It’s That Simple
My five-year-old daughter leaned against my pillow, a rainbow of gel pens spread out on the bed around her. Her face was all concentration as she added vibrant life to the black and white outlines of a flower. “Mom?” “Yeah, babe?” I folded another dress and added it to the box that will store my clothes while we’re on furlough. “God makes beautiful things.” “Yes. He does.” “Then Satan breaks things. But God makes them beautiful again.” And there it was – the uncomplicated Gospel from the mouth of a child who hasn’t even been to kindergarten yet. To be honest, life over the past year has been anything but uncomplicated. I’ve witnessed more brokenness during our short first term here than I could have imagined I would. I’ve seen how evil can lean in hard and heavy...
Read MoreWhere Words Fail
I write like I breathe. Inhale. Exhale. Pull thoughts into the core of me, let them saturate, then push them out as words. It’s less a pastime and more a necessary function of life. Sometimes, though, the thoughts and emotions flow wild and the framework of words doesn’t hold them. They pour out like water, bursting through the cracks and splashing over the sides, and I sit drenched and wide awake in the stream. Some experiences are too big to be tied to time and space. They overlap into eternity, and if we pay attention, we can catch glimpses through the veil. These moments are big enough that they vibrate the air around them, they resonate like music in the bones. They leave us gasping, pulling for air like a fresh born baby before its first cry. Three weeks...
Read MoreLetting It Go: The Road Back to Joy
I freeze people. Not as dramatically as a singing snow queen, but I do. I freeze them in my mind. I remember who they used to be, what they were like before, the words they’ve said, the hurtful things they’ve done. And I keep them there in my head like little shrines to unforgiveness. I forget that they are living, growing, changing human beings. I forget that I’m not who I was yesterday. Or the day before. Or the day before that. Or the string of months before that. In fact, I’ve changed pretty drastically since this time last year. The other day I remembered a piece of myself. I was at Zumba (yes, we missionaries sometimes do Zumba), and I couldn’t get my directionally challenged self to figure out the steps, so I turned to the also-very-lost woman next...
Read MoreThe God Who Opens
I have this thing about flowers. And the Highlands of Papua New Guinea is a good place to have a flower obsession. All year round our yard is an explosion of pink roses, red and yellow dahlias, tiny orange honeysuckles, peach gladiolas, and these poofy purple things that I’m sure have a name. But my favorite flowers are the gardenias. We have five bushes scattered around the yard, and they all seem to bloom at once, and then I have to run outside barefoot and visit each blossom because there’s just something about having warm grass under my toes and lungs full of gardenia scented air. I pick one flower, one that’s just starting to unfurl, and bring it inside to finish blossoming in the red glass cup on the piano. There’s glory in the opening. Gentle spreading,...
Read MoreBut What About the Teddy Bear?!
The biggest blow up of our early married life was over a teddy bear neither my husband or I ever owned. Before we started dating, during that tenuous stage of trying to figure out how to define our budding relationship, a close friend of Mike’s pulled me aside and said, “Be gentle as you get to know him, because he had his heart broken not too long ago. He gave a girl a teddy bear, and she ended up giving it back to him.” As I got to know him, I kept waiting for Mike to open up and share with me about the girl who had broken his heart. I didn’t ask, afraid of pushing him to talk about something that must have still been tender. He never brought it up. Two years of dating, then engagement, and not one mention of the teddy bear. I didn’t think about it much in the...
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