We’ve been invited to a church member’s home for a meal just three times in three years. As an accidental experiment in the Colorado city where we moved three years ago, we visited 17 churches, landing at 2 for about a year, 3 for a month each, and visited the others once or twice. Not…
I edged to the front of my folding chair, bobbing and weaving my head to find a view through the heads in front of me. “Do you have a child there?” an older woman sitting next to me asked with a slight accent as she pointed toward the stage. “I do!” I beamed. “She’s there,…
Not long ago, I found myself walking with a small team of missionaries along the rubble-filled streets of Mathare, the second largest slum in Nairobi, Kenya, with a population of more than half-million people. We stepped over ditches filled with raw sewage and held hands as we walked to the homes of students who attend…
When my family and I moved back home to America from South Africa, we were not prepared for what would greet us upon our return. The dead of winter in Boston with its frigid temperatures, gray skies, and snow were the least of them. We also noticed that the social climate had changed. Yes, our…
We couldn’t understand but a few words of the mass but the beautiful, flowing Arabic was music to our ears, rising up to the heavens along with the sweet-smelling incense. Not only was the language new to our ears, having only studied it for a couple months, but this was the first mass we’d ever…
“I don’t know if I can marry you,” I tell my boyfriend as we snuggle on the couch in his parents’ living room. “If I do, you have to promise to let me go to Africa, alone if I have to. I don’t know when, and I don’t know why. But I know God has…
Once again, it was Winnie and me behind the bake sale table, while all the real excitement of the annual plant sale swirled through adjacent rooms. Winnie is a whiz at organizing the diverse, nearly random donations from friends of the land trust. Arrayed around us on three cloth-covered tables are blueberry cake, rhubarb and…
When Momae moved up north to Massachusetts to join Daddy, she brought her most precious possessions stuffed inside my granddaddy’s big brown leather suitcase. She also brought recipes handed down from my Nana, some hastily scribbled on paper, and others committed to memory. Daddy was an ensign in the Navy; his ship docked in Boston…
We were up so early that it was still dark outside. In typical Florida style, the sky was foggy and heavy with dampness. The drive to the airport in my 12-year-old mind was magical; we were setting off on an adventure and moving to Bermuda. This was new for me because though I was born…
I love sunrises, sunsets. The grandeur of mountains, the movement of the ocean, the starkness of the desert—all engage my senses. But nothing captures my heart like the beauty of God revealed in his created image bearers. I see God in my husband, my children, and now, especially, my grandchildren. Friends, neighbors, and co-workers reflect…
One of the most powerful and strategic ways God is at work right now building his church is not in any one location – it’s online. The constant access we have to everything offered online can be viewed negatively. The enemy is certainly using it for evil, particularly through the increase of internet pornography, public…
Tradition! To some, this word brings up images of Tevye dancing in the streets in Fiddler on the Roof. Though we laughed at his insistence that tradition meant everything, many feel the same way now about the musical church traditions with which they grew up. I was raised in a Catholic Church in my youngest…
Congress designated March as National Women’s History Month in 1987, but of course, women have long been making history. Consider trailblazers, such as Belva Lockwood, the first female admitted to the U.S. bar in 1873. Madeleine Albright, Condoleezza Rice, and Hillary Clinton have each served as U.S. Secretary of State, a position third in presidential…
We’ve heard about her, sewing late into the night by a lamp that does not go out, gorgeous toned arms planting a vineyard, a prominent husband, self-designed purple clothing, and children that get up in the morning and praise her. All of that sounds like an unattainable biblical ideal. Reflecting on who you know that…