Maybe one thing all of us single girls need to remember (and married ones too)

More and more of my friends are joining the married masses, they are standing at the end of aisles and saying "I do" to one person and "I don't" to a whole world of people.

They are promising to stay and to love and to sacrifice even when they fall out of love, when they fall out of infatuation, when they fall into bed exhausted after cleaning up sick kids and sticky finances.

When they fall into gray hair and wrinkled complexions, when they fall into tight budgets and the unexpected.

Yeah, they are saying "I do" to all of the falling.

They are saying "I do" to preaching the gospel together, using their lives to say "It's not good that man is alone."

When people pay attention to them, to the way they keep saying "I do" and "I don't" through all of the falling, then they get to tell how we are all the fallen.

But how one man said "I do" to the whoring, sinner bride and "I don't" to the right he had to deity and he took on our sin and our shame so we could repent and believe and be the blood bought bride.

There’s this truth about marriage that sometimes on this side of the vows we forget;

The truth that the only alter that offers life is the one with the replacement ram.

Because wasn't that the whole point of Abraham taking his man child onto that mountain.

The man he had prayed years for, waited years for.

They walked to the alter and Abraham put Isaac there, he picked up his knife to take life.

Because ever alter demands life, requires sacrifice.

No one goes to the alter to live. 

And all of us self-righteous, self-absorbed, self-worshiping need the truth that more than the sacrifices of a man we need a replacement ram.

The truth that no altar can alter our reaction to the past but the one that reassures us God’s wrath has been pacified.

No aisle walked speaks safety to our insecurity but the one the God man walked to Calvary.

No man offers safety like our replacement lamb offers identity.

No future offers hope like that final breath of our bride groom when he declared bloodied and submitted it. is. finished.

No alter offers peace with our past like the one bloodied by the one bent on bringing good of all things.

No aisle walked, no alter approached could be as beautiful as the feet washed with tears and confidence in the presence of adversaries because one woman had finally found her advocate.

They say when God writes your name on a good man’s heart there’s nothing you can do about it. But better than that is when God etches your new identity into the palm of his own hand.

So we’re not waiting around for the day we get a new last name

Because we're already the renamed.

We're not hanging hopes on any man

Because we've got a ressurected replacement Lamb. 





How to come home from missions trips and camp and the high of summer

I woke up today in my own bed, in my own city, in my own country.

I woke up early and drove up to Cesar's Head to just be alone and sit in stillness. 

I'm sitting on the face of a rock ten times my size, that's rippled like the shore of the ocean from years of wear but compleatly crack-less. 

There's a fence in front of me keeping curious people off the ledge and safely on the crack-less rock. 

So much of the last two weeks are pictures by this place. Me being kept on the rock by the fence of God's love. 

Why is it so hard to be back home, when I felt like it was so hard to be gone? 

Why am I so lonely, when I craved aloneness for almost seventeen days? 

I slept at the house alone and woke up alone and have spent hours this morning alone. 

My introvert heart should be thrilled, but it just begs for distraction. 

So I came out to the quiet hoping to silence the stirring that screams aloneness and the mundane are purposeless. 

The two loudest cries of my heart are "perfection" and "purpose". 

When I see how these two things fail to be present in my present I feel the depression setting in. 

Well, maybe lack of sleep and airplane food contribute too. Either way this embodied soul struggles today. 

Siting on this little mountain, I hear your beauty. 

Why make birds sound so pleasant or give the bee a life that pollinates flowers for my visual pleasure? 

Why create the beauty of mountains being unveiled by morning fog? 

Why create multiple layers of blue in the mountain range or valleys that fall between them? 

Is there any purpose greater than to point to you? 

Or is their greatest pleasure bigger than showing how great you are? 

Why create trees that grow at different heights or leaves that hold multiple colors? 

Why make a chill morning meet a hot noon? 

Why put sand in colorful piles or leaves on tiny missed weeds?

All to remind the melancholy heart to look and see you. 

All to remind the mission-trip-returner that nothing is mundane because your glory is always being worshipped. 

As I finish looking out at all of what I could take in, a man in a blue polo and khakis walks to the edge of the fence, coming from the path behind me. He smiles and nods towards my journal and pen and smiles as he says that this is a good place to write. 

I smile and nod back because I know, more than what I'm writing, something is being written in me. 

He's writting it clear and purposeful on the parchment of my active heart;

"Rejoice oh child of God 
Lift your eyes to see
With every morning light 
Again we are redeemed" 


Support Slovenia



To support this trip financially you can send a check to;
North Hills Community Church 
C/O Mary McKenzie (Make sure to put my name in the memo line also!) 
4952 Edwards Road 
Taylors, SC 29687

For the People Behind His Back

For the first two weeks in July there's going to be a team of us in Slovenia running a camp for children and teens. We'll be teaching English, running an adventure camp, connecting with and loving on the local church and indigenous missionaries. And of course drinking kava.



Why Slovenia? So many reasons (and look for more coming) but can I just tell you the one that tugs my heart the hardest? 

When you ask the Slovene people about God they will tell you they have been forgotten, many will tell you they are "behind his back." 





My heart for this summer, is to go and tell them how once we were all behind his back. But that this God became man and actually came to us so that when we come to him, confident that he exists and that he will do us good, he does amazing things. The people who were once behind his back find him turning around and naming them, identifying them individually. They, the people once behind his back, become the children who are now face to face with God himself.

This is why I'm going. This is why I'm asking for your prayerful and financial support. To tell the people "behind God's back" that in Jesus, God turns around.





To support this trip financially you can send a check to;
North Hills Community Church 
C/O Mary McKenzie (Make sure to put my name in the memo line also!) 
4952 Edwards Road 
Taylors, SC 29687 

To support this trip through prayer, just sign up to follow this blog at the bottom of the page!