Getting Unstuck
My friend Trudie just got a huge double stroller. Like the kind that might take up the majority of an elevator. Which is exactly what happened a couple weeks ago at a local science museum. My husband and two girls got in first, followed by Trudie’s three-year-old, and then Trudie with her baby and stroller. (Did I mention this thing is giant?) The young maintenance man in the corner pressed himself into the wall and stared as I tried to squeeze myself past the stroller’s handle into the one empty square foot of space beside Trudie. I tried. And failed. As the handle pressed into my rib cage, the elevator doors closed on my undignified hind end. Over and over. By the time I managed to turn the stroller just enough to let me in, my friend and husband were laughing...
Read MoreLet It Be
Some things don’t settle in until you see it in somebody else’s eyes. Especially when they’ve known you forever and they can see the change. I stood on a hillside graveyard in Kentucky last weekend, bare toes in deep moss, and looked sixty or so of my family in the eyes. There was no pretending – not for them, not for me. It’s been a hard couple of years. There are more fresh graves on that hillside than seems right, and that’s just the upturned soil we can see. Almost all of us are working a little harder this year to fill our raw lungs, and there aren’t many of us that aren’t asking why. Why are there seasons like this? What’s the point of grief and cancer and heartache and aging and broken relationships and dreams that disappear like smoke in the wind? A...
Read MoreThe Light at the Bend
Our road just bent in a way we didn’t expect and didn’t want. We will not be returning to our home and ministry in Papua New Guinea. This seems sudden, I know. And in a lot of ways it is. But in other ways it’s been coming for a year. Friends, we’ve just walked through a really dark season, and only now are we slowing down enough to realize the full weight of it. Much of what happened in PNG is something we can’t share, but like most real stories it’s littered with shards of broken people. It’s a hard, messy story, and we can’t pretend that away. A few months ago, a dear friend said to me, “You’ve had an awful lot of ashes this year, but I want to hear about the beauty.” She’s right. The ashes are undeniably real, and there’s no getting back some of the precious...
Read MoreWelcome Home
The immigration officer with the stamp in his hand had a strong Long Island accent. We’d been up for nearly 24 hours, and our kids were melting down waiting in the first of many lines at JFK, while more English than we’d heard in a long time swirled around us. We handed over our passports, and he asked us questions about where we’d been and for how long. Then he handed them back with two words. “Welcome home.” I didn’t expect the lump in my throat. And a few hours later when we landed into a brilliant orange sunset in Charlotte, I couldn’t hold the tears back. Home. I grew up rootless – some life in the Philippines, some in Ohio, Texas, Virginia, North Carolina… Fifty houses and twelve schools in the first eighteen years of my life. And now I’m doing something...
Read MoreAn Open Letter to the Folks We’ll See on Furlough
I’ll go ahead and say sorry. I’m sorry in advance for the things we’ll do and say on furlough. We’ve only been away from the States for a year and a half, but we’ve already forgotten a lot about how to live there. When we show up to speak at your church and neither of my children can find their shoes, it’s not because we’re neglectful or disrespectful. It’s simply that shoes have become an accessory, not a necessity, and why in the world would you wear shoes when there are puddles to splash through and soft grass and warm stones on the dirt road? And, yes, I realize their toenails and the bottoms of their feet look like they need a good scrub. About the time the stains fade and their feet look respectable again, it will be time to return to the land of unfettered...
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