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A little tap-tap at the door notified me of their arrival, and then four lovely teenage girls in the young scholars program came into our house and plopped down on our sofas. Emily and I asked them about their day to get the conversation going as we put the finishing touches on a pot of chicken and vegetable stir fry. "I know you girls have homework, but even when you have homework you have to eat!" They laughed as I continued, "So my homework is to make you dinner so that you will have the strength to do your homework!" These girls are orphans, neglected, or otherwise put at a disadvantage because of being a young woman in a paternalistic culture. I grew up with a mother who prepared dinner for me every night. These girls have never had that; they've been on their own for as long as they can remember. I poured some glasses of cold water from the fridge for each of them. They giggled with delight because they love ice water! Anything from a fridge is a speci...

At 11:00 in the morning, the grandmother finally arrived with a baby tied to her back. We had been waiting for them all morning. A mixture of relief and urgency filled my lungs. Relief that they were finally here. Urgency because I saw the state of the child. Let me tell you some pieces of her story. Sabilan is a 1-year old baby girl in the infants in distress program whose mother died. She is cared for by her grandmother. Just a few months ago, an incident happened when a young girl who was watching Sabilan accidentally dropped her. When she fell, apparently on her head, she immediately started seizing. When Rebeca, the head of our infant program, heard about the incident, she instructed the father of the baby and the grandmother to take Sabilan to the hospital for a neurological assessment. Rebeca counseled them on three different occasions over the course of three months, but they never followed through because they said she was fine and had not had any further problems. This we...

I had no idea what to expect as we bumped down the red dirt road towards an outlying, rather remote village. It's not every day that we go this far out, especially not knowing exactly what we were doing. All we knew is we were looking for a sick man. Something told me we were also marching into battle. The church leader, John, of a certain neighboring village had called to notify us of this particular sick man. The only information he gave was us was that this sick man had visited fetishers (leaders in traditional African religion, most comparable to "witch doctors") in hopes to get well, but he only got worse. He was desperate. I had no idea what kind of sickness we might encounter, what kind of situation we would find, or what kind of darkness we might be walking into. As we drove out two hours to John's village in search of John and his sick friend, I prayed that God would clothe us in light and protect us from evil so that we could shine his love into the da...

I'm not sure I've ever seen such a mess in my entire life. Moving in is a messy business, especially when you've been gone for three months during the most dusty time of the entire year. I tried to cover up all the furniture before I left in October of last year, but the corners of the couches were still exposed, leaving a very visible brown line were the dust had settled. Wipe your finger across any surface, and you can write your name. Don't even mention the window sills, where the curtains has created some kind of vacuum that caused the dust to accumulate like snow. You might not think dust has a smell, but it does, and all it takes is one sweep of the broom across the concrete floor to lift it up into the air like confetti, dancing in the beams of light coming through the windows. And just when you get it all cleaned up, that's when the new refrigerator arrives and the installation crew tracks a new layer of dust and dirt into the living room. So you sweep a...

"For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do." The new year is a time of planning. We think about the things we want to do, accomplish, or change this year. We set goals and make plans. We ask each other, "What big things are coming up in 2017?" and then we talk about the trips we are going to make, the vacations, the move, the project on the house, the wedding, or the newborn baby. I experience the same thing to an extent here in Burkina. At the beginning of every new year we review our ministry plan and talk about what we are going to do this year. We talk about continuing old projects, moving forward with certain ministries, and creating new ideas. One thing is certain, a new year gets us planning, planning, panning. That's why Ephesians 2:10 strikes a sweet chord in our hearts. It's something we need to hear and remember at this moment. "For we are God's workman...

In a matter of about twenty-five hours, life drastically changed. When I left my middle-class American home at 10:23am, it was about 30 degrees Fahrenheit. When I got off the plane in Burkina Faso the next day, the 30 degree Celsius temperature (a quite cool 70s Fahrenheit) hit me like a fresh desert breeze in the face, carrying the smell of dirt and sand with it. I went from snowy to dusty, pavement to dirt, pants to skirts, English to French, advancement to development, fast-paced to slow-paced, individualistic to community, primarily white to mostly black, processed grocery store foods to natural earthy foods. A climate change, diet change, clothing change, environment change, language change, and culture change occurred in the span of one day. It's about as close to time travel as you can get. The first time everything changed so fast was two years ago when I moved to Burkina Faso on a one-way plane ticket. Since then, the coming and going along with the instant and drastic c...

I love that New Years Day fell on Sunday. I wish that happened every year!  Then the first thing we would do at the start of every new year is celebrate Jesus with the church and then intentionally dedicate and sacrifice the new year to him. There is no way more fitting to start a new year than to worship.  Having loved what we experienced with the body of Christ on Sunday morning, our family also created some worship time at home. Not planned, just spontaneous, as it sometimes should be. So I snapped this shot to remind me of how 2017 started.  Beginning the new year with corporate worship at church and then sweet family worship at home challenges me to make worship the everyday anthem and heartbeat of 2017.  The cool thing is: worship can but doesn't have to happen at the piano. It doesn't even have to happen at church. It is the prayers we pray, the ways we love and serve, the conversations we have, the attitudes we display, the decisions we make,...