We are so pleased that many of you will be participating in our summer study of The Fitting Room (click here for the schedule and details). The author, Kelly Minter, is a dear woman, and Angie and I are proud to call her friend. She is also a wise Bible teacher and you will be inspired by her and her writing. Take a few minutes to join us on her couch (sorry, we didn't realize how dark the light was - we promise all the videos are not like this!) and learn a bit about her and why she wrote ...

Hello To All You Bloomie Friends Out There, First off, I have to let you know how excited I am that Jess and Angie have invited me to be part of your community. This is a gift. I chose to write about the virtues found in Colossians 3 because putting on things like patience, joy, gentleness, love, peace, kindness and compassion is essential for Christ-like living while simultaneously can be quite challenging. The Apostle Paul uses the metaphor of putting on the virtues like you put on your ...
We are so excited about launching into our study of The Fitting Room with Kelly Minter today! Thank you for joining us. The Fitting Room- Chapters 1 & 2 from Bloom (in)courage on Vimeo. The foundation for this book is Col. 3:12: Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. We encourage you to write this down, underline it in your bible, put it on an index card and tape it up somewhere - do ...
On Sunday we discussed being chosen and today we are diving into holy - the second of the "big three" that Kelly describes in this book. Kelly shares a lot of fantastic insight for this chapter. Check it out. The Fitting Room - Chapter 3 from Bloom (in)courage on Vimeo. The concept of holiness intimidates me and I am thankful for the words on page 43: "It's not always easy to believe that God sees me as perfectly righteous in Christ, especially since I know my own downfalls, my past and ...
I loved this chapter...starting out with the description of Kelly's front porch and the hodgepodge of funky furniture. Won't you come join us on the sofa and share your favorite part? The Fitting Room - Chapter 4 from Bloom (in)courage on Vimeo. I can't help but smile that I have read this through a second time and I feel like I am already seeing different things than I had the first time around. This sentence jumped out at me, "Just the reminder that I am beloved of God gave me the ...

The Fitting Room - Chapter 5 from Bloom (in)courage on Vimeo. This "bridge" chapter is so important because before we can clothe ourselves, we need to chisel like a sculptor, don't we? Like Kelly writes on 68, "In essence, the truth presented in Colossians 2:11 grants us the chisel to start chipping away at these soul enemies, the power to begin the sanctification process.... when seeking to live the virtues, we first myst be aware of the work that is solely His: "God made [us] alive with ...
Hey all! Angie here :) I so hope you all are loving this book the way that we love it. Isn't Kelly fun? She's the perfect combination of brilliant and just a total blast to be around. It's really hard to find those in equal measure in a person, and we are grateful she fit the bill. Up until this point in the book, we have been laying the foundation, and at this point we are getting ready to kick it into gear as we get into the virtues themselves. I know that for me, there were several that ...
"The command to forgive others as Christ forgave us is not a lesson in trying to muster up the strength to forgive like Jesus, but an assurance that - because Jesus forgave us - we can forgive like Him. And perhaps we will even want to." -Kelly Minter The Fitting Room- Chapters 6 & 7 from Bloom (in)courage on Vimeo. Forgiveness can be a hard one, can't it? Kelly talks about in chapter 6 a trying time in her own life, and she says something really powerful: "the real revelation of this ...