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I planned to spend Saturday morning with a cup of hot tea and an open Bible, since honestly it had been a while since I had done that. Spending lingering time with the Lord in the mornings is one of my favorite things in the whole world, and oddly enough, it’s the first thing to go when I get busy. It makes no sense, but I’m just being honest.  This season has indeed been a busy one. I just noticed recently that I haven’t written in over two months and I wondered how that could even happen, but then I look at my schedule and I understand.  The past two months I have not been writing stories because I have been too busy living them.  And before I knew it, these stories I’m living were keeping me up to midnight every night, which makes me snooze the alarm and sleep in as much as possible, sacrificing my precious time with the Lord in the mornings on the altar of my addiction to activity and busyness.  On this particular Saturday morning, I wasn’t expecting visitors unt...

When I first moved to West Africa, one of my roles on the team was to spend time with our team’s ministry to orphans and infants in distress. My task was to observe, participate, and look for ways to make the program better. We Americans are always looking for ways to improve things, to make them more efficient and productive.  One of the first things I noticed was that the women who run the day-to-day operations of the infants in distress program spent the vast majority of their time doing home visits. They would hop on their motos, drive out to distant villages, and visit the children and their families in their home environment. The purpose, from my understanding, was to ensure that the children’s home environments were safe and sanitary. The women would spend five minutes checking to see if the baby’s bottles were cleaned properly, give a brief hygiene lesson, and then spend forty-five extra minutes just talking with the family and eating peanuts provided as a hospitality gift....

“I mean, I’ve definitely had more solid plans before,” Kolton said to me over the phone as we talked about the plan for finding the campsite tomorrow night. By solid, he meant foolproof, and by that statement, he acknowledged that his plan could go wrong on multiple levels. But thats how good stories begin.  There is a beautiful waterfall in Arkansas that is situated in a stunning canyon called hemmed-in-hollow. At 204 feet, it is the tallest waterfall between the Appalachians and the Rockies. The trail to get there goes down into the hollow where you can explore the waterfall and rock formations from below. Where the trail does not go is to the top of the bluffs overlooking the waterfall and the expansive valley. But that’s where an unofficial, off-the-beaten-path “secret” campsite was, and we were determined to find it.    “Here’s what we’ll do,” Kolton explained his game plan to me for this weekend’s trip, which included spending the first night on that majestic bluff...

As soon as I heard that Immerse’s drop-in center was being renovated and that everything inside it needed to be moved out, I sent a text message to the man in charge.  “Is that upright piano still in the drop-in center? And has anyone claimed it? If it has to be moved somewhere, I would love for it to find a home in my apartment during the renovation!”  I didn’t really hear back anything definitively over the next few days, so I figured the old piano had been accounted for. Oh well, it was worth the ask anyway.  I proceeded to have an absolutely lousy week. Things were rough all around - work was stressful, happenings at Immerse and around my apartments were stressful, a few of my relationships were tense and stressful, and my health and sleep patterns were suffering...which was stressful. It was just one of those weeks that everything was going poorly, which sometimes unnecessarily translates into “I am doing poorly at everything.”  But we are to be faithful even w...

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 ...