writing
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a suffering life.
I’ve been a Christian for, well, as long as I can remember. I’ve always embraced the truths of the Bible. I’ve had my seasons of straying, but mostly I’ve wanted to know and follow hard after Jesus. I’ve sincerely wanted to serve Him with my life. But three years ago I had an awakening of sorts. It’s a difficult awakening to put into words. Maybe the best way to say it is, “I once was blind, but now I see.” I see. I see Jesus, loving me. I see Him, calling me closer. I see Him forgiving me—not just that one time at my conversion, but every day forgiving me. …
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an unhurried life.
A few weeks I wrote about my desire for a simple life. Over time I’d love to flesh that out on the blog, as these thoughts take form in my heart and, hopefully, in my life. The idea of wanting an unhurried life has been growing within me these past couple of years, but I can reach back in my memory to find that I first began learning it from a pastor’s wife and friend here in Lititz, Sandy Johnston. I moved here and had no friends and a baby on the way. Sandy would call me every so often just to see how I was doing. She’d stop by…
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a simple life.
We’re a family in transition, which all of you know full well. There are about a hundred stressful things about being in transition, all of which we experience to some extent about every day. I like to complain a lot about these stressful things. I think, if I’m brutally honest, I even like to some extent to be stressed, because then lots of people feel sorry for me. But when the complaining in my heart dies down for a moment, and I make time to just sit and be, I see that there are also gifts that come with being in transition. One of these gifts is a chance to…
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going public.
Friends, we are in the process of moving away from South Asia for good, and with that the need to keep our blog password-protected is no more. Frankly, I’m a little torn about this decision. There are many things I appreciate about having a private blog; namely, I more-or-less know who’s looking at it, and can be a little less guarded with personal information. But I now want to make our blog public again for two reasons: 1. A few of my favorite blogs are those I’ve stumbled upon through a trail of links or through a friend. They are written by people I will never meet and on whose…
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a pregnancy test.
I sipped tea with a friend this week, and she told me that a young girl she knows—a university student in our city—has a new boyfriend and missed her period this month. Do I think this means she’s pregnant, my friend asked? Hmmm, could be. She should definitely take a pregnancy test. My friend looked dismayed: You mean go to a hospital? No, a urine test will work just fine. My South Asian friend had never heard of a urine test, the kind you can find at any drugstore. She thought for awhile. I asked if she wanted me to go buy one, and she looked relieved. “I am single,…
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the mixer.
Our team’s Business Development Center (BDC) is launching next month, so David and Jonathan have been connecting with entrepreneurs and businessmen in the city to promote the 16-week course. David was invited to an entrepreneur event last night, and convinced me to go with him to mix and mingle. I am here to report my experience to you. If you are a girl, you know the foremost question in my mind: What should I wear? Thankfully, my friend Amanda has been to these events before, and was able to prepare me: business casual. So, after a thorough wardrobe search (I don’t seem to have a whole lot in the “business…
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he is risen.
The angel spoke to the women, “There is nothing to fear here. I know you’re looking for Jesus, the One they nailed to the cross. He is not here. He was raised, just as he said.” – Matthew 28.5 I woke up this morning with a surge of joy: He is risen! He is risen, indeed. Today is a beautiful day. It is dry, dusty, and hot, hot, hot, and He is risen. My heart aches with the brokenness of this country—the family with preschool-aged children crouching on the sidewalk outside their tent-home, rifling through a restaurant’s trash piles at 11 pm. And He is risen. I feel the weight…
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april first.
It is the first day of April, and I am sick. You know what? On the first day of March, I was sick. My sinus infections still pop up monthly, more regular than PMS it seems. So here I am, at the start of another month, trying to hold off until the last possible minute to buy the Dreaded Antibiotics. This is a difficult place to be in. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I have taken antibiotics almost every single one of the seventeen months I’ve lived in South Asia. And, on top of that, I pick up a random GI virus almost as often. You’d…
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visa run.
A fellow guest at our hotel this week told a story about a friend of his, an ex-pat living in this country. Even after spending years here, the friend found it impossible to adjust to the 24-7 noise and crowds of this country, so one evening, feeling at the brink of madness, he drove his jeep as far as he could out into the desert, parked it, and climbed on top for a whole night’s sleep all by himself. And there in the desert, with nothing but sand in every direction, he was awoken the next morning by a man pressing his face in close, asking, “What are you doing?”…
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things that make me happy right now: living here.
A week of my favorite things . . . When I was little I lived for three years in Barbados, and my nine-year-old heart broke into a thousand pieces when we had to leave. That place and the people there were apart of me, and leaving them was a loss I felt for a long, long time. When I graduated high school I was given the gift of moving back for a semester, and I felt like a part of me came alive again. For four short months, I soaked up the hot, humid weather, the sticky mosquito-filled nights and the island accents all around me. I learned to navigate…