4156 The Secret of Being Content
Create Your Now with Kristianne Wargo
"I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want." ~ Philippians 4:12 Contentment didn't land in Paul's lap like some spiritual gift he unwrapped one morning. It was forged and tested, including shipwrecks, beatings, imprisonment, and hunger. He was refined through every season that could have, and maybe should have, shaken him loose from his faith. Desire to be supported and encouraged by other like-minded women? Join us at the . ...
info_outline
4155 Celebrate Your Spouse
Create Your Now with Kristianne Wargo
When was the last time you actually celebrated your spouse? Not on their birthday or your anniversary. Not some calendar-mandated holiday where Hallmark reminds you it's time to show up. This is a random, ordinary, nothing-special kind of day, when you look at the person doing life beside you and say, "I see you. And I'm grateful." Celebrate your spouse! Now, if you had to think about it, you're not alone. Desire to be supported and encouraged by other like-minded women? Join us at the . #RelationshipBuilders #CreateYourNow #LoveAndMarriage We love our spouses. Deeply. But a lot of times,...
info_outline
4154 Before the Bell Rings
Create Your Now with Kristianne Wargo
There is something about the start of a new school year that carries both excitement and weight. The backpacks are packed, the outfits are picked out, and the alarm is set for a time no one in the house has seen in weeks. But before the bus pulls up, before the shoes are tied and the lunches are grabbed, there is a window of time that belongs to you and your family. And what you do with it matters more than you might think. It's before the bell rings. It's that morning window, the window that doesn't just happen. It is built. And if you are a parent staring down the start of a new school year,...
info_outline
4153 One More
Create Your Now with Kristianne Wargo
I know you're tired. I know that thing you've been carrying — that weight you keep picking up every single morning, even though nobody would blame you for setting it down — I know it's heavy. And I know you've told yourself more than once that you're not sure you have another round in you. But here's what I also know: you have one more in you! You're still here. Desire to be supported and encouraged by other like-minded women? Join us at the . #Inspiration #CreateYourNow #DailyMotivation You're still listening to this. You're still showing up. You're still breathing and fighting and...
info_outline
4152 The Woman in the Mirror
Create Your Now with Kristianne Wargo
There's a moment — and if you're honest, you know exactly the one I'm talking about — where you catch your reflection and the first thing that crosses your mind isn't kind. It's not always about what you look like physically, although sometimes it is. More often, it's deeper than that. It's the look in your own eyes that says, I thought I'd be further along by now. It's the quiet measuring of the woman in the mirror that happens when you compare who you are today against who you imagined you'd be at this point. And just like that, the woman staring back at you becomes not enough....
info_outline
4151 Design Your Day
Create Your Now with Kristianne Wargo
Why is it that we can pour ourselves into everyone else's schedule, everyone else's crisis, everyone else's to-do list, but when it comes to our own day, we just… wing it? We wake up, already behind before our feet hit the floor, and we spend the next twelve or sixteen hours reacting. Putting out fires. Managing the chaos. Surviving until we can collapse back into bed and do it all over again tomorrow. And somewhere in the middle of all that surviving, we forget the most important thing. Our own day. The one God gave us. The one we will never, ever get back. So design your day! Psalm...
info_outline
4150 Stop Going Back
Create Your Now with Kristianne Wargo
Have you ever made a decision, felt good about it for a moment, and then spent the next three days replaying it in your mind like a movie you can't turn off? You made the call. You weighed your options. You moved. And then — almost out of nowhere — the doubt crept in. Did I really think that through? What if I'm wrong? Maybe I should have waited. Stop going back! When we make a decision and clarity stalls, something uncomfortable starts to bubble up. It's the fear of being stuck. Not stuck because the decision was wrong, but stuck because we won't let go of it long enough to see where...
info_outline
4149 Overflow with Hope
Create Your Now with Kristianne Wargo
When you feel like all you're doing is running away from or toward all the things, it's hard to find joy and peace in life. You can get down and out about your circumstances, and all hope feels lost. But as Paul says in Romans 15:13, "May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit." Have you ever had one of those seasons where it feels like you're just running? Running toward the next thing on your list. Running away from the thing you don't want to face. Running in circles because you're not even sure...
info_outline
4148 Look For Something To Work With
Create Your Now with Kristianne Wargo
There's a moment in every marriage where you have to make a choice. You can stand there replaying every missed pass — every time your spouse came up short, every promise that got fumbled, every "we'll get to it" that never got to anything. Or you can do what the good ones do when the clock is running out. You can look for something to work with. Think about what you do now. Are you one who focuses on what doesn't work? Or are you willing to see what's possible? Desire to be supported and encouraged by other like-minded women? Join us at the . #RelationshipBuilders #CreateYourNow...
info_outline
4147 Never Miss A Beat
Create Your Now with Kristianne Wargo
Parenting is a never-ending, rhythmic song that plays over and over again. Some of the melodies are soothing to the heart — a sleepy child curled into your shoulder, a shared laugh over something silly at the dinner table, a "thank you, Mom" that comes out of nowhere and undoes you a little. But many more of the notes disrupt the nervous system. The 2 a.m. cries. The slammed doors of the teenage years. The days when you've given everything and it still doesn't feel like enough. However you hear it, you can't run from the most important responsibility in your life. Never miss a beat. Parents,...
info_outlineThere is a difference between a firework and a tree. A firework is glorious — sudden, bright, impossible to ignore. It commands the sky for a moment, and then it's gone, leaving only a faint trail of smoke where something beautiful used to be. On the other hand, a tree doesn't ask for your attention. It simply grows. Season after season, quietly sending roots deeper into the ground, wider beneath the surface, most of its work happening where no one can see it at all. Grow in grace.
