4187 Love the In-Between
Create Your Now with Kristianne Wargo
Have you ever paused in front of a mirror and thought, almost? Almost healed. Almost confident. Almost the woman you know you're meant to be — but not quite there yet. That pause, that space between where you were and where you're going, can feel like the loneliest place in the world. But what if that's actually one of the most sacred places where you need to love the in-between? Because most of us have been taught — by the world, by our own expectations, sometimes even by voices inside the church or community or your job or your family — that we earn the right to love who we see only...
info_outline
4186 Lead with Your Gifts
Create Your Now with Kristianne Wargo
There is something inside of you that the world needs. Not the version of you that has been shaped and polished by degrees, training programs, and years of professional experience — though those things matter. But it runs deeper. Before you ever sat in a classroom or clocked into your first job, God planted something in you that was never meant to collect dust; lead with your gifts. Too many of us have spent years building lives around what we've learned while quietly setting aside what we've been given. We show up to work with our skill sets. We volunteer with our expertise. We check the...
info_outline
4185 And That's A Wrap!
Create Your Now with Kristianne Wargo
You cross the finish line. You hit the milestone. You reach that thing you've been praying over, grinding toward, and believing God for — and you exhale. And that's a wrap. Or is it? When you accomplish a goal or finally touch a long-held dream, do you stop? Do you sit down, dust off your hands, and call it done? Or does something inside you whisper, "There's more?" It's very interesting how we see life. The moments can feel like a year, when it might have been only a day. But nothing worth having comes in a moment. Desire to be supported and encouraged by other like-minded women? Join...
info_outline
4184 Come and See
Create Your Now with Kristianne Wargo
There are seasons in life when the darkness feels closer than it should. When the weight of what you're walking through presses in from every side and you start to wonder if the light you once felt so sure of is still there. Maybe it's grief. Maybe it's uncertainty. Maybe it's a weariness that has settled so deeply into your bones that you can't remember what rest feels like. Wherever you are right now, whatever shadow has crept into the edges of your story, do something simple and holy — come and see. Come and see that the light has not gone out. Desire to be supported and encouraged by...
info_outline
4183 Don't Let the Calendar Replace the Connection
Create Your Now with Kristianne Wargo
You married your best friend. You chose each other. And somewhere along the way, the life you're building together started pulling you apart — not because the love faded, but because everything else got louder. You're not fighting. You're not even frustrated with each other most days. You're just missing each other; sitting in the same house but living in different rhythms. And that quiet distance? It didn't happen because of one bad day. It happened one full week at a time. So when life crowds in on your marriage, don't let the calendar replace the connection. However, the biggest threat to...
info_outline
4182 Listening Is Love
Create Your Now with Kristianne Wargo
It's not that unheard of to want to explain everything to your children. We carry decades of life behind us, and we think if we can just say the right thing at the right time, we can spare them the pain. But regardless of their age and stage of life, what they need is your presence. Not your lecture. Not your five-point plan. Your presence; listening is love. You don't have to have all the answers. You don't have to be the problem-solver every single time. What they need from you is ears to hear. Desire to be supported and encouraged by other like-minded women? Join us at the . ...
info_outline
4181 The Heat Is On
Create Your Now with Kristianne Wargo
There are moments in life when everything feels like it's pressing in — the deadlines, the demands, the weight of expectations, and the relentless pace that never seems to slow down. And right in the middle of all of it, you realize something: the heat is on. Not just the kind that comes from outside pressure, but the kind that rises from within, the fire that tells you it's time to move, to grow, to step into the fullness of who you are and who you are created to be. No matter what happens in your day, at some point you have to be willing to go the extra mile, play full out, and do whatever...
info_outline
4180 The Soil No One Talks About
Create Your Now with Kristianne Wargo
People will tell you about the blooming, the breakthrough, and the moment they finally stepped into the calling God placed on their life, where everything clicks because He has been planning it all along. But nobody really talks about the soil no one talks about — the stuff underneath the surface that made the bloom possible in the first place. The seasons that felt more like a burial than planting. The prayers that seemed to bounce off the ceiling. The plans you laid out in good faith that God, in His gentle sovereignty, folded up and tucked away. And if you've been in one of those...
info_outline
4179 Set the Pace for Your Daily Race
Create Your Now with Kristianne Wargo
Have you ever watched a tennis match and noticed the winner isn't always the one hitting the hardest? Sometimes it's the one who knows when to slow down, when to push forward, and when to reset between points. With the US Open in full swing right now, there's no better time to be reminded that the way we approach our daily lives mirrors what's happening on those courts in Flushing Meadows. It's time to set the pace for your daily race — not someone else's, not the world's, but the one God specifically designed for you. Tennis is a game of rhythm. Every elite player has a routine between...
info_outline
4178 Laboring For What Lasts
Create Your Now with Kristianne Wargo
There's something beautifully ironic about Labor Day. It's the one day of the year when we're told to stop laboring — to set down the to-do list, fire up the grill, and just breathe. But as the burgers sizzle and the kids splash in the last pool days of summer, a quiet question has a way of surfacing: What am I really working for? Today, as we celebrate the gift of rest, let's talk about Laboring for What Lasts — and why the answer to that question shapes everything. Jesus said it plainly in Matthew 6:21 (NIV): "For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." Desire to be...
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.