We are one week from leaving for Lithuania and we still don’t have a place to live. But I keep humming the Christmas carol, “No crib for a bed…” Even the Son of God on His advent to earth didn’t have a place to live. That strikes me as so strange. It wasn’t like God [...]

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Annie Dillard makes a very interesting distinction between freedom and just being loose in her book An American Childhood. Daryl is reading this book to me as part of our evening ritual. Dillard’s phrase, (used to describe her father that quit his job to travel the river), keeps rolling around in my head, “He wasn’t [...]

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We just finished our eighth week in Klaipeda, Lithuania, and we love it more each day. Someone asked me what I miss most of our lives in the U.S. Things? No, not “things”. I don’t miss movies or TV or restaurants or shopping malls or having a car. I don’t miss our house or the [...]

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“The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs” (George Eliot, 1861, Middlemarch). I hope and pray that I [...]

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There is a time in all of our lives, no matter how old or young we are, that we need to stop and evaluate things—do a sort of assessment of where we are and why we are doing what we are doing. Friends said to me once they always felt kind of guilty when hanging [...]

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Okay guys! Please forgive me in advance for using the blog for a newsletter. Daryl was in the hospital for five days! He’s never been in the hospital in his life! (Yes, birth, but that’s all). We’ve lost two weeks of prep time getting him well. He still has a little infection and is on [...]

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Every single day of my life I’ve had to make decisions. We all have. When I was a kid my Mom would ask, “What do you want for breakfast?” That’s decision making 101. When I got older my teachers in school would ask, “Do you want to pass or fail this class?” That’s decision making [...]

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Words. Can’t live with ‘em; can’t live without ‘em. Okay. I guess that’s not entirely true. We can live with ‘em…some of them. Not all of them. I’m thinking a lot about words right now ‘cause I’m preparing to teach a class on linguistic theory and well, there’s a whole lotta stuff about words in [...]

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“I love Russia! I mean I really love everything about Russia! The food, the people, the literature—EVERYTHING!” I was my usual melodramatic self speaking through clenched teeth to an American teacher in China telling her just how much I wanted to live and work in Russia. It was an insignificant chat with my new friend [...]

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Kathleen Norris is a writer that takes you on a journey. She doesn’t have to use the old template of a beginning, middle and end like we’re taught in Comp 101. Sometimes the “end” of her books are really just the beginning–at least for me. As she leads the reader on a road, occasionally she [...]

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