Past Adventures
We spent 7 years living in Papua New Guinea working with a religious non-profit. Five of those years were spent deep in a jungle swamp, living among a remote, isolated tribal group. These are some of the posts that we wrote from that context!
Ifs, Ands, & Buts Aplenty
I got to have one of those special “let’s talk” church-leader conversations with one of our Iski believers this last week. I won’t get into all the messy details, but the main gist of it is that, for over a year and a half, this individual in our small jungle church...
I’m a Poet and I Didn’t Even…Realize It
I was having one of those days today. You know…THOSE days. The kind of day that feels like a Friday, even though it’s only Tuesday. The kind of day where you wake up feeling more tired than when you went to bed. The kind of day where you choose instant coffee instead...
The Sad Side of Success
I have been able to drop about 15 pounds since arriving back in our village a month and a half ago. Having spent a fair bit of time on the “husky” side of the scale lately, it’s been nice to finally see a bit of movement in this other, less blubbery, direction. I...
Awake, Oh Sleeper
Not everyone knows this about me, but I have insomnia. It first started right about the time we arrived in PNG and began our language study in 2015, and it has been going strong ever since. Now, I know that correlation does not equal causation, but I am a Millennial,...
Missional Misconception #1 (Support Figures)
Support. If there was ever a word that was surrounded with misconception and confusion in the missional realm, it is that one. Anyone who has ever worked for a faith-based* mission organization has inevitably had more than their fair share of confusing conversations...
Meet Izzy
I was going to write about language-learning woes today, because that is where my mind is at these days. As I pondered my potential prose however, I was reminded of a post I did a while ago on that same subject. I went back and reread that other post and was impressed...
Near-Nude Generosity
The other day, I started a post off with a fictitious account of a man named Stuart. It was meant as a playful anecdote containing a thinly veiled moral lesson: Give to charity or end up as a grease smear on the highway. Well, within 24 hours of my posting that story,...
The Photovoltaic System and the Snake: A Fable
Once upon a time, there was a man named Stuart. Stuart was a somewhat selfish man, who thought only of himself. One morning, after purchasing his usual, over-priced, unnecessarily specific, probably organic coffee, he was strolling along, and he met a kind-hearted...
Don’t Be A Cow
As a general rule, I think we tend to take things for granted. We go through each day, utilizing incredibly advanced technologies, interacting with amazingly unique people, and experiencing wondrously special events, and we do it in a ho-hum sort of way, like a cow...