It Started With a Blog and a Burden

There are some things you start because you have a plan, and then there are things you start because you need somewhere to put what God is doing in you. Inclination Life was the latter.

In 2015, I was walking through one of the more challenging seasons of my life. My family had been through a lot. I was being stretched as a wife and a mother, and in many ways, I felt isolated. At the same time, I was navigating significant transition in ministry.

I had come from spaces where I knew where I belonged. I had responsibilities. I was growing. God had developed gifts in me and given me opportunities to use them. Then things changed, and some of those transitions weren't necessarily of my choosing or handled in ways that made the leaving easy.

Suddenly, I found myself asking a question that I think many of us eventually have to ask:

What do I do with who I've become when the place where I used to express it no longer exists?

I didn't have language for all of that then. I just knew I was frustrated.

What I didn't realize was that God had already planted something years before I would need it.

The Idea Had Been Sitting There

Sometime around 2007 or 2008, I had an idea for an inspirational website or blog. I never really did anything significant with it. It was simply one of those ideas that remained somewhere in the background…until 2015.

I remember coming home after a particularly frustrating experience and sitting down to write. That writing became a blog post. And that blog post became a beginning.

Writing gave me somewhere to channel what I was carrying. It allowed me to take experiences that could have simply left me hurt or frustrated and ask, What truth can come from this? What has God shown me here? How could this help another woman?

I didn't know I was building a community. I was simply saying yes to what was in front of me.

Why “Inclination Life”?

I started the blog and quickly knew I needed a name. I don’t know what my first thoughts were, but ultimately the name grew out of what I was trying to express.

I wanted language for a life that was focused toward God…a heart positioned toward Him, while still dealing honestly with the realities of being human.

Eventually, I landed on ‘Inclination’. To be inclined is to lean or be drawn in a particular direction.

And ‘Life’ mattered because I wasn't interested in creating something that only worked inside a church service. I was thinking about a way of living.

The original language around Inclination Life was Positive Living via Simple Truths.

And by “positive,” I never meant pretending everything was wonderful.

I meant developing a mindset anchored in God and learning to take the truth of His Word and make it understandable enough to actually live.

The language has matured over the years, just as I have. Today, I say: Inclined to God. In tune with you.

The tagline has changed but the heart behind it remains.

Then Five Minutes Changed Something

You may be asking how I migrated into what you see today. It came with twist and turns.

At one point, I attended a class about blogging and learned about monetizing a blog.

Now that sounded interesting. I loved writing. If I could turn something I enjoyed into income, why not?

But somewhere along that journey, I participated in a challenge that required me to get online every day for about five minutes and simply talk about a topic.

That challenge gave birth to something I never planned: the weekly Faith Talk.

I started getting online around 9:00 on Monday nights because that worked for my schedule.

That was it. No elaborate strategy. No grand launch. Just me showing up and talking about faith and real life. More than a decade later, I'm still doing Faith Talk.

There are things we dismiss as small because we don't yet know what they are becoming…I’m a witness that we must go with the flow of it.

From a Blog to a Room Full of Women

The next shift came during another season of frustration.

I remember sitting in Cracker Barrel with my husband, talking through everything that was stirring in me. He grabbed a napkin and started writing as I talked.

Eventually he told me, “You're going to do a women's conference.”

At the time, even that felt complicated. I was still figuring out who I was in ministry. I was sitting beside a senior pastor in a role that came with plenty of expectations about who I was supposed to be and what I was supposed to look like.

I knew there was more in me than sitting in a particular seat and fulfilling somebody else's definition of the role.

I had spent a lot of my life helping other people move forward. Leadership has always come naturally to me, but much of mine had happened from behind the scenes. I was comfortable helping the person in front succeed.

Stepping forward myself was different. Still, I did the conference and somewhere along the way, Inclination Life stopped being simply the place where I wrote. Women were gathering, talking, learning, and growing.

Something that had begun as an outlet during one of my own difficult seasons had become a place where other women could bring theirs.

Finding My Own Voice

Looking back, I can see another thread running through all of it. I was learning to become comfortable with my own voice.

For much of my life, there had always been voices willing to tell me who I was, what I should do, how I should do it and sometimes even what it should look like.

When I accepted my call to preach the gospel, one of my prayers was that God would give me my own voice and my own delivery.

I didn't want to imitate someone else's ministry, and I didn't want to become somebody else's version of a woman in leadership. I wanted to discover how God created me to do what He called me to do.

That has taken time. Actually, it's still taking time.

There are things I know about myself today that I couldn't have articulated in 2015. And there are probably things God is still going to uncover that I can't articulate now.

I've also had to become less protective of doing things differently.

There was a time when seeing someone pick up something I had done differently could make me hesitant to put the next thing out there. Somewhere underneath that was probably the fear that someone else might take an idea and do it.

I've had to release that. There really is nothing new under the sun.

And if something God allowed me to pioneer gives someone else permission to move, create or build, that doesn't diminish what He gave me. I still get to be me.

Eight Years In, God Changed the Pattern Again

By the eighth year of our Women's Converse, I had developed a system. I knew how we did things. And then God disrupted it.

That year became a turning point because I had to discover that I already had within me what was necessary to give the women who showed up what they needed.

I couldn't simply depend upon the familiar structure. And strangely enough, that breakthrough brought me back to another question: Where do we go from here?

I don't have the complete answer yet and maybe that's appropriate.

Inclination Life didn't begin because I had a ten-year strategic plan. It began because, in a difficult season, I responded to something God had planted in me years earlier.

A blog became Faith Talk. Faith Talk became one expression among many.

A conference became years of women gathering. The woman who was trying to figure out where she fit eventually learned that sometimes you aren't supposed to find another space to fit into.

Sometimes God develops what He put inside of you until you're ready to build the space He showed you. I continue to fine-tune Inclination Life and everything else as God gives it.

I don't know every expression of it all will become in the years ahead.

But I know what has remained true from the beginning:

Incline your heart toward God. Pay attention to who He created you to be. And have the courage to walk that out even while you're still discovering what it looks like.

Maybe that's the real story of Inclination Life. It started with a blog and a burden, but it has always been about becoming.

The story continues…