Learn more about all the facets of Take Up Ministries

Meet the Core Team at Take Up Ministries

Elizabeth Foss

Founder and Chief Content Director

Elizabeth is a certified Catholic life coach. She is trained as an integrative wellness nutrition coach and a mindset coach. Most importantly, she has been well educated in wholly Catholic cognitive behavioral coaching. She is wholeheartedly committed to helping you live your abundant life. Members love this very fruitful coaching that supports their physical, spiritual, and emotional health.

A wife, mother of nine, and grandmother, she has authored or co-authored many well-loved books, including Real Learning Revisited, Small Steps for Catholic Moms, and dozens of Take Up & Read bible studies. Elizabeth lives in a 255-year-old house in Connecticut that challenges her daily with its quirks, and she seeks refuge in her cottage garden which brings her great joy.

Micaela Darr

**Member Coordinator**
Micaela is a happy Catholic wife and a mother of many: 7 on earth and 5 in heaven. She is a homeschooler, a childbirth educator and the founder of Beata Birth, and a woman in awe of God’s design for birth and babies and families.
Her days are spent helping her older daughters navigate high school, and homeschooling her school-aged kiddos. She is passionate about God and the truth He reveals here on earth, and she loves learning alongside her children. She spends her evenings discussing politics and the state of the world with her husband, and working behind the scenes on ministry: aside from Take Up & Read, she is also the co-founder of the Fiat Conference. Her weekends are spent enjoying the beauty of Southern California, and sometimes photographing families and other such beauty in between baseball games and Mass.
At her heart, Micaela would simply define herself as a Catholic woman, a daughter to the one True King, and she seeks to acknowledge every day how great He is and how blessed and undeserving she is.

Where does the “Take Up” come from?

Take Up & Read began with our journals—beautiful devotional books that draw women into the word of God every day. We followed the voice heard by St. Augustine to “Take up and read!” We became students of the word. Pray-ers of the word. A community built on the word.

Then, we wanted more. We wanted the seamless integration of a life that is lived when the word is made flesh. We wanted to know and understand more about how to be women of the word in every way.

Now, Take Up Ministries is still as devoted to the word of God as ever. We still study the word together. And we ask ourselves how God wants us to live the Gospel in our hearts, and also in our families, in our friendships, and in our communities. We want to know what he says about stewarding the health of our bodies. We want to lean into the wisdom of scripture and take every single thought captive for Christ. Then we want those thoughts to incline us to act as he would have us act.

We support and encourage women—and we are supported and encouraged ourselves—through scripture study, mindset coaching, wellness mentoring, and the continued pursuit of both knowledge and wisdom. Come see what we’re all about.