Earlier this month, I drove 95 miles to a speaking engagement up in Orange County. I plugged my phone into my car’s stereo system and listened to a podcast with the occasional interruption from Google Maps. Eighty miles into my road trip and I pressed the “OFF” button on the car radio. I needed space […]
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Around this time of year, we are inundated with tips and tricks from experts, gurus, and influencers about how to live better, do better, BE better. We are encouraged to look at our lives and our selves and determine what we want to change. We look in the mirror and all of our body issues […]
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After a lifetime of going, the bravest thing I’ve ever done was to stay. My story starts with the bravery of my parents, when they left everything they knew in California to become lifelong missionaries in France. I was seven when we moved, oblivious to the fact that I should have felt some measure of […]
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When I was growing up in France, my grade school classmates could always be counted on to ask me one of two questions upon finding out that I was American: Do you eat hamburgers every day for lunch and dinner? Do you know Michael Jackson? Both questions were absurd enough to make me laugh! Of […]
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Sometimes, God talks to us in a burning bush, like he did with Moses, and sometimes he speaks to us through a still, small whisper as he did with Elijah. But how does God speak to us today? When we think about hearing from God, we might limit his voice to what we find in […]
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Do you ever make pretend comments? My husband and I have a shorthand saying for when we feel that the other person isn’t truly listening to us. One person will be telling a story — maybe something that happened with the kids or at work — and the other person has their mind elsewhere and […]
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It was fun, at first. Hundreds of pictures are stacked in piles and lined up in chronological order: the highlights of 2018 spread before me. My gold striped picture album lay open, and the coordinating scrapbook paper is standing at the ready. I’d missed papercrafting and so I dove right in, arranging pictures, writing a […]
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It’s the fresh start of a new school year. Last week, we caught a whiff of new beginnings as we milled about the school for Meet the Teacher night. It smelled of fresh paint, rubber blacktop, and dry erase markers. The nervous excitement among the Kindergarten parents was mirrored back to us by the Kindergarten […]
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After two months in Michigan, we are back in San Diego. When a friend asked me if I was excited to come home, I told her that I was looking forward to being settled in. Settled means feeling comfortable and established. It’s what I want to feel immediately after coming home from a trip. But […]
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Before I became a mother, if someone would have told me that having a baby changes the way you relate to God, I would have scoffed. I’ve always been a creature of habit, and I still envisioned that my quiet time would stay unchanged after my baby was born. I could not foresee the sleepless […]
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Sarah K. Butterfield 