Week three is where book clubs die. Four people show up, two of them didn't read the book, nobody schedules week four, and by February everyone is politely pretending it never happened. Book clubs don't usually fail because people stop liking books. They fail because of bad organization, unspoken hosting insecurities, and open-ended commitments. Here are six structural decisions you can make before sending your first text to build a book club that survives.

I was supposed to write this post and film this video a week ago. I didn't, because at the end of that day, there was simply nothing left. With a full-time job, a book launch approaching, and a family that needs me to be an actual person, I hit a wall. But having nothing left is a fairly on-the-nose reason to talk about what to do when you're completely exhausted. When you have nothing left to give, traditional productivity advice falls short. Here are four practical things to actually do, along with lessons from women throughout history who faced extreme demands.

When you start researching the women in your family tree, you often run into what feels like a brick wall. A quick search on standard genealogy databases turns up census records, maybe a death certificate, and then... silence.

It is easy to assume that because an ordinary woman’s name doesn’t pop up in a quick online search, her story was lost—that nobody cared enough to write it down at the time.

Scrambling to figure out what to say to a loved one who stopped going to church? Here are 4 habits to stop and 2 things to start today to keep the relationship strong.

When my dad passed away, I spent a lot of time going through his things. It’s a strange, quiet process, one that feels a bit like archaeology. I found the expected stuff: old high school yearbooks, graduation tassels, and stacks of photographs. But I was fascinated as I flipped through them, I was looking at photos of my mom and dad when they were young, laughing with people I didn't recognize, living through moments I had never heard a single word about.

I am going to tell you about three women. All three were Catholic. All three lived in the last hundred years. All three did something that should have made them famous.

And I would bet you have never heard a single one of their names.

I hadn't either, until I spent years researching my book, Important Catholic Women of the 20th Century.

Writing a book is rarely just about the words on the page, as any author will tell you. When you write about faith, history, and the lives of holy women, it feels less like a project and more like a stewardship. For months, I wrestled with a persistent, quiet question: Is this Catholic enough? It wasn’t a fear of bad grammar or poor sales—it was deeper than that. I worried that my voice, however sincere, might misinterpret the holiness of the women I was writing about. I worried that I was projecting my own modern lens onto their extraordinary lives. As the first edition of Important Catholic Women of the 20th Century made its way into the world, that nagging doubt remained.

If you search for advice on how to write a book while working full-time, you’ll find a million articles promising the same thing: "productivity hacks." You’ll read about specific apps that organize your life, morning routines that start before the sun rises, and elaborate strategies to squeeze creativity out of every spare second. I’ve been there. I’ve looked for those shortcuts. And here is the honest, unpolished truth: there are no hacks.

Move-in day is looming. You’ve likely spent the last few weeks in a blur of Target runs, comparing Twin XL sheet thread counts, and trying to figure out how that much stuff is supposed to fit into a 150-square-foot dorm room. But as the piles of storage bins grow, it’s easy to overlook the transition that matters most: the one happening inside your student. 

The summer before your child’s first year of college doesn’t always feel like a grand farewell; most days, it feels like a quiet, slow-motion undoing of the life you’ve known for eighteen years. One minute you’re navigating the familiar chaos of sports schedules and dinner plans, and the next, you’re standing in a doorway realizing the house is about to get a whole lot quieter. It is bittersweet, but it is undeniably beautiful.

We all have our favorite saints. Many of them are probably depicted in stained glass, serene and unbothered, hands folded in prayer, eyes cast toward heaven. Their stories are beautiful, and their holiness is inspiring.

But sometimes, when you’re standing in the middle of a kitchen covered in school projects, laundry piles, and the "ping" of a hundred work emails, those stories can feel a bit... distant.

We often think of love in cinematic terms: the grand gestures, the life-changing milestones, or the heroic rescues during a crisis. It’s easy to assume that if we handle the "big stuff" well, our family life will naturally be strong.

But spending time on safari in the Serengeti, watching the delicate, almost invisible ways nature keeps itself alive, made me think about my own family ecosystem differently.

There is a strange gravity to travel. We pack our bags, we cross time zones, and we expect to be changed by the landscapes we see. But rarely do we talk about the internal shift, the way a single encounter can dismantle the categories we didn’t even know we’d built in our minds.

Have you ever felt like you couldn't take a break? In a culture that worships the grind, we are often tempted to measure our self-worth by our momentum and daily output. When we are constantly "on," the thought of pausing, of truly quieting the noise and stepping into the unknown, can feel incredibly unnerving.

But scripture offers a different narrative. Throughout the Bible, when God wants to do a deep work in a soul, He doesn’t invite them to a crowded room or a busy conference. He calls them into the wilderness.

When we think about encountering the Creator, we usually picture ourselves somewhere quiet and grand, maybe standing at the base of a mountain or staring out across vast, open spaces. We picture the jagged peaks of a mountain range, the expanse of a sun-drenched desert or the untamed wild of the Serengeti. We travel thousands of miles to find God in the "Book of Nature," assuming that His voice is loudest where there’s no laundry to fold or emails to answer.  But here’s the beautiful paradox: the same Artist who sculpted those mountains is the exact same God sitting at your kitchen table.

I am currently preparing for a trip of a lifetime to Tanzania. My bags are packed, the itinerary is set, and I am preparing to step out into a space where phone signals and Wi-Fi will be spotty at best.

But there is one specific item that will be staying firmly on my desk while I am away: my laptop.

If I am being completely, brutally honest, this choice brings me a massive amount of angst.

Sorting through my dad's things after he passed away earlier this year was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do. As my sisters and I moved through a lifetime of physical items, deciding who gets what and sorting through old pictures, I found myself thinking a lot about what’s actually left when the last things are packed away.

Have you ever planned a dream vacation, only to find yourself filled with dread and panic right before you leave? You’re not alone. 

In a recent video, I explored why our brains often interpret rest as a threat. When you spend years acting as the "anchor" for your family, business, or community, your brain gets wired for hyper-vigilance. You become a professional problem-solver. So, when a period of total stillness or deep play approaches, your brain interprets that lack of control as a danger, not a gift.

If you’re anything like me, you often look at your to-do list and feel a familiar wave of panic—the one that says, "I am so far behind!" The good news is, you're not alone. It feels like every project, from writing a report to cooking dinner, seems to take longer than it should, leaving me feeling overwhelmed a lot of the time. Sound familiar? The easy answer is to blame our poor time management skills, but what if the failure isn't ours? What if the problem is the cultural obsession with optimization?

We tend to think that the struggle to stay connected to our families is a modern problem, invented by group texts, packed schedules, and long-distance moves. We feel a unique ache, but history's most resilient women faced very similar hurdles. In this video, I take you inside the pages of history to meet two extraordinary 20th-century women who faced staggering physical distance, political upheaval, and massive life shifts—yet managed to build unbreakable family legacies. They didn’t have smartphones, but they had a relational blueprint we can definitely borrow from today.