Moments in Grace

When I met her for the first time, she looked ordinary to me, unassuming, like any grandmother, anywhere, with salt and pepper hair and a soft, generous smile.   How could I have known that I had met a hero?   On that very first mission trip, into the high Mexican desert, up the winding dirt roads to land of cactus and cattle and smiling children living in structures made of sticks tied together with twine, how could I have known that there was a gem buried in those desert mountains?   That there was a gem of a woman tucked away in the sparsely dotted folds of those mountains, a hero of a woman with a name like a gemstone.   Her name was Garnet. And this gem of a grandmother, she led our team up these winding mountain roads and we bounced and jarred over rocks and packed dirt in a white twelve-passenger van, she told us her stories. The stories of a life lived full out for Jesus. She told us that she had come to this desert land when she w...

  So maybe you’ve been fighting the dark and the cold like some kind of polar vortex epic battle. And maybe you’ve been feeling like maybe the dark was winning. I think I can relate. Maybe your days have been hard and depression has been lurking like some kind of stealthy snow fox and maybe for a while you might have lost your way in all that blinding blurring snow.   Well, there is hope for people like us. People who sometimes get lost, and sometimes fall off the map, and sometimes can’t even remember what grace is let alone write about it and sometimes can’t even remember who they are. There is hope. When life turns you upside down and you can’t quite remember how to get back up, you can remember this….hope will find you. When, the day before Thanksgiving, I found out I was pregnant with our seventh child, I have to be honest and say, the wind was knocked out of me. And even for me who spent years working in the pro-lif...