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Sometimes, things in life just all seem to line up. That’s when I know God must be trying to tell me something.   I think God gives us spiritual seasons in our lives, and each of these seasons either makes new growth spring forth, matures us into summer, makes old leaves change new colors, or makes wintered things die completely away. For me, these seasons come with a theme, often in the form of one word.  A few months back, I received one of these words.  I was feeling particularly discouraged because I see the woman I want to be and how far I am from actually being her. But instead of lingering in disappointment about how I haven’t yet arrived, the Lord gave me hope for the journey of getting there. Instead of finality (which says “I’ll never get there”), God gave me the word  Becoming . He has given me a vision of who he wants me to be, and though I am not there yet, I am becoming, and there is joy in that journey.  Then I pick up Bob Goff’s...

I’ve been reading about the life and legacy of Amy Carmichael, and for some reason, a very small part of her biography has lingered with me. A mentor once asked her something like this: Can the person who gives the final mallet blow to break a rock claim all the credit for breaking the rock? Or is it not every strike given previously that also counts?   When I was an intern for a mission organization in Nicaragua during one of my summer breaks in college, I helped with a lot of construction. (I know. kinda funny, right?) At least twice a week, I went out to a nearby community where a church was being built, and there was a large rock about the size of a microwave (or maybe two) in the way that needed to be moved. But it was just to heavy to budge, so it had to be broken up. Every day that we worked at the construction site, someone was striking that rock with a heavy mallet. Bang, clang, bang, was the steady rhythm behind all the other construction work that took place at...

I traced the baby’s heart rate with my finger as I explained terms like baseline, variability, accelerations, decelerations, and what they all mean. For the young lady shadowing me in labor and delivery on this afternoon, I could tell she was overwhelmed with the information overload I just gave her in my electronic fetal monitoring 101, but it also served to remind me how amazing it is what you can know from watching a baby’s heart rate pattern.  Electronic fetal monitoring is simply attaching a couple of harmless belts and devices on a mother’s abdomen while she is in labor, and these devices measure and trace both the baby’s heartbeat and the mother’s contraction pattern. But if you know how to read and interpret the data, you can tell a lot about what is going on with the mother’s progression of labor and the baby itself.  “I bet you anything this baby has his cord wrapped around his neck or body,” I predicted, looking at the pattern of the baby’s heart rate durin...

It was a busy morning, and I was running back and forth between passing meds and checking on babies, but I couldn’t stop thinking about one of my patients, the one sitting alone in the maternity ward.  My heart ached for her, as if I carried a part of her sadness just in knowing what had happened that morning. The maternity is a place where people spend the happiest and the saddest days of theirs lives, and hers was the latter. I imagined her sitting behind the curtain, hearing babies crying when she learned just yesterday that hers was gone. I listened to fetal heart tones for the lady in labor just on the other side of her curtain, and I prayed for her whose baby’s heart no longer beat, that she wouldn’t hear and feel the sting of loss all over again.  All morning as I took care of her, I prayed for a direct opportunity to show her love and speak comforting words to her, words about Jesus. And I watched expectantly for the right moment.  I turned the corner...

Living with an open door policy means a whole lot more to me than it used to. It used to be just a saying, a phrase that meant “come on over whenever you like”, and it does mean that.  But here in Africa, I really do have an open door policy. Mainly because I just usually leave the door to my house literally open.  I’m not sure when exactly this became my normal, but if I’m home, then I open the door and I leave it that way. It allows the fresh rainy season breeze to blow through; it lights up the living room with natural sunlight. It makes the porch feel like an extra room instead of a thing attached to the outside.  A lot of people in Africa don’t even have doors. (On a side note, it makes me laugh how many patients and family members come to the hospital and don’t know how to open the door in the maternity because it has a handle.) They just hang curtains in the doorway. If your curtain is closed, it either means you are out or you are sleeping. If it is o...

The great thing about Facebook, Instagram, and other social media outlets in our culture today is that we can take snapshots of our best moments and post them, creatively constructing a picture of our lives that looks like what we want our lives to look like. Publish all the pretty images and omit the ugly ones.  Missionaries are not immune to this either, especially me. I post blogs and send out newsletters focusing on the positives and failing to mention the things that are hard or just plain ugly. And so I unintentionally (or perhaps intentionally?) create a picture of a glorious missionary life that includes beautiful sunrises, smiling Africans, and success stories.  Learning to focus on the positive is a good thing, but hiding what is hard is not. In fact, looking back on my past three and half years in Africa, what has changed and grown me the most have been the hard things. And it’s the hard things that I am most thankful for because these have pushed me to pre...