“To listen to a witness is to become a witness.”   Elie Wiesel.

January, 2025 – new beginnings!  Focusing on healthier habits, learning new skills, meeting new people, prioritizing the truly important aspects of our lives. 

New website/blog

CCSF has moved to a new website:  ccsfnewhope.wordpress.com.  Being amateurs at building a website, the new website is quite simple and has the enews letters from only 2024 and moving forward. The resource lists remain on the new website and we will update the lists soon with additional resources.  We hope that we will gain further skills as we manage the new website. We invite you to visit it!  

We sincerely appreciate our previous webmaster whose skill and expertise made the previous website more indepth and professional in appearance and content.  We also appreciate the work she did for us on Facebook and the migration to X/Twitter.  (We will not be using those social platforms in the future.)  Her years of dedication to CCSF are truly appreciated.

What’s In Your Cup?

As you prepare to welcome the New Year, you might not have plans to ring it in with a kiss, but you might be thinking about a toast to the old year and a toast to the new year, even if you are on your own now. We want you to consider what is “in your cup”. Instead of bubbly or sparkling cider your cup might be full of disappointment, regrets, bitterness and resentment. Have you been sipping most of the year from the glass of “If Only… Why Me… Why Does He Do That…”?

 Did you go to a holiday party or family get together with your cup full to the brim of hurts, and one person too many asked the question of ” What Did You Do To Cause Him To….”? Or maybe “When Are You Going To Start Dating Again?” Etc, etc, etc. Perhaps your tears from the loss of your previous holiday traditions were the drops too many that spilled over from your cup and revealed the wounded spirit inside. We want to encourage you to realize this and reach out to your support team and let them and Jesus help you empty the cup of sorrow and bitterness. Let go of any junk from the last year. Consider if there are any coping skills that were not healthy that you were leaning on last year that need to be replaced. Are there relationships that were not nurturing for you or your children that need to be removed or at least put on pause for a while?

 Then trade your cup in for a water bottle and ask the Holy Spirit to fill your bottle with new life and better coping skills, healthier behaviors and safer relationships for 2025. You see people everywhere carrying their water bottles with them. Picture yourself with your new vibrant water bottle of life that you can take with you everywhere you go. You can drink from it whenever you need to. Remember also the great athletic training adage to “drink before you are thirsty” and practice that. Imbibe in sips of life and positive self-talk as you go about your day.  Have a song of encouragement to go to and a Bible verse for the new year. Consider asking God for a word for the year to meditate on. Be thinking about what stickers of encouragement you can put on the outside of the bottle. When you are stronger and able, you can even offer sips of your bottle of life to others.

 Help your kids get their own bottle filled and model how to use it.

 We here at CCSF understand, support you and hope our articles for this next year will be a great resource of encouragement, support, health and peace to put in your bottle. Blessings and prayers for you.  KW

The “Good Enough” Relationship

This sounds like we are going to tell you not to settle for something that is just “OK” or  only “good enough”.  As if you will just put up with the things that are not “good enough”. But John Gottman, Psychologist and Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Washington, encourages couples to strive for the “good enough” relationship.

Nicole Kalbermatten, Development Director, Northwest Family Life, explains that “in a good enough relationship, people have high expectations for how they are treated.  They expect to be treated with kindness, love, affection, and respect.  They do not tolerate emotional or physical abuse.  And they expect their partner to be loyal. This doesn’t mean they expect their relationship to be free of conflict.  Even happily married couples argue.  Conflict can be productive because, when handled in healthy ways, it leads to greater understanding.  Couples in a good-enough relationship are good friends.  They honor one another’s dreams even if [those dreams] are different.  They trust one another and can manage conflict constructively.  That means they can arrive at mutual understanding and get to compromises that work.  And they can repair effectively when they hurt one another.”  Nicole encourages her readers to “Expect that.  You deserve it.  It’s not unreasonable, and it’s achievable.”

This article, in its entirety, is courtesy of Nicole Kalbermatten’s Survivor newsletter, April 2024. For information about the Survivor newsletter, contact Ms. Kalbermatten at nicole@nwfamilylife.org 

January is National Stalking Awareness month.  www.stalkingawareness.org.  Know It, Name It, Stop It is their motto. Visit their website for training modules, training events, guides for professionals, victim resources, webinars and more.

Scripture Verse:

Each of you should use whatever gift he has received to serve others, faithfully administering God’s grace in its various forms.  1 Peter 4:10