And we don’t have to work so hard to be okay.

I was electrocuted twice as a child. The first time was with my 80-year-old great-grandmother. That was bad. But the one that stands out most in my mind was the other one. 

The Lord’s Spirit in the Lowliest of Places.

Cal (name changed for anonymity) was probably the last person you would choose to bring into your home. Six feet tall. Strong and broad in shoulders. Ex-con. Coyote. Wanted by both the police and the cartels for knowing too much. His first arrest happened at 7 years old, when he held an American couple at gunpoint to rob them. He spent years in prison. And years running.

When You Have Noting to Give. 

I had a vision once when I was in Mexico. It happened in the middle of the night when I had gotten up to use the bathroom. The moon was full over the desert ranch as I passed the window, and its light spilled a cascade of silver on my newly planted garden below. The tilled soil. The baby plants. All of the day’s labor. And somewhere in my mind, wherever visions are planted, I was barefoot in that garden.

When Your World Comes Crashing Down.

When I was a young mommy, I followed a woman online called The Fly Lady. I don’t know if she’s still around. But she was one of those wise people who taught young women how to manage their days. How to organize their households. How to get through the whirling chaos that comes with infants and toddlers and home life in those early years. Her advice was simple. Start with the kitchen sink. Just the kitchen sink. Begin there. Wash the dishes. Scrub the basin. Bleach it. Dry it until it shines.

A Greater Purpose in the Pain.

I guess I’ve been thinking a lot about birth lately, given that my very first grand baby is on the way. And I’ve been thinking about the miracle and design of the process, how a baby passes from one world to the next. From womb to earth. Water to air. And how those painful minutes in between are the most vital of all.

YHWH: A Deep Sigh Calls HIS Name.

Some words stop me in my tracks. 

They have a way of affecting me deeply and changing the way I look at things—the way I look at life. 

Hope in the Disappointment.

He was the cutest boy I had ever seen. Three and a half feet tall. Baby brown eyes. He lived right across the playground and over the chain-link fence. Brett Elmblad … the name forever embedded in the recesses of my mind.

We’ve always told our youngest son the story of the day he turned three. He woke up that birthday morning down in Texas (during language school) and told my husband, Peter, he had a dream he could ride a two-wheeler bike. He asked his dad to get it out of storage so he could ride it.