Sacred Chaos, Again? Lord, You are goo…
That was as far as I got in my prayer journal this morning before my four year old grandson Abraham came wandering in, rubbing his eyes and looking for a lap to lay his head on. Within a few minutes two year old Dane joined us, saying: “Sit in you wap gramma.” Yes, the chaos has returned as our oldest son and family are with us for a few weeks while between houses. They have three kids now instead of two, and with my younger son who has also moved back home, our clan has gone from two to eight. Of course the challenge is in finding ways to make the chaos sacred (someone should write a book about that!) To read more, click here.

God is FOR Me: Do you know what it is like to desperately need someone to believe in you? To be so wrought with self-recrimination and second guessing that you aren’t sure who you are anymore? 25 years ago Joe and I were living in a remote Alaskan village seeking to bring the gospel to the 100 Eskimos among whom we had made our home. After one particularly troubling season when village drunkenness had kept me from sleep for weeks on end, I broke down and told Joe I didn’t think I could possibly endure the final year of our stint there. Hours of painful conversation later, overwhelmed and completely spent, we boarded a bush plane to go break the bad news to our supervisor, Don Rollins. As I sat looking out the dirty window at the miles of pristine tundra below, I couldn’t help but remember our very first interview with him at LAX airport a couple of years before. To read more, click here.

Harriet Beecher Stowe and Living Loved: Do you ever get to the end of a day and realize you haven’t connected with the Lord at all? I seem to have more of those lately and while there was a time it would have produced a lot of guilt and frustration, now it just perplexes me. Why does this happen? Shouldn’t I be way past this kind of struggle? And how can I possibly experience what it means to ‘live loved’ by God, when I’m barely aware of His presence in a given day? I could chalk it up to the crazy chaos of my life right now with 8 people living here, three under seven and the youngest being the most curious and precocious 2-year old I’ve ever seen. (My son said I should write a book about this experience called “Sacred Crisis” because the number of major mishaps multiplies exponentially with the addition of every child to a family!). But I digress. To read more, click here.

Recoup, Regroup, Rest and Restore: One of the things about writing for others is that God will inevitably make sure you get the opportunity to test what you’ve written – before, during or after you say it. Several weeks ago I wrote of Harriet Beecher Stowe and how our life changes when we realize that God is truly in everything – all the mundane details of our lives, the upsets, the mishaps, the overturned schedules, the busyness – you get the point. I know it struck a nerve because so many of you wrote of how this simple truth ministered to you. There are still eight of us living together here and the chaos continues, so when I got an email from my friend Derrith offering her house for a week while they were gone, I was determined to find a way to take her up on it. Derrith and Evan, their two boys and two dogs live in a gorgeous home in Lake Oswego, Oregon. The master bedroom with its wall to wall, floor to ceiling window looks out on luscious green woods and it is only a short walk to the Willamette River. (I won’t even begin to tell you about the Jacuzzi tub with the same view…) The idea of the beauty and serenity, not to mention the escape from San Diego’s oppressive August heat, was more than I could bear, so within a matter of hours I’d booked our flights and our plans were set. . To read more, click here.