thoughts from the deep recesses

How is it that hot water poured over little ground up beans makes such a magical drink? The weather has been positively glorious the past four or five days... we had our first dinner out on the deck Sunday night. I love dining al fresco. I just had to google 'al fresco' to be sure it meant what I thought it meant. I had this fear I was saying I liked dining nude. Speaking of google, I don't really Google anymore. I use Swagbucks now exclusively. Are you using Swagbucks? Because it's just another search engine, except that you can earn points (swagbucks) and then turn them in for free stuff. I've already earned $15 in Amazon gift cards. I'm just saving them for Christmas... hey - it's free money. Kyler ran his personal best for the mile last week at his track - finished at 5:12. His goal is to do a sub-five mile this year... GO KYLER! I love the end of the school year busy-ness... we're constantly on the go with some event or another, but so many of the e

So all year for the internship at church we've been reading books. Books about humility. The poor. Leadership. Church planting. Lots of books. And all year I've been searching for a book I could really relate to... the one that really grabbed me and where I found myself saying "This is me! This is what God has for me! This is why I did the internship! This is what I'm supposed to be doing!" After awhile, I found myself willing to settle for just a chapter... I kept asking at intern meetings "Where is my chapter?" While in Chicago, we visited SO many different ministries... from Latino churches sitting right on the border between two gang territories to ministries reaching out to the African-American neighborhoods on the south side of the city, tutoring, teaching computer skills and mentoring youth. Business owners purposefully settling into poor neighborhoods to invest their lives into improving the quality of life and ministries that take the most at r

I've been feeling particularly wordy lately... Perhaps it's because I laid in bed the other night and read my hand written journal from the time that Tejan was here... while I blogged a TON during that time period, I have more personal journaling that I kept to myself... something inspired me to pull it out. We're coming up on two years since he left... April 20th will be the two year mark. It's been ages since we heard anything from him, even though we recently sent a nice big package of pictures and letters and a gift to him. It saddens me. I have a lovely picture of him with his house mother Mama Josephine up on our kitchen wall. I see it every single day. The other day I really paused in front of it. Kissed my fingers. Placed them on his picture and said out loud "I love you, T." It made me cry... that spontaneous affection. I miss him. We are still saving money for a family trip to Sierra Leone. Sometimes I get positively overwhelmed by the magnitude of t

It's been ages since I've decided to tackle any sort of baking/craft/holiday project beyond the classic sugar cookies at Christmastime. I used to be the mom who made elaborate cakes for all the kid's birthdays, until we discovered that no one in our house really likes cake... But when I saw these bunny cupcakes in a recent copy of Woman's Day magazine, I knew I wanted to give them a try. We started with simple chocolate cupcakes - a Weight Watchers recipe made with a devils food cake mix and 12 oz. of diet soda. The original recipe calls for cola, but I had some diet lemon lime soda in the fridge... you don't add anything else. Just cake mix and diet soda. And guess what? It makes the fudgiest, yummiest cupcakes out there. I made these the other day with the yummy frosting I linked to awhile back... best cupcakes EVER! For the bunnies though, I decided to go with simple canned frosting. We made the ears by cutting large marshmallows in half and then dipping the sti

I've just about settled back into things after my trip to Chicago... why is is that the week after you get back from a trip always FLIES by so quickly? Can it possibly have been a whole week already since I got home? Where did the time go? We had the loveliest of Easters yesterday... I ended up singing a little background choral bit for the service at church - been YEARS since I've done that. It was extremely low key. But fun. Then after church we had people over... my nephew Spencer and his girlfriend Annie were already here after arriving in town Saturday night, then we had our friends the Pannells over, as well as Kevin (my niece's boyfriend) and a young couple (the guy is a fellow intern...) It was loud and wonderful and we had more food than we could possibly eat... including ham and flank steak and the obligatory deviled eggs... good stuff. When everyone left we had a little family time watching "Life"... it was great to have a Sunday off from work. (No Weig

Seven days. Eight people. A windy city. It would take forever to tell you about everything we did in Chicago... we hit the ground running and were in and out of our rockin' 15 passenger van about a gazillion times... and we saw everything from the poorest neighborhoods to one of the wealthiest churches in the nation. Chicago is a city riddled with issues - corrupt government, poverty, crime and hopelessness abound. Cook County decides how many prison cells to build based on 4th grade test scores. So instead of putting money into prevention (ie education), they literally just build more jail cells. I was appalled at the policies - infuriated by the lack of concern for the poor - overwhelmed by the broad scope of the problems this city faces. And yet, it is one of the most beautiful and culturally rich cities in the world. I got to spend a morning at the Art Institute... such a strange contrast between the wealth and beauty there on Michigan Avenue and the garbage strewn streets a