See Something More

A thick, dark cloud covered the desert horizon. “Looks like we are about to get a storm,” A Burkinabe woman said to me as we were waiting in the customs line at the airport in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso.  Sure enough, as soon as we got our luggage loaded into the vehicle, the heavens opened and it started to rain. No, it poured. Water ran through the streets like a river, and the windshield wipers could not keep up with the amount of rain coming down. The funny thing is that we are in the desert...in the dry season. Even the missionaries said they had never seen rain like this. Welcome to the desert of Burkina Faso. It is miraculously pouring rain. I fell asleep to the sound of unexpected raindrops on the windowsill, thinking about how Jesus rains love-water on us in our dry, desert places. “This must be a promise,” I prayed, “of what is yet to come.” It is a beautiful thing to be in the rain. The next day, we traveled to our destination city in Burkina Faso to stay with the Ric

For the next 60 days, I will be traveling and surveying across Burkina Faso, West Africa. This is a journey that God has put together over the past eight months, and I am eager to watch His faithfulness unfold even more and more as we actually step off the plane and get our feet dusty with the dry dirt of Burkina. We will be going to four different locations, including two places where missionaries are already working, and two places where there is currently no outreach and in which we could potentially work should we return long term. When people ask what exactly we will be doing, I feel kind of silly when I honestly answer, "I don't really know." I cannot tell you exactly a day-by-day schedule of events, nor do I know very much of what to expect when we get there. The beauty of having no expectations is that when God works in whatever He plans to work, we will be on board, and we will be delighted. What I do know is this: we will be traveling with a seasoned missi

It just so happens to be the season of life for making plans. For example, I have a friend, Chelsea, who is getting married this summer, planning to go to grad school in the fall, and then wanting to start a family in about two years.  One time, she was explaining this proposed plan to another friend of ours, Rachael. Rachael listened and then replied, "So let me get this straight. You want to get married this summer and then start graduate school this fall. By the time you are finished, you will only have maybe a half of a year or less to teach before you start having kids. And you want to be a full-time stay at home mom for the first several years. That kind of doesn't make any sense." Chelsea paused and replied thoughtfully, "Yeah, you're right. That doesn't make any sense." As Rachael relayed this story back to me, we laughed together because we both know Chelsea's personality, and we understand that she is so excited about planning th

When I applied for my first nursing position at a reputable hospital, I was fairly hopeful that I would get the job. I felt like the application and interview process went well, so I was eager to find out if I would be hired. Several of my peers also applied, and I heard about them getting call-backs of acceptance one by one. Meanwhile, I heard nothing. A few weeks later, I received an email saying all the positions had been filled. Rejection stinks. I applied for a second position at a different hospital, and they never even called me back after my interview. Once again, rejection stinks. That's when a friend reminded me that God probably had something better in mind for me. And she was certainly right. Not too long before graduation, when many of my friends already had nursing positions and I was still searching and wondering what I was going to do after I graduated, one of my classmates told me about an opening for a night shift new-grad nursing position in a labor and del

I lay wide awake, unable to sleep because so many memories kept flashing across my mind. I wanted them to keep coming, so I forfeited sleep in order to relive my favorite moments of nursing school. So many times that I climbed the flights of stairs to the third floor of the Olen Hendrix building. So many late nights studying in the Simmons lab or messing around in the lounge. So many trips to clinicals in Little Rock, complete with the Les Mis soundtrack. I kept thinking about the excitement that could be felt in the dusky hallway air of the science building, which for once did not smell like formaldehyde, but rather triumph and joy as all the graduating seniors adjusted each others' tassels and lined up. I remembered how beautiful our red shoes looked as we walked across the stage together. (It is tradition for the graduating nursing students to wear red shoes on graduation day) Then, all manners and etiquette were let go as we let loose to hug and high-five one another as we

You might expect the last few weeks of the semester to be a time of wrapping things up and tying ends together. That's what I sure was expecting. But I was wrong. And I am so glad. Instead of winding down, I have found myself pressing forward over these last few days of my time here at Harding University. Yes, my final exams are finished and all assignments are turned in, but Jesus has not stopped working. In fact, He has been showing me knew and exciting things...all the way to the very end. The spiritual growth never stops because the Spirit never ceases moving, blowing, and turning hearts. Just when I was expecting things to wind down and come to a conclusion, here comes the Spirit moving in waves, stirring me up from the inside out. First of all, He has opened my eyes to see how active He is on this campus. I have some friends who are so in love with the Spirit that they went out onto the front lawn of campus the other day and asked the Lord to send someone to them who wa

It seems to be a season of lasts: last undergraduate class, last chapel, last Sunday brunch in the cafeteria, last Sunday night devo, last...last...last. A friend of mine who is also graduating confessed to me how much she hates all these "lasts". "I think I am just going to cry all week," she said. So I told her optimistically, "Oh, don't cry! Then you will miss out on all the joy in store for us." Little did I know how much I was speaking to myself - probably even more than I was advising her. I found myself in a melancholy mood today as I listened to our senior nursing class's graduation presentations. I suddenly realized how much I don't want this to be over. Which is funny because I have wanted to be done with nursing school and all its stresses and struggles ever since my first clinical orientation. I have longed for this moment for a solid two years. And now here I am, and tears well up in my eyes when I think about it coming to a cl

The countdown is on. There are only eight days left until graduation.   By this time, we, the graduating seniors, have accumulated at least 128 credit hours, which translates to 1024 hours in the classroom. We have probably taken somewhere around 160 different tests, bought at least forty textbooks (and probably more like twice that many), and sat in chapel 480 times...assuming that every chapel skip was used every semester. In four years, we have been on Harding’s campus approximately 832 days, and now there are only eight more to go.   With only eight days left until graduation, that means there are eight items left on my Harding bucket list. All semester long, I had been wishing for graduation to come as quickly as possible. But a few weeks ago, about a month before graduation, I suddenly wanted time to slow down, not speed up. So I made a bucket list, which is really less of a bucket list and more of a here's-all-my-favorite-things-at-Harding-that-I-want-to-do-one-las