by Laura on February 4, 2012

The following is my humble, quick attempt to convince my fellow missionary-types to jump the hurdles of fear, time and know-how and just go ahead and start a blog of some sort. {That is, of course, unless you are one of those super-amazing people living in a closed country where blogs are illegal or in [...]
by Laura on February 2, 2012

It’s Thursday morning, and I wake up with my mind racing. The balls are spinning in the air, and it seems the faster I juggle, the more likely I am to drop one, or two, or seven for that matter. I have about twelve too many projects going on at once, no consistent childcare help, [...]
by Laura on January 28, 2012

So I met a family last week that suddenly made me want to sell all my stuff and go live in the red-light district of Bangkok, buying rice for the homeless crazy woman in the mornings and giving warm socks to the male prostitute on the street corner, trying to make a buck. Their story [...]
by Laura on January 26, 2012

If my spiritual life were a dashboard in a flight cockpit, I’m pretty sure the red lights screaming danger, crash-and-burn-imminent! would be angrily blinking. Because my faith has taken a beating this year, a battering. . . ********* But, here’s the thing I am {re}learning about this God I started following 25 years ago. He [...]
by Laura on January 24, 2012

1. Don’t Become a Missionary if You Think You Are Going to Change the World. First, high expectations doom to disappoint, but, also, maybe your desire to change the world is trumping your desire to serve. Ask yourself if you would be happy moving overseas to a much harsher environment in order to quietly help [...]
by Laura on January 21, 2012

Admittedly, I am a crappy pray-er. I have the attention span of a cocker-spaniel whose owners are having a dinnerparty, and the result of my distraction is that my prayer life is sporadic, hurried, and fuzzy, at best. Last week, though, I learned about a new tool to use in prayer that has really helped [...]
by Laura on January 20, 2012

I homeschool my kids. I see them from 6:30 in the morning until about 8:30 in the evening, with the exception of an hour-and-a-half lesson in taekwondo a few times a week or the occasional playdate. We don’t have family close by to watch the kids for the weekend, and we live in Asia where [...]
by Laura on January 18, 2012

So the number one comment I read last week asked for more writings, images, and videos of our daily life here in Thailand. I’ve done videos of the local market where most people shop, the process of riding local transportation, my daughter eating worms, my husband making chopsticks and riding an ostrich, but I realized [...]
by Laura on January 12, 2012

I was talking to a Chinese neighbor the other day while his kids were playing with mine. My friend and I began asking him a little about his work in Thailand, and it turns out he trains Chinese nationals to go into countries of the Middle East– Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq. And then he told us [...]
by Laura on January 11, 2012

So, yeah, our family has food issues. I have one kid that has claimed vegetarianism for the past 6 months, one kid that I think has a gluten-allergy and also hates rice {yeah, in Asia, he hates rice}, and another child that literally wants ketchup on everything from noodles to watermelon {yeah, I am not [...]
by Laura on January 10, 2012

National DeLurking Day in the blogworld is this weekend. Haven’t heard of it? Neither had I before this morning. Essentially, it’s a day when bloggers ask readers to leave a comment. It gives bloggers an idea of who is actually reading the stuff they are throwing to the big-wide-Universe. So, in honor of this epically-grand [...]