by Bella Robertson | Apr 21, 2020 | Life Advice, Sisterhood |
God gives people dreams for His purposes and His people. In December 2019, God gave us a dream to start a gathering of women in our community called cultivate.LA. Cultivate.LA’s motto is, “Gather the girls. Scatter the girls.” God revealed to us the need to unite women from all ages, backgrounds, and denominations in West Monroe, Louisiana. At first we were overwhelmed that God would choose us, a 17 and 23 year old, to do something this big. Cultivate.LA was bigger than us, and we knew that before it even had a name.
For the past five months, we have prayed, planned, and worked nonstop to host our first gathering of women. The gathering was set to happen on March 27th, and with over 450 RSVPs, we were working our tails off with the help of so many amazing women who had joined with us in helping make this God dream come true. We were and still are thrilled to be a part of God’s plans for West Monroe, Louisiana.
Two weeks before our first gathering, we received the call that gatherings over 250 were banned due to the global pandemic. We were at lunch, and as disappointed as we were that our efforts of planning would be stalled, we were not disheartened. We believe wholeheartedly that God’s plan for cultivate.LA will prevail despite any setbacks. That’s the thing when you put things in God’s hands, nothings going to stop the will of God for His people and His purpose. Paul said it best when he said, “And we know that God causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose for them.” (Romans 8:28) God saw the days of quarantine and sickness coming even when He gave us the initial dream. We had peace in the storm because cultivate.LA was never in our hands. When you place your dreams in God’s hands, you can dream and plan through life’s unknowns.
Cultivate.LA was God’s dream first, and we are only the stewards of that dream. We are so honored that God chose us to lead and foster community for the women of our area. What a fun thing to get to do, host, learn from, dream alongside, and love on other women! Some days our work is not always what we want to do. We don’t always want to sit through meetings about the logistics of event planning or explain to women the importance of doing something that’s never been done, but it is a calling from God so we’re going to run with it. We don’t want to miss out on something God wants to do, so the second we had the dream of cultivate.LA we decided right then and there that from that day it was our mission to serve the women of our area.
Something we’ve had to learn in our short time of making this dream a reality is that our gifts, talents, and callings are never for ourselves. The dreams God gives us are always for others. God gave us the dream to start cultivate.LA for the women of Louisiana. It was never about us, and it will never be about us. We have said it before and we will say it again, God’s dreams are for His purposes and His people.
Godly community has changed both of our lives, and through the community of cultivate.LA, the lives of the women in our community will be changed as well. We desperately want this for these women. We have seen the power of community firsthand, and we are blown away that we get to do this for our area. We are committed to living out God’s dream for others. Our motivation is just like His, His purposes and His people, always.
Bella Robertson and Kaylea Mayo are the founders of cultivate.LA, whose mission is to unite the women of Louisiana with the love of Jesus. Bella and Kaylea saw a need for a united women’s ministry in their community, and felt called to meet it. Their motto is “Gather the girls, scatter the girls.” Once a season, they gather the girls together and empower them to scatter back into their individual lives to make a difference in our community.
Find out more at cultivate.online and follow them on Instagram @cultivatela.online
by Bella Robertson | Mar 21, 2018 | Life Advice, Relationships |
You know the one scene in mean girls, when they are all in Regina’s bedroom and start saying all the worst things about themselves? I think the reason it is so funny is because it’s a little too true. What do you hear when you are in the locker room? One girl says, “oh my gosh my legs are huge…”, and then it is like a spiral effect one after another. “My face is so fat.” “I’m literally a giant.” A couple of weeks ago, as I was in the locker room, this same conversation came up and as the words, “my stomach is huge” came out of my mouth, I was convicted. What am I saying? Why am I saying this? So I started to think, what if in that moment I said, “I love my body.” What would have happened then? Girls would probably look at me funny, because yeah…you don’t hear that often and yeah…I’m no x-small. Girls, what if you said, “I love my body” and take it step further—what if you actually believed it!!
On this journey of finding body positivity, I’ve learned that we all need to enforce in girls these days is that what you speak upon yourself is what you are going to believe. If you are telling yourself you’re too heavy or that you need to look like that model on TV to be happy, you really are going to believe that—but what if you looked in the mirror and said, “you’re beautiful and exactly who God made you to be”. Do you think you would believe that? No? Okay, imagine this: you are packing for a friend’s house and you walk by the mirror and catch glimpse of your body. Here is when you make the decision. When that voice in your head says, “yikes you need to go on a diet!” You say, “uh, no” to that. You hold your head up and you say, “girl you are flawless and you do not need to be a size 0 to be the absolutely priceless girl that you ALREADY are.” This is what it is all about. My old bible teacher used to say, “Garbage in, garbage out.” Do not put garbage about yourself in your head. You can work-out all you want, but until you work on what your mind believes about yourself, there is absolutely no way you will be able to happily look in the mirror.
