Blog

On the night of April 21, 2008, I stood in an outside courtyard at UCLA Hospital. A group of nearly 100 friends encircled me, some weeping, some silent, all in shock at the unexpected place they found themselves ending what began as an ordinary day. Two floors below...

Prior to marriage the thought of conceiving a child seemed quite easy. Everywhere I looked a woman was pregnant; surely it wasn't that difficult. My husband and I decided to try for children fairly early into our marriage. What looked easy before quickly became...

Our bedtime reading became hours of youtube adoption stories in those months before we adopted Eden and Caleb. We were hooked on home-spliced, three-minute life snapshots of forlorn children -- who had a slight sparkle return to their eye as strangers became their...

Her shoulders slump and her eyes search the floor. She mumbles and turns her back towards me. This little sprite went from fire-in-her-eyes to a stone-cold-countenance in a matter of seconds, all because things didn't work out as she'd planned. I could write the...

In his thought-provoking book, The Mystery of Marriage, Mike Mason compares our spouse to a great tree “growing up in the center of one’s living room.” Mason goes on to say how beautiful and unique the tree is—how utterly rooted and unmovable. Standing in the middle...

She was baptized once, and we weren’t there.  Not part of her life, her story.  And the way she tells it, her grandmother held her in a deep pool and together they went under. I still don’t understand it.  And neither does she. In honor of this new skin on the old...

Late on the evening of July 7, 2005, I sat across the table from my beautiful wife. We were celebrating our sixteenth wedding anniversary, and we were doing it in style, on the patio of a rooftop restaurant situated across the street from the White House. The setting...

Summer is finally here -- I always look forward to the first barbecue of the season. I had just flown in to join friends around a table for good conversation and good food. Normally that combination is tough to beat, but this barbecue was a little different. In honor...

In honor of this new skin on the old blog, I'm throwing an open house. For the month of July and into the first days of August I am going to introduce you to some others in my life who have their real stories of how He has used the seemingly "bitter"  to create new...