Heidi Goehmann

Twenty years ago, a boy looked on me and I swooned.

Okay, it didn’t quite go like that. Instead, a boy looked on me, I looked skeptically back, we started discussing deep theological concepts and—bam—three years later we figured out we should be a couple. I started to swoon a year after we were married and I found out he thought I was pretty with bedhead and unbrushed teeth.

I tend toward using my phone to check out. I’m just going to say that out loud and let it be a thing.

I’m a big believer in grace.

I believe I’m saved by grace alone and you’re saved by grace alone, through Jesus Christ. It’s a openhanded free and beautiful gift from our Savior willing to sacrifice everything for us. He values our face and our voice so much that He wants to spend eternity with both. He’d rather lose His life than lose us forever.

I have found myself using the term fearless lately to describe the women in my life. Most days I am privileged to hear women’s stories. Men have great stories too, but today I would like to celebrate the fearlessness of women in particular. I hear wide and varied stories:

A few days ago, I was sitting at my desk returning various emails and updating various web-type things when my phone vibrated. I picked it up expecting a text from one of my children that they had forgotten their lunch or at the very least a text from a friend with a funny gif.

I have a vocational issue.

What do you do when your marriage has failed to make you happy?

In marriage there are moments of unhappiness—the sharp tongue of the moment, the inability to come to a rational conclusion together, the challenge to communicate so many life details as someone rushes off to work.

When we look at research, it usually feels like an overwhelming mass of information. Recently, Barna came out with a new body of research on Generation Z, people who were born between 1999 and 2015. I looked at the research, and my first thought was, “There are over a hundred pages here!”

When I was nineteen years old, I went on spring break from my small Christian liberal arts college, cut off my wildly curly hair to a quarter inch from my head, and swore off dating forever. I was done with a capital D.

A few weeks ago, my first grader brought home a little book he had made in school. He was zealous to show it to me, reading the text for me himself as he turned the pages. It was filled with affirmation, but it was unique in that the text focused on growing rather than achieving.