Sorry Jeff – bad pun, but I just can’t help it… Because I’m goin’ to Guatemala with Jeff Goins! (and 24 other super-awesome people).     It’s the Wrecked vision trip, where we’ll spend five days getting off of our comfortable couches and experiencing reality — families living and scavenging in the city dump. Children who have been abandoned. People. People Jesus loves, even though we’ve overlooked and forgotten them. Look, we all get comfortable. And every once in awhile, we need our worlds turned upside down — maybe for the first or fiftieth time. We need to get our hands […]

Read More

The other night, I woke up around 2:30 and couldn’t get back to sleep. You’ve been there before, right? That horrible tossing and turning? Too hot and too cold at the same time? Mind racing like Secretariat? So I started trying to pick apart the reason I was awake — because it didn’t make sense. My brain was spinning, but over nothing. Not even over stupid things, but truly over nothing. Just spinning. That’s when I remembered that all negative emotions — all stress, all anger, all discouragement, all jealousy, all pride —  boils down to fear. I’ve talked about fear before…what […]

Read More

I love hedgehogs. Last week, my amazing friend Andi Cumbo made me this super-cute hedgehog. You can get one too, handmade just for you, from her Etsy shop, and support her dream for “God’s Whisper,” a retreat for artists in the Virginia mountains. This started me thinking about *why* I love hedgehogs so much, and what we can learn from them… A hedgehog is a solitary creature. I can relate. She is perfectly happy to cuddle up all alone in a warm little fleece bag. She won’t come out voluntarily unless you’re holding a mealworm in front of her nose. But […]

Read More

I recently saw a list of the top five most popular posts on a productivity app’s blog. The posts themselves weren’t really anything stunning…what struck me was the story that the collection of them told. The five posts were titled: The big list of 100 tools, tips and tricks to work more efficiently online What multitasking does to our brains What happens to our brains when we exercise and how it makes us happier How much sleep do we really need to work productively? The science behind how your productivity is affected by what, how, and when you eat Individually, all […]

Read More

Tomorrow is Election Day in the United States. Tomorrow, for the very first time, Masha will cast her vote for President, for Governor, and for several other local races. You may have noticed that I stay pretty far away from politics here. That’s not a result of any strategy of appeasement, or any effort to passive-aggressively imply support for one side or the other based on certain beliefs I’ve shared or not shared here. It’s not from any failed effort to show direct support or opposition to any particular single issue. Honestly, the reason is that I’m conflicted. I have […]

Read More