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With the weather forecast showing night time lows in the 20s, it was decided last minute to leave the the tent in the trunk and hail an AirB&B in who-knows-where Arkansas. It turned out to be a great idea. Even with the floor heaters, we could barely get the cabin above 50 degrees, so we walked around “camp” in our wool socks and warm coats, hiking during the day and cozying up in the cabin at night.  The four of us happy campers met serving at the hospital in Togo in 2018, and this was the first time we had seen each other since we parted ways a year ago. Since we were all in the United States at the same time, naturally, we planned a reunion, which is what brought us out to this AirB&B.  After a good night’s sleep, we moseyed out of our chilly bedrooms into the kitchen, which felt ten degrees warmer to my heart just because the four of us were gathered together in the same room. Elizabeth fried hashbrowns, and I stood shoulder to shoulder with her at the sto...

“I’m definitely going to get pho,” I announce when I walk into the Vietnamese restaurant with some friends. We sat down and received our menus, and the inevitable happened: I was suddenly overwhelmed by the choices and began to doubt what I knew I wanted.  “Need a minute?” The waiter asks.  “Yes, please,” I say even though I know what I want but I still have to read all 92 menu options to makes sure there is not something better. Guess what? I got the pho. The original classic number one thing on the entree page, and it was delicious. We in our western culture are bombarded with choices. And we are blessed by them. Getting to chose where we live and work, where we get health care, where our kids go to school, what to buy at the grocery store, even down to what to order at the Vietnamese restaurant is a liberty that a lot of the world does not have.  And here I am trying to make a choice about my future, contemplating and stressing over where in the entire...

Winding its way through the Ozark mountains, Interstate 49 is a beautiful drive through northwest Arkansas. It cuts into mountains, skirts along ridges, crosses high bridges over rivers and valleys, and even goes through a tunnel. It’s a countryside that wears the seasons really well - fresh green in spring, mature and lively in summer, striking colors in autumn, and even beautiful in the barrenness of winter when the rolling mountains turn to shades of dusky blue and the branches on the trees make tangly silhouettes and catch the lightest dusting of snow.   I took the drive early enough on this particular fall morning that the wide open spaces between the mountains were saturated with heavy fog. The interstate seemed to wander aimlessly through thick clouds. I held the steering wheel with both hands, happily not anxiously, and leaned forward in anticipation, glancing upward and all around through my front windshield.  Fog is a rare phenomenon in west Africa. We just ...

While the sky was still dark, I quietly slipped out of the cabin and escaped to a place called “sunrise point” on the eastern side of Mt. Nebo. You know I wasn’t going to miss this.  I had gone to bed only a few hours earlier, considering that the cabin contained a crew of six bridesmaids and one excited bride on the night before her wedding. A cookie log, a showing of My Big Fat Greek Wedding, and hours of reminiscing, story telling, and dreaming of the future kept us up later than we predicted, but not too late to keep me from the sunrise.  I knew the day would hold lots of dresses, dolling up, and dainty things...so I set out for a little romancing of my own before the day began.  When the glorious colors of orange and pink whisked the night away and the clouds swirled together with new shades of daytime blue, as dawn took the earth by the eyes, I knew God was meeting me there, loving me, and reminding me that the same glory in the colors of the sunrise ar...

When the alarm goes off at 6:00 am, my eyes pop open and I sit straight up in my sleeping bag. It’s still dark outside, but even the darkness beckons me to come out and look. My dad is already awake, heating water on a pocket rocket stove. Two coffee mugs sit there empty, waiting for the hot water like I’m waiting for the sunrise.  We are hiking on Isle Royale, a remote island in Lake Superior that is only accessible by ferry or float plane. We are hiking west to east, all forty-five miles across this long skinny island wilderness. We are day six into our adventure, and we’ve found a campsite with a big rock that slides down into Lake Superior. It faces east, a perfect sunrise rock.  The problem is, we haven’t seen the sun but for perhaps two hours in six full days. The weather is variable in the middle of the Great Lakes, and we’ve caught a cloudy, rainy week. But it’s okay; great even. Because we’re not fair weather hikers. In fact, nothing is better than hearing ra...

It has been a few weeks since I’ve written anything, and quite honestly, I considered taking a break from writing. The reason for both is the same: since coming back from Togo, France, Greece, and Kenya life has just been so...well, normal. Uneventful, I’m tempted to say.  And for some reason, I’ve equated normal and uneventful with uninteresting. Not worth writing about. After all, I’m not delivering a hundred babies a month anymore or feeding refugees or sharing the gospel in the African bush. I’ve been doing a lot of picnics with my mom, bike rides with my dad, and quiet moments with Jesus. And how do you make entertaining stories out of that?  When I first started writing this blog, it’s first design had a banner across the top that read something like this:  the presence of God turns the ordinary into extraordinary . I’m embarrassed to say that I actually forgot how it read exactly, which explains why I’ve wandered from it’s motivation. This blog was int...

I bent over and ducked my head to enter the narrow doorway into a traditional home, and my shoulders brushed both sides of the door as I entered. Inside, I could stand easily, for the thatched roof was high, held together by bendable bark formed into an    impressive grid that even an architect would appreciate. The circular walls were also formed in this fashion, which some mud around the base just to hold everything together.  I turned my attention to the woman who had showed us in. This was her home. She was dressed in a brightly colored fabric that looked exceptionally beautiful against her dark skin. It is one long piece of cloth wrapped once over the shoulder and then around a few more times, strategically tucked and somehow staying together. (I bought one and tried to dress myself in it, which was terribly hopeless. Even with help, I couldn’t seem to get mine to stay intact without the assurance of some safety pins!)  Her smile beamed in the darkness ...