About the Author
Cathy Boyd Byrd invites others to join her in considering topics of interest to those on the Christian spiritual journey…..discipleship, spirituality, mental health, Christian growth, and Bible study. Cathy enjoys working with others as they transition from emotional emergency and brokenness to spiritual emergence and abundant living! Many of the topics about which Cathy writes are interrelated as experienced in her own life and in the lives of those with whom she works in counseling, teaching, and case management, and in friendships. She believes that sharing our journey of Christian growth and spirituality helps us know God and ourselves better and connects us with others!
Cathy is a Christian Educator and Life Recovery Counselor, and an ordained deacon through Christian Leaders Institute. She serves as Community Outreach MInister at Lynn Haven United Methodist Church. She is a student (disciple) of the Holy Spirit and shares with her students (disciples) the things the Lord teaches her through Bible study and contemplation, incorporating experiences interpreted through the Word, cherished traditions of her faith, and reasoning that comes from seeking the mind of Christ in accountable community. She was widowed in August 2020 after 48 years of marriage to Bill Byrd, is mother of 2 and grandmother of 5. Her journey of faith has been lifelong and continues to be an adventure with the trailblazer and guide, Jesus Christ!
Cathy is the founder and program manager for a Christian women’s residential life recovery program, Titus 2 Partnership, Inc.(www.titus2.life) in Panama City, Florida.
God Places The Lonely In Families
Psalm 68 "May God arise, may his enemies be scattered; may his foes flee before him. 2 May you blow them away like smoke— as wax melts before the fire, may the wicked perish before God. 3 But may the righteous be glad and rejoice before God; may they be happy and joyful. 4 Sing to God, sing in praise of his name, extol him who rides on the clouds; rejoice before him—his name is the Lord. 5 A father to the fatherless, a defender of widows, is God in his holy dwelling. 6 God sets the lonely in families, he leads out the prisoners with singing; but the rebellious live in a sun-scorched land. 7...
Gift of The Unseen
Jesus said He had to leave for the benefit of His followers, so the Comforter could come.... Jesus knew we would depend on seeing Him with our own eyes, on having His physical Presence, as long as we could. We could never mature in the Spirit while depending on our physical senses. His Immortality could not continue to manifest, feeding our physical senses in the physical realm, and sustain freewill for mankind's continued existence in the physical. Faith is the fulfilled desire to see beyond the physical that is rewarded with the gift of The Unseen that gives us spiritual vision to see more...
Idolatry and Nature
The Bible tells us that God’s glory is manifest all around us in creation from the beauty of the cosmos to craggy mountain landscapes. God has used many things to capture the eye and attention of mankind and to speak to their hearts and minds. Donkeys, burning bushes, wandering stars, pillars of smoke and fire, flocks of sheep, vineyards, fig trees, etc. In my life God has used a plowed field, a cardinal family, the symmetry of flowers, trees, sunsets, and other created things to attract my attention. If one has not known God’s Word and the history and traditions of God’s ways of engaging...
Catch 22: Being Second
A friend posted that none of us are going to avoid the end of the world…. That reality she related to life being like a Catch-22 paradox. Well, living for God is a paradox ….To live for SELF is to die; to die to SELF is to live for God in Christ. When we do that we, like Jesus, subordinate ourselves to the will of God, who is always First…..#1…. …Jesus submitted his own will to be #2 to his Father’s will. When we want to live for SELF we are usurping God’s position as #1. When we choose to live in submission to God’s will…… we become like Jesus……co-heirs with him of the position of #2. We...
With-For-In-Through
I had a 7th grade English teacher named Mrs. Maddox, who told us that a preposition was essentially defined in the same way as by the manner a squirrel could relate to a tree.....the squirrel can go: over, under, to, in, around , through, to, behind, before, inside, up, down, within....... Preposition [prepəˈziSH(ə)n] NOUN grammar a word GOVERNING, and usually preceding, a noun or pronoun and EXPRESSING A RELATION to another word or element in the clause....... Those squirrels are important little things, aren't they? !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! SQUIRREL !!!!!!!!!! Why, yes, actually they are. We will...
Becoming Perfect-Butterfly Style
In our ministry we relate the spiritual growth of a person to that of a butterfly’s life cycle: first is the initial stage-the egg. It contains all the potential that will be needed to become what God intended. As it becomes an immature caterpillar it eats, grows and molts as it moves toward its full size, much like we do as we consume the things of life around us and grow in the ways necessary. Once at full physical size one recognizes it needs a change and enters into a cocoon stage. Our ladies’ time in life recovery we call their “cocoon” stage. When it begins those outside cannot see the...
Spiritual Hunger (Updated August 13, 2022)
Physical hunger and Spiritual hunger are not the same. Physical hunger will continue until one's appetite is satiated. Spiritual hunger is the opposite. You lose your appetite by neglecting it. If one is not spiritually fed, the more she doesn't eat, the more she loses the desire altogether. One must learn to spiritually feed herself and know the necessity of spiritual nourishment for herself and where to find the choicest morsels........ However, with both the physical appetite and the spiritual appetite, the more you eat, the hungrier you get. What do you do in the twilight zone when you...
My Promised Land
Toby Mac has a song “Promised Land” that asks “Where’s my promised land?” When God pointed my vision to a plowed field on 3/20/1997 he began my journey to find my Promised Land. What God has shown me is that it is my own life lived in Christ that IS my Promised Land…. It is not a place defined by legal institutions’ complex and ancient property rights laws or by how long it has been passed down from parent to child…. My Promised Land is timeless, unbound by space or surveyors’ marker stakes. God enlarges the territory of those who look to Him for that place of promise….. No matter how long...
Stages of Faith Development
(The header photo is a downed pine near the school gym where my church met for a year and a half after Hurricane Michael. From the road it looked like rays of sun radiating from its smiley face center!) Charles Westerhoff, a Christian educator, described spiritual formation like the development of rings of a tree… each ring is the building block, the substrate for the next. That tiny sapling, sustained in the nurture of the family, its first identity arising from the other trees around it, and its sapling marrow becomes the substrate and strength for the next season’s rings forming...
Patterns in Relationships: Toward Interdependence
Patterns in Relationships A simple way to visualize relational patterns, leading to understanding the pattern that Christ intends through participation in spiritually intimate and accountable community within the Church Cathy Byrd, MS CRSS HEALTHY PARENT-CHILD DEPENDENCE: One or two mature and differentiated adults provide stability for a child until the child matures into the ability to differentiate and stand on his own. DEPENDENCE (or CO-DEPENDENCE): One or both parties lean upon the other, usually in a way and to an extent that the supportive person is not intended by God or able to...