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He could have chosen to come another way. He could have come in a powerful storm or with a flash of bright light. He could have appeared as a fully grown powerful man and instantly gained the respect of a vast following. As my French devotional book said on Christmas morning, " He could have appeared suddenly like a glorious man with all the marks of honor."  But he didn't.  He came like a tiny, innocent baby. He came with a sweet cry in the middle of an otherwise silent night. He was held by the hands that he created. Nobody would have even known it happened had it not been for the angels, who of course didn't announce it to the whole world but rather to a regular collection of ordinary shepherds.  "You will find a sign," the angelic host announced, but it wasn't the star. It wasn't a bright light shining over a stable in Bethlehem. The sign was this: "You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger."  This seemingly ordinary,...

It was 6:10 am, 30 degrees, and my breath looked like smoke in the beam of my headlamp. My two brave (or crazy) friends and I began our ascent of Pinnacle Mountain for a sunrise climb.  It's fun to be up so early in the morning and not have to be quiet, so we laughed and talked all the way to the top, catching up on a year's worth of life adventures. One studied biomedical sciences in London this past year and came home with a masters degree. Another got married and moved into her first home. I had a few stories to share as well from my first year in Africa.  We got to the top of the mountain just in time to watch the whole sunrise unfold - you know, not just the moment the sun peaks over the horizon, but rather the fifteen minutes both before and after when the clouds take shape  as the light from the sun moves and colors them.  We sat in a little bit of silence for a while. Not uncomfortable silence, just natural wonder-filled silence as we watched God paint the sk...

"What time are we leaving in the morning?" I asked Dad, even though I already knew the answer.  "4:00 AM of course!" he replied enthusiastically. "What Roussel vacation would start any later than that?!" He threw the freeze dried Mountain House meals and extra Starbucks Christmas Blend instant coffee packets into a plastic tub, which was lined up next to all our dry bags, packed and ready for the river. All you need to be happy can fit in a canoe, I do believe.  So our annual Buffalo River float trip began that next morning at 4:00 AM, and I started it off just like I do every year - sleeping in the car all the way there.  My dad and Mike did wake me up once to see a gorgeous sunrise that lit up the whole sky in a fiery red. "Red sky in the morning, sailors take warning!" Mike jokingly added, because we already knew that the forecast for that night and the day after was 100% chance of not just rain, but thunderstorms.  That's why we got on th...

"Come and see what God has done, how awesome his works on man's behalf! Come and listen, all you who fear God; let me tell you what he has done for me."  I wrote that verse from Psalm 66 at the very top of the dry erase board as a reminder to everyone, including myself, of the reason we were all there.  I noticed the exclamation mark in that Scripture right away. People put exclamation marks everywhere these days. If you put periods instead of exclamation marks in your text messages, you sound rude. Everything has to be high energy and excitement all the time. But the Bible is not that way. In fact,  exclamation marks in the Bible are not that common, so whenever I see one, it makes me think it's there for a reason.  "Come and see what God has done, how awesome his works on man's behalf!" I decided that I wanted to make this whole evening about just that. With an exclamation mark at the end!  I named the event "come and see" based off this vers...

It all began over Thanksgiving weekend, when my uncle was sitting in our dining room and saw a rat cross the neighbor's porch across the street. "It was this long!" he emphasized as he spread his two index fingers apart to demonstrate that this was no little house mouse. It was  a rat.  Not too long after that, I had a strange encounter involving an empty toothpaste tube that I threw away in the trash can in my bathroom. The next morning when I pulled back the shower curtain to hop in the shower, there it was. My empty toothpaste tube in the bottom of the shower.  "Kaysi, did you put my toothpaste in the shower?" She gave me a strange look and a blunt "no", as if to say "why in the world would you even ask me that?" But to me, it was a legitimate question.  "That's just like a rat," my dad said, "to dig toothpaste out of the trash and drag it off somewhere." In my mind I am thinking about just how big a rat would have ...