Across the Kitchen Table

I turn 75 tomorrow. I don’t feel old or irrelevant, although my culture may tell me otherwise. Older, more savvy friends and pastoral mentors shared with Wayne and me in our early 40’s that life doesn’t even get really fun and rich until your fifties. That was a bit of experiential advice that I put…

New Beginnings Call for Remembering Roots

It’s late May and sometimes the early mornings are still cool here in Texas. Today is one of those glorious days. Wayne and I thought that it would be especially poignant on this beautiful spring morning to return to our roots.  We took a walk around the prayer center connected to the Grand Prairie campus…

Go into all the world…

At age 14, Elizabeth Elliot of the missionary-famed book, “Through Gates of Splendor,” spoke at my church. She told the heart-wrenching and brutal story of her husband’s death, along with 4 other missionaries, at the hands of the Acau Indians in South America. She stayed on, along with her young daughter, after their deaths to…

Searching for the Light Switch

This is part 2 from the post below, “See Jesus in the Flames.” Update on Julia…Thank you so much for your prayers. We got the biopsy report that Julia did have renal cell carcinoma as the doctors suspected, but it was stage 2 and grade 2. Stage 2 is because of the size (8.5 cm,…

Go, and Keep Going

I responded to a call to go into all the world to preach the gospel in my early 20’s. Eagerly, I went to Bible school to prepare. This hope became my bread and butter as I studied, dreamed, and planned to go. I didn’t exactly know where God would send me, but I knew international…

The Rules are Different

  After traveling for about 24 hours with flying time and layovers altogether, I was glad to board the last flight into Larnaka, Cyprus. To my knowledge we were the only Americans on the flight. And this is when you really leave your culture, homeland, and flannel comforts behind… You forget about being an American at all, or a…

‘Didn’t Our Hearts Burn Within Us…?’

There is only one thing better than drinking a rich cup of Ethiopian coffee in the morning… That is to drink it with an Ethiopian! For the past few days we have had a dear Ethiopian friend stay with us. This morning we drank our coffee under the arbor in the backyard. The weather was so…

Skipping Through Life

  My daughter’s outreach team in Cyprus Our 20 year-old daughter just returned from six months in Cyprus. This was her second year in a missionary-training school. Her daddy and I spent the last couple of days getting ready for her homecoming. And when she finally walked through the door, our hearts flooded with joy. It…

Focus

These are the candles for our Sabbath meal last evening. They brightened our table and our eyes through the entire evening. Two candles burning against the night are symbolic of Sabbath rest and Jewish tradition.

Where is Home?

Tiki, our Cypriot poodle, never has any trouble feeling at home… For the last 12 years, my husband and I have been in the fast lane as far as international travel. It has been a privilege, exhilirating, revealing, and exhausting at once. One year we traveled to three continents in the space of seven days. It was…