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It was a beautiful Sunday afternoon in September. 80 degrees and sunshine. My friends and I had overnight camped at Mt. Nebo State Park, and when everyone else decided to pack up and go home, I decided to stay a little while longer and explore the famous mountain bike trails.  I only recently started mountain biking and have found that I really love it. However, I am still very much a beginner. Tip for mountain bike beginners #1: don’t go alone. But I did. Mainly because I hadn’t come all this way with a borrowed bike and rack to just go home without using it on “the best mountain bike trails in Arkansas” according to one of my friends.  So I said a prayer and invited Jesus to go with me. As I rode the trails for the next two and a half hours, I kept my eyes and ears open to anything he wanted to show me or speak to me while I rode and prayed.  I rode the 5 mile rim trail, which was marked easy-moderate, around the top of Mt. Nebo and thoroughly enjoyed it. Once I finishe...

I kept a sticky note on the left side of my keyboard at work. Throughout the day as I remembered things I needed to do when I got off, I jotted them down on the sticky note. Before long, I was running out of room, writing sideways up and down that poor sticky note. I waited for 4:30, not to get off work, but to get to work...to start the one thousand other little things that needed to be done.  Right when I got home, a friend came up to visit with me and I was too busy to even hold a decent conversation with her. I needed to talk to someone who is very important to me on the phone, but all I could think about as I listened to their sweet voice was the one thousand other things I needed to do. I could barely even focus on the task at hand because I had so many other things I needed to do next. And then the smallest hiccup in my mad dash to get things done triggered my impatience and made me snap.  I don’t like this version of myself. When I try to control my time and my sche...

“Where in the world are we going to get bamboo?” I asked doubtfully when my friend announced that we were going to cut down large bamboo stalks In order to build support systems for the tomato plants in his garden. “You’ll see,” he said with a characteristic smirk that always means we’re up for an adventure. He led us right to a nearby local park. If you follow the creek that runs through it, you end up a little bit off the beaten path where, lo and behold, thick bamboo grows strong and tall. Pretty sure cutting down bamboo in a city park is unlawful, but it was for a worthy cause. Back at the garden, we took three bamboo sticks, each cut to six feet, and tied them together at the top. The result was a teepee-like bamboo structure that is rooted into the ground around the tomato plants. In this way, the tomato plants can grow up under them, and the sturdy bamboo provides support for their branches. The tomato plants were already heavy with tomatoes, bending and bowing with the ...

A Parable of Two Paths Two friends were walking down the same path when they came to a point of contention in the road. It was a point of conflict, some could call it a crisis. Here the path diverged into two separate ways. One path had a small gate and a narrow road. It was a path that chooses the hard thing, the sacrifice of self, in order to pursue reconciliation. Because that’s what Jesus did for us. The other path was wide and broad, and most people end up walking that way because it is easier. It is a path that elevates the self, gratifies the desires of the flesh, and feasts on the ideals of individualism, preference, and personal choice.  One friend had promised to always walk the small, narrow path with the other friend, not knowing the friend would choose the broader road and their paths would diverge.  Father of the Prodigal Son I felt powerless to affect any kind of change in the decision of my friend. Although several of her friends rallied around ...

There they were, sitting on display in the middle of an aisle at Walmart — house ferns. I had just recently managed to kill my first house plant, so I figured if these ferns could live in the middle of Walmart, surely one could survive my apartment. I threw it in the basket and took it home, a hardy houseplant. No fuss, easy to care for, anyone can do it — this was how it was marketed, and I bought it.  A few weeks later, the ends of the fern started to turn brown. A quick Google search informed me that my fool-proof, hardy houseplant was either over-watered, under-watered, or fungus-infected. Since I had been watering it every other day or so, my first diagnosis was over-watering, so I took the thing out of its container and set the root ball outside in the shade to dry out for twenty four hours. Then I brought it back inside and started a strict watering schedule once a week...just like google said.  A few days later, the poor fern looked even worse. It was dropping leav...

A year ago, I packed all my belongings into a fifty gallon Tupperware box and left West Africa, and for the first time, I had no plan to return.  It was June 29, 2019, a year ago. A year ago, I had no idea what I would be doing in the United States nor how long I would be there. But I would not have imagined that I would still be here a whole year later.  A year ago when I was talking with an African friend about my return to the United States, she said to me, “You need to be prepared to stay longer this time.” This was so contrary to the typical African way of saying what you want to hear, such as “You’ll be back soon” or “We’ll be back together again in just a short while”, that I knew her words to be from the Lord.  “God is faithful,” she reminded me as we parted.  A year ago I prayed, asking the Lord whether I should seek some kind of permanency in the United States, specifically whether I should get an apartment and a job. Little did I know how...

Have you ever had a friend that you thought you knew pretty well, when all of the sudden you learned something fascinating about them that you never knew? It’s like going over to a friend’s house and seeing a remarkable painting on the wall. “Where did you get this?” you ask. “Oh, I painted that,” she replies, to which you realize that your friend loves to paint and you simply never knew it. So your friend shows you more of her work, and its fantastic, and you feel as if you’ve been let in on a sacred and beautiful part of your friend’s heart. You know her better because of it, and you admire her deeper. That’s how I felt about God when I started to befriend Africans. God is too wonderfully complex and beautiful to be expressed in any one color or culture. So he creatively put a piece of his heart into every tribe, people, nation, and culture. The diversity of nations  and races paints a larger picture of the character of God, and knowing a race or culture different from your...