Everyday Miracles

  The grandkids working on a creative project in my backyard How I got Here For most of the early 2000’s I was a missionary in Italy. I loved being a missionary. I had a missionary guesthouse in Milan, Italy. There I met, hosted, and prayed with missionaries and pastors from all over the world. Often I had opportunities to collaborate with them as well. It was fun and interesting. No two days were alike. In addition to my duties as hostess, I also traveled all over Europe and sometimes beyond. I’ve prayer walked most of the European capital cities [1] . At the end of 2019 God closed the door to Italy and I came home to North Carolina to live with my mom. Of course, I was disappointed at first. I missed Italy terribly, Milan being the place I had lived the longest of my whole life. I had no idea that pandemic loomed, but when the whole world went into lockdown, I began to understand. This had been God’s protection. What I didn’t know was that it signaled a completely new directi...

 “We’re doing a giveaway from a semi-truck,” K had told me. Since we usually do giveaways from a box truck, I knew that this was going to be a huge giveaway. And this was on the morning of New Year’s Eve. We have free use of a church parking lot close to the center of town, but the parking lot is too small to accommodate a semi. Thus, we met at a church I’ve never been to before. It is on the edge of town and has a very large and open parking lot. K and the unloading team had been there since 8:30. Distribution team setup was set for 10:30, with the giveaway set to start around 11AM. When I got there, they had already unloaded the semi and it was gone. The forklift operator was straightening the line of pallets (about 20 of them) and then he loaded the forklift onto a trailer and drove off. On the pallets were dozens of cases of sparkling iced tea. One last pallet had a huge box full of bar soap—much of which had not been cut up into bars. The team was bagging-up the smaller bars...

It’s December 30. Time to start thinking about New Year’s resolutions. The last time I made a New Year’s resolution was in 2020. I had decided to take charge of my health by losing some weight in order to lower my blood pressure. In fact, I lost 70 pounds in 2020 and my blood pressure went from borderline problematic to low in the normal range. In addition I became a certified Health Coach in June of 2020. Unfortunately, over the next two years I put about half of that weight back on, but still, it’s a win. With that win under my (much smaller) belt, I decided to get back into daily writing. I had already started my new blog: Everyday Miracles [1] . But with only one post since its November inauguration, the inspiration I had enjoyed at the beginning had faded. What to do? Well, I used to teach creative writing. I always told my students to make a daily appointment with themselves: a minimum one hour in their most creative time of day (eight in the morning for me). During that hour t...

Katie called me a few minutes ago, breathlessly excited to share what had just happened. First, a little context: Hurricane Helene devastated Western North Carolina almost two months ago. I was there. God had protected me so that for me and my family, the devastation amounted to an inconvenience [1] . I know Katie from church in Hillsborough, about four hours from Asheville. Katie has a house in a small town in Mitchell County. She wasn’t there during the hurricane and in fact didn’t go to see the aftermath until over a month later. There were a lot of downed trees on her property and the pipe from the cistern had been wrenched right out of the wall. She spent the weekend doing cleanup and repairs, but wondered what she was going to do about the trees. She doesn’t have a chainsaw. And even if she did, she’s not strong enough to move fallen trees by herself. It was clear that she’s going to need help. She decided to pray about it and turn her attention to more immediately pressing matte...