you are...

“Good fences make good neighbors” is a line from Robert Frost’s Mending Wall, but the poem goes on to say, “Before I built a wall I'd ask to know / What I was walling in or walling out” So often in our lives we feel the unrest of chaos or dysfunction in our relationships, but we don’t know exactly what we need to wall out or wall in. My guest this week, Lysa TerKeurst faced a new season of life and wanted to enter it with wisdom and strength - caring for others and herself in each of her...

Grief has been called the unwanted visitor - it shows up when you don’t want it and it often stays longer than we would want. In the midst of seasons of suffering or grieving it’s so easy to feel isolated and to be isolated, the weight of bringing our real selves into community feeling like another burden to bear. Whatever dreams we might have had of how our life we go or what it would look like for us to serve God and others seem to be an impossibility. Meet my guest this week, Lindsey...

“Deck the Halls with Chaos and Unmet Expectations” - not the traditional words to the song but maybe more accurate? Advent is celebrating Jesus coming into our everyday life, meeting us humans in the spaces where we are. My guest this week, Mindy Rives, reminds us that our activities to celebrate Advent should be just that - woven into our everyday life. But so often we get buried in “failed” activities or the season zooms past us. Mindy’s excellent planning tool, Advent Prep Club, will...

The Chosen has taken the world by storm. It’s the largest fan supported entertainment project of all time with over 408 million views on its app alone. It’s a show about the Bible, about Jesus written from the unique perspective of the people Jesus chose to be around. It showcases Jesus’ incredible love and puts us the viewer right into the daily life of Jesus’ disciples and friends. Join Heather as she speaks with cast members and writers and more on The Chosen’s impact on their own lives...

Do you view other moms as collaborators or competitors? Whether it’s our achievements or our difficulties we often compare ourselves to other moms rather than come alongside them (or even celebrate them - gasp!). My guests this week say it this way - “[we] are committed to choosing collaboration over competition and running far from that scarcity mentality that there's just not enough at the table. Instead, we're just building a bigger table.” Jessica is the founder of Noonday Collections...