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He has seven teeth and only one person elicits a full reveal. All seven of us were around the dinner table laughing at the antics of the just-over-one year-old. Deep belly giggles and a single one-syllable word (at varying decibels) to describe just about everything...

Dear twenty-two-year-old me, I see you. It's September and still muggy in Virginia. Football is in the air, the only sign yet of fall. You're full of energy for the new year ahead -- September always delivered that to you, and you're glistening with the sweat produced...

Today, I share my friend Emily Wierenga with you. This woman has a way with words -- she invites you in and before you know it you're smelling what she's smelled and feeling what she felt. It's an honor to have a writer in this space who has handled her craft with...

I flew across the ocean, twice, to grow my family. I invited once-strangers to call me Mommy and made them my own. I fielded all the hurt and anger that comes from four once-broken lives that are now finding mending in my home and sometimes finding me to be an easy...

"Pray for this one," I told my friends that I knew would pray. It was a subtle drip of negativity coming from this child whose once-orphan wounds had threatened to be scars. Subtle enough that no one bumping up against the world outside our home would see, subtle...

Our birthing room for her was under the open African sky. The smell of burning trash and the sound of wild dogs outside our guest home, her welcome committee. "Daddy" she squealed when she saw us. It was the first word out of her mouth as she put years of her story...

I was twenty-six with a college degree and journals full of worn pages carrying dreams for my life. I'd led dozens towards Jesus in my decade of being a God-follower and somewhere in there managed to graduate magna cum laude. I rarely missed a "quiet time" -- a lot...

The day we pulled up into our driveway with them -- into the home that had been full of empty bedrooms for years while we waited for them -- we sat with the keys in the ignition while they, buckled into boosters in the back, slept off days of sleepless travel and we...

One of my favorite parts of life during this stretch, when it would feel easy to think that having five children and being a homeowner makes me old and wise, is having women who truly are wise (and maybe on the other side of forty) in my world. I can't imagine doing...

I never wanted to be you. All those years that my womb was hollow and when friends were shifting clothes in and out of their closets – moving out pilled maternity shirts (well-worn), and moving in those post-maternity jeans (worn much longer than planned) and...