I’m joining the fabulous Emily Freeman in sharing 10 things I learned this August weaving back and forth from silly to serious. This is the summer vacation edition. 1. First, I need to just keep pushing the publish button. Keep putting words on paper.…
The last few months I have been living the stages of grief, swerving from anger to depression and back again, barely catching my breath. I only momentarily live in the broad open spaces of acceptance before being pulled back into the vortex. …
I grew up believing I would be a missionary. After feeding on thick books about Amy Carmichael and Hudson Taylor, I buckled seat belts on as many planes as possible and headed to Gabon, West Africa, Albania, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, and Tibet. I learned…
It was summer in South Haven, MI. Life was full of fresh blueberries, Kilwin’s ice cream, and white pizza from Venezia brought down to the beach to watch the sunset, but I couldn’t taste any of it. A conflict was escalating…
Like the walls of Jerusalem in Nehemiah’s time, our lives after a move are in various states of disrepair. We can’t figure out how all the rocks fit into our new schedules and so everything feels a bit haphazard, chaotic. We’re catching meals…
Three weeks ago I looked across to Andrew reading in bed and wondered out loud when we would be allowed to go home. I was done with this moving thing. Our neighborhood pool had just closed for the autumn, he was beginning to travel again,…
When you packed up that UHaul you carried more than just your tan couch up the ramp, you brought along other baggage too: grief, anxiety, anger, and possibly fear. Moving changes everything. Psychologists say it can disturb the deepest foundations underneath your identity.…
Wide open, unfilled spaces can be utterly freeing. Anne Morrow Lindbergh in A Gift by the Sea rolled up the rugs in her “shell of a beach house” to encourage visual simplicity, a way of embracing the quiet. With this move, your schedule has…
Every new exploration needs a home base but when we are struggling to put down roots, sometimes we neglect ours out of rebellion. I don’t mean that in not creating home we are sinning against the homemaking gods, but sometimes in our grieving we…