The Ordinary Ones

About five years ago, I went to a Theology of the Body conference where the speaker asked, "Are you a spiritual being?" After everyone started to say yes... He responded, "No! You are not a spiritual being. You are a HUMAN being. The angels are spiritual beings. You are not an angel. You are human. You have a soul AND you have a body." And you know what else? Being human is not bad. It's actually not a sin. You know who else was human? JESUS. And He never sinned. So being human can't be a sin. It's actually a good thing and a gift that God gave us. My body, my emotions, my intellect, they are all good, holy things. It's so easy, especially as a missionary, to live as if I am a spiritual being, and not a human being with a body, emotions, and a mind, as well as a soul. It's easy to live as if what I feel, think and need doesn't actually matter unless it is a spiritual thing. That is just simply not true! It's a big fat lie, okay? It is

I believe in wasting time. Wasting time in my personal life. And wasting time in ministry. When I look back at the best moments of my life, they were ones that didn’t accomplish anything. Sitting around a table, telling stories, laughter. Definitely laughter. When I look back at the best and most fruitful times in ministry, I also fully believe that those are the ones that would be considered wasted time. Like when my high school girls’ small group in Nashville would eat dinner together, usually resulting in stories, jokes, and laughter. Or sitting outside of someone’s house in Haiti, playing with kids, letting them tell us about their lives. Or playing a card game with teenagers on our porch in Haiti, before I could speak much of the language. Or jumping rope with the kids and our neighbors in Asia. What is the point? Relationship. Sometimes when I was a teacher monitoring the playground, kids would come and tell me little pieces of their story. How she stayed up all night wit

A month and a half ago, I came back from mission in Asia, after three and a half months. Many different things contributed to our early return, and after a lot of prayer and conversations, I decided not to go back to this particular mission. I still feel deeply called to foreign mission, and am taking some time to rest, then pray and discern where the Lord may be calling me next, for hopefully a longer amount of time. The view from the roof of our home in Asia How awkwardly difficult. I wanted to be the kind of missionary that could love Asia, the continent with the least amount of Christians, and a variety of incredibly different cultures. And while I won’t say that I didn’t love it, and that I couldn’t come to love it with time, I do feel very clearly that right now is not the time, and this was not the particular situation, in which the Lord is calling me to be a missionary in Asia. Maybe one day. A different season in my life with a particular kind of grace. It took a lo

We finally arrive at our house that we have been waiting for since we arrived in this country exactly one month ago. Pulling up in our van packed full with suitcases and belongings. Two guitars. Some kitchen items and storage. A yellow, blue, and green house. Smiling faces as we step out of our van. Women and children at the corner. A child hides behind his mother’s legs. Coming down the stairs from the rooftop. I walk around my friend who is staring over the wall at the neighbors, smiling. Pick up a coconut to see if we could find a tool to crack it open and drink the coconut water. I turn around again and see my friend standing in the same spot, still staring over the wall, still smiling. She hasn’t made a sound but her hands are moving. I stand on my tiptoes to look at the neighbors and their hands are moving too, smiling. - Days later, sitting on the floor of our living room. No furniture yet. Running water, check. Trying to eat our food before it goes bad since we don’t y

When I was 24 years old, I moved to Haiti, a small country in the Caribbean. It is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. To me, Haiti is a place where there is much suffering, but also much joy. I lived there for three years. Many times, I thought about how crazy it was that I was living my dreams in my twenties. Some people never get to pursue their dreams in their lifetime and here I was living it at my quarter century mark. What is next? I used to think. How could God possibly outdo Himself here? I thought that the Lord could be good to me only one time. My vision was so small. It took me three years after I left Haiti to trust the Lord for this next adventure. Now I am living on the other side of the world. A new community. A different organization. It is incredibly hard to be in a new place with a new community. But it seems that the Lord can outdo Himself. Not because this is better, but because once again, He has been good to me. He doesn't stop blessing

Making gestures with our hands. Three women in the family are deaf, so this is how we communicate. Somehow it has been easier than a foreign language. A fishing net. Shrimp. Their work is peeling or cutting shrimp after the fishermen bring them in. They ask us if we ate the shrimp they brought to our house. Not yet.. We try to communicate with our hands.. We don't know how to cook them. They try to tell us how with their hands. Put them in a pan with oil and spices. That's the best I can understand. Their mother is in her eighties, crippled and sitting in a chair. Her hands and feet are bent more out of shape than anyone I have ever seen before. They tell us that she had fallen and broken her shoulder at some point. Their father died in 1992. One of the women traces 92 with her finger onto the inside of her forearm. We are sitting in a two bedroom house, in one of the bedrooms which might be just an entryway. But it's where these three women, their mother,

Washing laundry in a blue bucket in the bathroom. I remember Timanet and Bibi who taught me to wash laundry in Haiti. All of us laughing as I tried to make the squelching soapy sound with my hands and my clothes in the water like they did every time clothes hit clothes. Squelch. Squelch. Squelch. I maybe succeeded a couple of times in the three years that I lived there. Maybe. Now, here I am again in my bathroom on the other side of the world with a bucket of laundry and some soap. This time, more than six years later, my bucket is tall and deep instead of wide and low. This time I sit on a low stool in a tile bathroom instead of on a cinder block under a tree. Last week my laundry came out smelling more dirty than clean. Such is life. Here there are banana trees, mango trees, coconuts, rice almost every day. It feels familiar to me. New but familiar. More familiar than dinner in a big city that costs more than $20 per person. Here I can eat for $2 or less. A simple life.

In the past ten years, I have lived in twelve different houses, in nine different cities, in three different countries. When I write it out, I can’t even believe that those are real numbers. I am very familiar with transition, and am in the midst of it right now… again. I am also an introvert. I love people, but in small doses. Intentional, quality, share-the-depths-of-your-heart time is where I thrive. This is sometimes hard to find in the pace of changing places, people, relationships. So I wanted to share some of the things I have learned (and am still learning) about what I think is one of life’s greatest challenges – transition. Things Not to Do: • Continually dig things out of your suitcase for the first couple of weeks while you run around like crazy. Avoid unpacking because it seems stressful. There will come a time when you spend fifteen minutes in the morning looking for something and then just go back to bed, with your suitcase spilling over, still unable to fi