I walked the loop of our neighborhood last week, before going to church for the evening. Stress had been running high in my life, to the point that I was breaking out in hives, and I needed to take a mile to remember to breathe. But I passed by a house on the north end…
It was better than Hallmark, when Matt and I left the Global Leadership Summit in August and he looked at me and said, “Part of our conference experience needs to be that we each go home and order one of the books that was mentioned by a speaker and that sounds intriguing.” I swooned. He…
Some of you have had weekly private sessions with a professional counselor, because you realized you needed help. I had to marry my counselor. “Matthew, L.C.P.C. (Licensed Clinical Professional Counselor), do you take Christy, H.M. (hot mess), to be your lawfully wedded wife? Do you promise to love and cherish her, in mental and emotional…
Let me preface this article by saying that I just took a personal assessment that described me as being someone who always starts with the question, “What is the right thing to do?” Funny, because I said those exact words to Matt before we went to sleep last night. I said, “I so desperately need…
I paid $15.00 for a three-shelf unit for our garage. It was light enough that I could carry the box home in one hand. When I opened it and slid out the parts, there were several bags of varying kinds of pipes and screws labeled A through J. Seriously? I had to lay it all…
How did this white Montana girl end up on the equator in Uganda? Only by God’s design. But there I was, with my midwinter pale skin (which I refer to as “morgue white” when shopping for makeup), flying into the airport in Entebbe, Uganda: my first time to be in the minority. First let me…
There’s a beautifully crafted, wooden peace pipe hanging above my father’s desk. Dad was an engineer for an oil company, and he worked with a lot of Native Americans on the oil field. It’s extremely unheard of, for a Native American to gift a peace pipe to a white man, but one fellow employee respected…
Last year at this time, I was buying slate-blue house paint, along with brushes, and rollers. I learned how to caulk between siding gaps. Then I set up on the front porch of my mother-in-law’s house and did the first cutting in. Six weeks later, I finished painting the entire house (minus the top portions,…
It was a Sunday afternoon, in the middle of March, when the email came for which I had been holding my breath, telling all of us teachers that we would be transitioning immediately to remote teaching. The next day we met solemnly at school, a chair space between each of us, to hear the action…
The gate was just to keep people who lived farther up the mountain from using our road. It was nothing but a single metal bar, and we knew it was high enough to drive under. I can’t count how many times I sailed underneath that gate in my Ford Taurus. Until one day I was…
How are we doing, everybody? Matt and I went to Lowe’s for a lawn mower spark plug on Sunday, him and me in face masks. Someone at church made them for us. I jokingly said, “Make sure his fabric works for a pastor.” She chose black skulls and flowers for him, if you need a…
Whew, I was Anne of Green Gables there for a bit, in the depths of despair. The world shut down, I moved to teach online school overnight, and an unwelcome fear and cynical hopelessness snuck up on me. As Anne says of despair, “It’s a very uncomfortable feeling indeed. When you try to eat a…
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