Gird Your Loins: A 30-Day Devotional for Courageous Faith - The Journey Behind My New Book

Recognizing the Need for Preparedness

It's the nightmare we all share: arriving at a black-tie party dressed in overalls, showing up at a meeting clueless about the topic you're supposed to be speaking on, or performing on stage without having memorized your lines. Whatever form your particular horror takes, the fear is clear: You are unprepared.

Over a decade ago, I faced a similar nightmare. Only it was my reality...and perhaps yours, too. Having grown up in a small town where everyone seemed to be Christian, I long assumed I would enjoy that cultural comfort into my golden years. Instead, as I entered my forties, I found myself standing on the shaky ground of our postmodern, post-truth world. It is a world where wishful thinking and weak faith do not hold up under secular scrutiny. Where the weight of Christian cowardice and the reductive mantra of "Love God, love people" crushes the lost under uncontested falsehoods.

I witnessed the casualties of compassionately misguided silence. Confused young people with pasted-on smiles and suicidal thoughts. Delusional men encroaching upon women's spaces, destroying their safety and stealing their opportunities. Blurred sexual boundaries putting children at risk. Language theft requiring the rest of us to utter absurdities like "biological woman". The euphemism of women's reproductive rights used to justify killing preborn humans. The whole world groaning for truth while Christ's church simply stays in its Sunday lane. Satan relishing his heyday.

I could not live at peace in a house of faith that treated God's Word as optional and people's feelings as sacred. I could not keep quiet as I watched folks made in God's image flounder amid lies. Surely, if Christians followed the call to feed the hungry and clothe the poor, we must also not shrink from declaring the whole counsel of God, as Paul advised believers in Acts 20:27.

Grounding in Biblical Truth, Acting in Courage

How many of us are prepared to not only follow but tell others about the whole counsel of God? Having spent four decades of my life as a people pleaser, the idea of discussing God's plan for humanity with a hostile audience was never on my bucket list. To make matters worse, I didn't really know my Bible. Yes, God's truth rested in my bones, but I needed it on the tip of my tongue to be used with grace and conviction at every opportunity.

I also needed a new understanding of courage: not a sense of bravery, but the Holy Spirit's movement empowering every believer. Like so many virtues in our Christian walk, we cannot wait for feelings to compel us to follow in Christ's footsteps.

I suspect that many of you share my desire to speak God's truth over Satan's lies but feel unprepared to do so. Enter my new book, Gird Your Loins: A 30-Day Devotional for Courageous Faith.

Through relatable stories, biblical teaching, and daily “Call to Courage” challenges, this new devotional will ready you to:

• Replace cultural lies with scriptural truth

• Engage boldly in God’s world

• Break free from fear

• Choose wholehearted obedience

If you’re done backing down—if you’re ready to stop compromising with culture and follow the real Jesus—I pray that Gird Your Loins will equip you to live with clarity, conviction, and courage.

Gird Your Loins: A 30-Day Devotional for Courageous Faith will be available on Amazon in softcover, hardcover, ebook, and audiobook on July 16th!

Please take the time to leave an honest review. Every review makes the book more visible to shoppers!

Until next time.

Your Courage Cheerleader,

Sarah 📣