Last month here in San Diego, parents were hit with a double whammy of circumstances which made proper planning paramount. During the last weekend before school started, when last-minute moms like me were raiding what was left in the Target bins, Hurricane Hillary was due to hit us—the first tropical storm to hit southern California […]
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I cherish my slow summer mornings at our family’s farm in Michigan. I can sip my coffee on the back porch and listen to birdsong, watch the sun rise over the fields. Looking out over the oak trees, I wish that every morning could be a slow summer morning, but I know that eventually all […]
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Every day has felt a bit like Christmas at our house lately. Amazon packages arrive in waves. I open them, make a note of who to thank, then bring the contents to work with me. In my role as Director of Children and Family Ministry at my church, I’m in charge of running VBS (Vacation […]
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I had a gift card burning a hole in my pocket, and that’s how I came to be out our local Barnes & Noble one Friday morning. The last time I stepped into a Barnes & Noble, we were living in a different state, and the bookstore had been connected to a mall, back when […]
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One of my responsibilities as part of my new job as Director of Children and Family Ministry is to teach preschool chapel once a month. Like many churches, we have a thriving preschool on our campus and it’s a delight to see all those 3- and 4-year-olds gathered together in a squirmy mob on chapel […]
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Our sphere of control is comically small: this is what we all learned in the early months of the pandemic. As we bumped up into our new reality—not knowing how long quarantine would last, being unable to make plans for the future, feeling the stress of uncertainty every day—we faced our own extreme limitations. During […]
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Last year was my first time observing Lent by “giving something up.” Throughout the years, I was vaguely aware that Christians from other denominations participated in some sort of fasting during the 40 days that led up to Easter. I always thought this was strange and unnecessarily hard: why wouldn’t everyone just skip to the […]
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When we lived in the south of France during my junior-high years, we had a cherry tree in our small backyard. Our house shared walls with a row of houses on a busy street near the edge of town. My parents had chosen to rent this house for all the space it afforded us: three […]
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My French is rusty. It pains me to admit this, because I have a lot of pride about growing up bilingual as a missionary kid. My family moved from California to France when I was seven. We attended language school for a year, and then I was dropped into French public school for the rest […]
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Reading is my favorite thing to do, and this year I read over 75 titles! Narrowing down my favorite reads each year is torture, but I’d love to share my favorites with you here. I used the following categories to make it simpler: top fiction, top historical fiction, top Christian nonfiction, best of memoir, and […]
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Sarah K. Butterfield 