254 - How to Apply Half-Marathon Preparation to the Rest of Life
Ripple-Effect Faith with Twyla Franz
Release Date: 05/19/2026
272 - How to Make Yourself More Resilient: Challenge 2026
Ripple-Effect Faith with Twyla Franz
If you want to become more resilient to change, disappointment, stress, betrayal, loss, anxiety, long seasons of waiting, or the tender journey of recovery, this gratitude challenge is for you. Links mentioned: Take the #ResilientGratitude Challenge! Sign up to get the prompts, social share template, and some invites to send your friends. The challenge begins Nov. 1, 2026. song by Anna Golden. Get a Turn Your Loneliness into Ripple-Effect Faith in 5 Days. Read the written version of this episode .
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271 - One Important Thing to Remember When You’re in a Battle Zone
Ripple-Effect Faith with Twyla Franz
When one of those “unfixables” happens–a relationship strain, health complications stacked on top of a financial drain, an irreversible injustice–it can feel like you’re in a battle zone. You vs. the world. Like the implications of what you can’t do are strapped to your back. Makes you feel unmoored and helpless. Because you’d change the situation if you could, but it seems there’s no easy path forward, no win-win resolution within reach, no reversing the hurt. I’m thinking of this–thinking of you–as I read Deuteronomy 1. Links mentioned: Get...
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270 - Something a Snake Invasion Teaches About How to Pray
Ripple-Effect Faith with Twyla Franz
I relate to the way the Israelites prayed. When something terrible happens, I want God to take it away. To make life go back to how it was. I expect God’s rescue to look like reversal or extraction. But threaded through this ancient story is a new way to pray. Links mentioned: Get a Turn Your Loneliness into Ripple-Effect Faith in 5 Days. Read the written version of this episode .
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269 - 40 Fundamentals Fresh on the Mind as I Turn 40
Ripple-Effect Faith with Twyla Franz
40 quietly laps you when you’re more bent on running, writing, and preparing for fall break in New York than recalling how old you are. But all of a sudden, you’re the age your teenage self remembers your parents. So you begin a list of little learnings you’ve picked up the past four decades. Fundamentals, you title it. At first it’s a dare. Can you write down 40 life lessons? Then it’s a whittling, as you narrow to just 40. While revising and rearranging, you realize how much you need each reminder to stick to the essentials. Because we tend to overcomplicate what it...
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268 - Finitude, Focus, and Other Delicate Musings About Life
Ripple-Effect Faith with Twyla Franz
I leave leaves on my writing table–small ones that landed soft on my laptop last time I wrote in my front yard. They nestle next to pumpkin pistachio and it’s cheery woodwick flame. Fall. I’m already ready, and it’s not even here. There’s a comforting conjunction of crisp and cozy that enters with autumn. A deliberate extension of the both/ands that offer hope along with the hard. Links mentioned: Get a Turn Your Loneliness into Ripple-Effect Faith in 5 Days. Read the written version of this episode .
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267 - How to Find the Intersection of the Sacred and the Mundane
Ripple-Effect Faith with Twyla Franz
It’s one of those mornings the sunrise peaks as I walk up the hill from my house, trees and power lines and houses towering between me and the sky. I take pictures of the remnants of color gently grazing the horizon when I reach my typical sunrise viewing spot. It’s lovely, but not stunning. I stretch and check my shoelaces, but before I hit the record button on my running app, I turn around. I’m glad I do, because God’s glory hovers over an ordinary parking lot, and I almost missed it. I’d been bent on the angle, trying to situate the sun just so between the trees or over the...
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266 - 10 Things You Don’t Have to Do Before Inviting Neighbors Inside
Ripple-Effect Faith with Twyla Franz
Our brains are always telling us what we have to do, as if there’s always more we could–should–be doing. We’re continually privy to the guilty nagging, the critical comparison, the insistent whisper of not enough, not enough, not enough. No wonder a missional life gets lumped in with the shoulds. We’ve been conditioned to stack on extras and deny we’re on empty. We assign a grading scale to our hospitality, our servant-heartedness, our neighborliness. We assess our overwhelm as selfishness. We see our homes as never company-ready, our lives as lacking, our faith as...
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265 - A Farewell to Summer 2026: How to Go From Good to Better
Ripple-Effect Faith with Twyla Franz
Maybe you feel like you’re falling into fall too. Barely ready. Rarely at your best. And yet, there’s a quiet, undeniable inkling that something is missing. Conversations in driveways and over casual dinners. Cheery hellos and neighbors helping neighbors. Pretense-free, faith-forming honesty. Perhaps this dream has lain dormant for a while as you fit all the necessaries into your day-to-day. Perhaps you’ve never laid a finger on this desire for an old-fashioned kind of neighborhood, where kids play in the street and adults converse on porches. But the tumble from summer to autumn...
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264 - The Unusual Gift of Being Inefficient: What a Nail Salon Taught Me About Life
Ripple-Effect Faith with Twyla Franz
Maybe you’re like me. You use your hands a lot. You type and wash dishes, tie shoelaces, and take contacts out every night. It all feels natural–unless your nails are too long. Then they click-click on the keyboard, and you take five tries to spell one word correctly to answer a text. I’m clueless about nail salon lingo, so after my nails were way outgrown, I found a local spot with all the downtown vibes and nail techs who texted back to answer all my questions. They use gentle products, engage in genuine conversation, and do beautiful, meticulous work. I’m hooked. But the beautiful...
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263 - 10 Simplified Ways to Make Your August Calendar Less Overwhelming
Ripple-Effect Faith with Twyla Franz
If meal-prep sounds exhausting . . . If your quiet time is inconsistent (or non-existent) . . . If you’re already wondering how to clone yourself . . . If you want meaningful moments in the midst of the busy . . . If you long for authentic community . . . If you wish you could just slow August down a tad . . . This list of tips is for you. They’re practical. Easy to implement. Gifts from my actual life to you. Links mentioned: Get a Turn Your Loneliness into Ripple-Effect Faith in 5 Days. Read the written version of this episode . This handy, ...
info_outlineI sign up on a whim. One half-marathon for Saturday, through hilly horse country. My calves are still tight from three runs the same morning, because my impetuous mind decided to run to the start line of a community 5k, which also meant I had to get home on foot after the race.
Honestly, my only hope of non-stop running for the half is contingent on keeping a slow, steady pace. And resting.
Funny how sometimes the best way to prepare is literally to take a break. To slow to a walk. To sit in the sun. To stretch. To strengthen with pilates.
Fear tells me to cram-train, to sprint up more hills, to prove (pre-race) to myself that I can make it that many miles. But muscle memory brings quiet assurance that I’ve gone the distance. My own permission slip from my last half-marathon says it’s okay to break pace, to walk a spell, to simply finish.
This close to the race, rest will get me further than distance training.
And maybe it hits close to home in other areas of my life too. I’m a work-in-progress when it comes to rest. Sometimes my stubbornness is misdirected, and I strive for excellence in relatively inconsequential areas. Too often, I keep my proverbial plate full by working ahead in order to create margin for a future version of myself (who will simply find something else to perfect or create). You see the cycle. Perhaps you can pinpoint the same pattern in your own life.
Links mentioned:
- FREE, 5-Day Email Course: Turn Your Loneliness into Ripple-Effect Faith in 5 Days
- Read the written version of this episode HERE.