Red Vine Spirituality

Taylor K. Arthur balances Bipolar 1 Disorder, marriage, and motherhood with a nitty-gritty faith inspiring a twisted, blissful life.

As I start 2018, I’m overcome with the realization that I am going to fail. I look at myself in the bathroom mirror as I squeeze into my workout clothes, feeling a lot like ground-up sausage being stuffed into a casing, and I tell my un-made-up face: you do this workout today. Don’t even look over the fence into tomorrow. Don’t listen to the voice in your head whispering “What if you fail?”There really is, after all, only today. Your job is to get up and try today. Continue reading

Bless This House (Upon leaving our first family home)

See, I have set the land before you; go in and take possession of the land that I swore to your ancestors, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give to them and to their descendants after them. Deuteronomy 1:8 Continue reading

For My Heart Warrior Son on Hard Days

For my dear, struggling, heart warrior-son:

Sometimes I don’t know how to help you but to put words down. God seems to talk to me through my fingers, charting a map through my fears, showing me the way home through this blog-tangle of words. Continue reading

How to Know when God is on the Move

Do feel trapped in a hopeless situation? Do you feel like there’s no way out, and God’s forgotten you? Do you wonder if there is any hope for your broken marriage, your upside down finances, your stalled career, your dissolved dreams? Well, come join me at the table, friend, and let’s reevaluate your position. From where I’m sitting, your story’s just starting to get good. Continue reading

When You Hit the Same Wall All Over Again

Do you ever feel like you’re hitting the same wall again and again? That no matter how spiritual you think you’ve become, no matter how much counseling you get, you just keep making out with the pavement? Yeah. Me, too. But there’s hope. Therefore lift your drooping hands and strengthen your weak knees, and make straight paths for your feet, so that what is lame may not be put out of joint, but rather be healed. Hebrew 12:12-13 Continue reading

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A blog roll functions as a digital gathering place, a sprawling table where many voices set down their plates and pull up a chair. For readers who feel that traditional religious spaces ask them to smooth out their rough edges, scrolling through a curated list of writers can feel like wandering into a candlelit room full of honest conversation. Each linked name represents a different corner of the journey through motherhood, mental health, marriage, and faith. The roll becomes less a directory and more a map, pointing weary travelers toward kindred hearts willing to share stories without pretending the path is clean or straight. It invites lingering, clicking, and the slow work of finding your own people among the many who have learned to live blemaed and unafraid inside a story still being written together across the vast and tangled landscape of belief.</item>

Curating a blog roll requires a quiet kind of attention, the sort of listening that hears what is not being said between the lines of a post. Writers who land in such a list often share a willingness to crack open their days and show the texture inside, the grit as well as the bloom. Visitors browsing through discover voices wrestling with depression, navigating the long aftermath of loss, or learning to pray again in a language that fits a complicated life. The compilation honors imperfection, treating broken faith not as failure but as soil. Reading one entry leads naturally to another, and the roll grows into a small library of testimony, each voice a thread weaving into the larger tapestry of survival, hope, and the slow patient work of becoming whole.</item>

For someone balancing a mood disorder with the daily rituals of raising children and keeping a marriage tender, a blog roll can feel like a porch light left on. Late nights find mothers scrolling through familiar names, seeking language for feelings that ordinary conversation cannot reach. The writers collected there understand that crying in the grocery store and laughing an hour later are not contradictions but neighbors. They write about medication adjustments, sleepless vigils, and the way prayer sometimes arrives as a long exhale. In this companionship, isolation loosens its grip. Readers remember they are not the only ones bargaining with grace at three in the morning, and the simple act of clicking through to a new voice can steady the heart for whatever the next hour brings.</item>

A blog roll also signals editorial trust, the curator saying these writers have earned a place at the table. Each addition reflects shared values around authenticity, mental health awareness, and faith that does not flinch from suffering. Visitors come to expect honesty over polish, narrative over performance. Over time the list evolves as new voices emerge and older ones shift focus, mirroring the changing seasons of a life lived in public reflection. Returning readers scan for fresh entries the way one checks for familiar faces at a weekly gathering, always hoping someone new has arrived with a story worth hearing. The roll becomes a living archive, less a static page and more a continuing invitation to sit, listen, and recognize the sacred tangled within the everyday.</item>

Engaging with a blog roll is its own quiet practice, an exercise in extending attention outward after long days turned inward. Readers discover essays on nutrition, memoir craft, church hurt, and the slow art of forgiving oneself for needing rest. The diversity itself teaches generosity, reminding visitors that no single narrative can contain the range of human longing. Some posts are long and patient, others brief as breath, and together they form a choir rather than a solo. For those walking the narrow road between mental illness and faith, this kind of reading nourishes the deep places where words eventually take root. The roll endures as a gathering point, a small altar of links where weary pilgrims set down their phones feeling slightly less alone in the vast wilderness of becoming.</item>