In yesterday's episode, we talked about how the spark gets the attention. But today, there remains a harder question: What are you doing with the slow years in between?
Desire to be supported and encouraged by other like-minded women? Join us at the Kairos FREE Online Community. https://createyournow.com
A More Perfect Union
The founders understood something we often overlook. They didn't write "a perfect union." They wrote a more perfect union — three words that carry more honest weight than any polished declaration of arrival ever could. Read the full opening line of the Constitution and feel the humility in it:
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
More perfect. Not finished. Not complete. Not arrived. The very document that governs the most powerful nation in the world begins with a phrase that admits there is still growing left to do.
That is not a flaw in the language. That is the whole point.
Grace works the same way. It doesn't arrive all at once and declare itself finished. It takes root slowly, grows down before it grows up, and does some of its most important work in seasons that look, from the outside, like nothing is happening at all.
The Long Work of Roots
When an oak tree is young, nearly all of its energy goes underground. What you see above the surface — a thin, unimpressive sapling — tells you almost nothing about what's actually happening. The roots are reaching into harder and harder soil, finding cracks, going around stone, pressing deeper in search of what they need. It's slow. It's invisible. And it is absolutely essential. Without that hidden work, the tree will never be able to hold its own when the storms come.
Two hundred fifty years of American history is the story of a nation doing exactly this — reaching into hard soil, pushing around stone, sometimes fracturing under pressure and growing back stronger, sometimes failing and having to begin again. The arc was never straight. The roots grew slowly, through generations of people who chose to stay committed to the vision even when the cost was high.
That is not a comfortable history. But it is a growing one.
The Apostle Peter, who knew a thing or two about being broken and rebuilt, wrote words that sound like they could have been addressed to the nation itself:
"But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ." (2 Peter 3:18)
The K.I.S.S. ~ Grow in grace!
Not arrive in grace. Not perform grace. Not achieve grace once and post it on the wall. It's not for you to proclaim it, but to grow in it — present tense, ongoing, never fully done this side of eternity.
Grace Is Not Softness
It would be easy to read "grow in grace" as an invitation to go easy on yourself — to excuse the gaps, to lower the standard, to look past what needs to change. But that's not what grace is, and it's not what it produces.
Grace is the soil that makes growth possible, not the excuse that makes growth optional.
John Adams — who, alongside the joy of what they were building, carried a clear-eyed awareness of its cost — wrote something that reads like a charge to every generation that would come after:
"Let us tenderly and impartially investigate the causes of the evils that afflict our nation, that we may correct what is amiss."
Tenderly and impartially. That pairing is grace in action. Not cold judgment. Not defensive denial. But the willingness to look honestly at what is wrong, with enough love for the thing you're examining to want it to be better.
That's what a more perfect union demands. That's what growing in grace requires.
It means sitting with the parts of your own story that aren't finished yet — the places where the roots haven't reached, where the soil is still hard, where you haven't grown into who you said you wanted to be. And rather than abandoning the vision or pretending you've already arrived, choose to stay in the slow, unglamorous work of becoming who God divinely designed you to be.
What's Growing Beneath You
Here is the question worth sitting with today, on this Wednesday in the middle of a week built around new beginnings: What is growing in you that no one else can see yet?
The root work you are doing right now — the prayer that feels unanswered, the faithfulness that hasn't been rewarded, the character being built in a season that looks, from the outside, like nothing is happening — is not wasted time. It's the most important work. It's what will hold you upright when the storm finally arrives.
America's Semiquincentennial (250 years of the Declaration of Independence) is not a finished nation. And neither are you a finished person.
And grace — real grace, the kind that comes from God and not from our own best efforts — is not insulted by that. It is designed for exactly that. It meets us in the incompleteness, takes up residence in the gap between who we are and who we are becoming, and quietly, season after season, doing the deep work of growth.
The firework gets the sky. But the tree gets the years.
And in the end, it is the roots that hold everything together.
"Blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord, whose confidence is in him. They will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit." (Jeremiah 17:7–8)
Grow down before you grow up. Stay in the slow work. Trust the soil.
The bloom is coming — but first, let the roots go deep.
"Be present. Be incredible. Be YOU!!!"
#WellspringWednesday #CreateYourNow #HealthAndWellness
🔔 Desire to be supported and encouraged by other like-minded women? Join us at the Kairos FREE Online Community. https://createyournow.com
TAKE A.I.M. ~ Action Ignites Motivation - This is a complimentary (FREE) coaching call with me. You will discuss your specific situation while gaining tools and strategies to move you forward. (https://form.jotform.com/62988215824163)
🙏 Create Your Now TV on Pray.com (https://pray.com)
🎥 Create Your Now on YouTube (https://youtube.com/createyournow)
🎧 Create Your Now on Spotify, Pandora, and Audible.
🎶 Create Your Now on iHeart Radio (http://www.iheart.com/show/263-Create-Your-Now-Your-Best/)
✍️ YourBestSelfie@CreateYourNow.com
Instagram
@CreateYourNow
@KristianneWargo
Twitter
@KristianneWargo
@CreateYourNow
Facebook
www.facebook.com/TheKISSCoach
www.facebook.com/CreateYourNow
Cover Art by Jenny Hamson
Photo by Canva.com
Music by Mandisa - Overcomer
http://www.mandisaofficial.com
Song ID: 68209
Song Title: Overcomer
Writer(s): Ben Glover, Chris Stevens, David Garcia
Copyright © 2013 Meaux Mercy (BMI) Moody Producer Music (BMI)
One Songs (ASCAP) Ariose Music (ASCAP) Universal Music -
Brentwood Benson Publ. (ASCAP) D Soul Music (ASCAP) (adm. at CapitolCMGPublishing.com) All rights reserved. Used by permission.