So that is what I’m here to tell you. You are more than body shaming. You are more than low self-esteem. You are more than your differences, and you better believe it. You are rare, and that is not something to be looked down on. That is something to be proud of. That is something to believe. There’re lots of different beliefs floating around, but I think this one is real, and this is something I want to be heard on. I want you to hear me when I say you are stronger than this tough tough battle. I want you to listen to me when I say you are better, and my goodness I want you to believe me when I say YOU ARE MORE.
I had lots of ideas about what I was going to write for this blog, but nothing hit me as hard as this. I know so many people talk about the issue of the lack of body positivity, but girls, maybe there is a reason for that. Maybe there’s something to it. I encourage you not to just read over these words. I encourage you to let them sink in and believe them. Guys, body positivity is really a confidence issue. Confidence doesn’t have to be a conceited thing. You can be confident in the most humble authentic way. It is all about what you believe about yourself though.
Remember to love your body, because it gets you places. It is one of the many things that makes you, you. This subject is tricky and in no way do I have it all together, but that is the thing, body positivity is not something you just wake up and have. Jenna Kutcher always says it is a daily decision you make, and that couldn’t be truer. It is a choice, so choose it. Choose to believe it. Don’t live trapped in the boundaries body shaming gives you. So, next time you are in the locker room and tempted to say something negative about your body, bite your tongue (figuratively, not literally).
by Bella Robertson | Oct 17, 2017 | Testimonies |
“I am a lion finding its roar
I was just a shadow, but now I’m much more.
I will no longer be silent.
I will no longer be still.
I am a lion who found their roar.”
I found this poem I wrote last November. As I read it, I began to think about all the emotions you feel when comparison takes over. “I was just a shadow, but now I’m much more” during the time I was writing this, I was overcoming a battle of comparison. I had just really started looking like my sister, Sadie. Although I love this compliment so much, I was also getting comments like “Wow! You look so much like Sadie, but she’s the prettier one.” For a long time, I let comments like these come in and steal my joy. I let comments like that define me.
In the midst of feeling like I was in the shadow of Sadie, I found myself in another shadow – the shadow of HIS wing, and of all places that is where I found my roar. I found my confidence in the sacred place. Little did I know, that would soon be where I thrived. After I began to get in touch with Jesus, I found that I could be so powerful if I just had confidence! I had to stop trying to be confident in the things that stole my confidence, and that I was just a lot different than Sadie.
Sometimes, we try to find confidence in what we think others find their confidence in because it may look cool or be the “IT” thing, but the only place that got me was a shadow. When your mindset is all on Jesus and not another person, confidence comes relatively easy. When your focus is on a person you find comparison, but when your mindset is on Jesus you overflow with confidence.
When I thought I had to be like Sadie, a pressure came on me that began to silence my roar. But as I searched for my voice in whom Jesus made me to be, I realized who Bella was. Guess what, she’s a lot different then Sadie and really everyone in my family. Can you relate? Well, if you on the other side of the screen know exactly how it feels can I just say this…IT IS NORMAL AND OKAY TO BE DIFFERENT. That is what makes the body of Christ so beautiful. It actually makes Sadie and I a more powerful pair of sisters because of our differences. She has taught me how to live original, and I have taught her how to live fearless. When we understand our differences can be our greatest strengths, we empower each other to be the strongest, boldest and loudest we have ever been.
Here are some things about me:
I love to cook. Sadie almost set our house on fire trying to make mac and cheese. I love to sit in my space and listen to music. Sadie has never been into music. If it’s Friday night, you will find me cheering on all my guy friends at a football game, and Sadie would be calling the quarter’s innings. I love to be the person behind the camera taking Sadie’s picture. She literally has to beg me to take a pic with her. It’s just not my thing. I can out sass anyone in my family. I have mastered the dry sense of humor and sarcasm if a craft – don’t even try using sarcasm on Sadie because it goes right over her head. When I finally found out these are just parts of what makes me, ME, and not what makes me opposite of my sister, my roar got louder once again.
Without Jesus, none of this would’ve been made possible. Jesus helped me understand my worth, and to know your worth is to have confidence. If you truly believe your worthless, then where is your confidence? Jesus died on the cross to show you that you are worth more than you could EVER imagine, and that is what I am confident in. I have confidence because I know I am worth more. I have come a long way in my relationship with Jesus, and I still have got a long way to go. I pray that my journey through this will open your eyes and see what Jesus is trying to do in your heart, and with everything in me I hope you find your ROAR.
