A Beautiful Mosaic

God has called me to a place where: I spend some days sitting in waiting rooms for hours so that children can recieve the medical or psychologocial care they have been without for too long. "Progress" may look like a youth yelling and screaming about the pain in her life...finally. Grocery shopping takes two Wal-Mart baskets, two hours, and well over two (sometimes three) hundred dollars.  That is for the week. I respond to alarms at 1:30am because she's afraid of the dark and is having bad dreams, but I can't just let her crawl into our bed and fall back asleep. A single ounce of pain from the life of a youth is heavier than all the pain in my life put together.  In some ways, I am younger than the girls here. I am a minority.  I don't usually like the music, I don't understand all the slang.  The way I relate is certainly new to most of the youth here. Getting to the core issue is harder than it used to be; there are so many layers. Telling them to p...

Observations from a Midwesterner Living in the Bible Belt : Bible Belt:  an informal term for an area of the Southern United States in which socially conservative evangelical Protestantism is a significant part of the culture and Christian church attendance across the denominations is extremely high.  Christians talk often of their desire for Christianity to have more of a presence in their life and acceptance in their culture.  We want this because we want comfort and if our norm is THE norm, then we will be comfortable.  I live in a town now where I can listen to David Crowder* Band while I sit and eat at Taco Bell.  K-Love is played over the speakers at other hot spots like Wal-Mart, gas stations, and clothing stores.  No one around here feels disrespected by the lyrics or the fact that it is being played in a public setting.  On a more significant scale, there is a much greater level of openness to discussing faith and God by children...

I'm working on a few other posts that I've been chewing on the last week or so, but I may not complete them before we begin our work week tonight, so I thought I'd do a quick update and prayer plea. We're starting Week 4 in the house with the girls and things are still going really well.  Some days are harder than others, and the difficulty can stem from a variety of places or levels and it can spring up in an instant of course.  We're going on a one day Vacation with the girls this week to Hot Springs which we are all really excited about!  Normally, we would have been fundraising for our vacation all year and tried to go somewhere for a few days (one house on campus went to Houston for 4 days), but since we're brand new and school starts in 2 WEEKS, we're doing the best we can with our budget.  This coming year I have all kinds of ideas of how we can raise our funds for next year's vacation!  Once we are back from that, I am sure the remainder of our...

It has taken me a few weeks to put my finger on it, but I'm noticing yet another transition to my life here.  A transition concerning my faith, my life, my work.  For the last several years of my life, God has placed me in positions where my focus was sharing and talking about Him - about my relationship with God, your relationship with God, and relationships with God in general.  His desire was for my life to match up with my talk most certainly, and since ministry often creates the "life in a fishbowl" phenomenon, there is even some built in accountability to walk out your talk.  But you spend a lot of time talking.  Teaching, preaching, mentoring, sharing, writing, and on and on. I would say I spent as much time talking as I did walking...and sometimes, sadly, more. The thing is...I don't do half as much talking anymore.  But I have to do a lot of walking.  I mean 24/7 in-your-face walking out my faith or lack of faith every single day wi...

Yesterday marked one month of the Andersons being residents of Southeastern Arkansas, employees of Vera Lloyd Presbyterian Home, and beginning to build the foundation of our new life here.  I can't believe it has been a month.  In one sense, it feels as if we have lived here and been in this kind of work much longer than 30 days, but I am also surprised often with "feels-like-yesterday-moments" or moments when I refer to Salina places of businesses as "our" and the same places in Monticello as "their."  And I still have gentle waves of emotion.  When I miss all the people.  Because people are the irreplacable thing...no matter how many more you meet.  Our second week in the house went well.  It was the second week in the house, though, when I broke the golden rule around here: Do not let them get to your feelings.  Don't take the things they do or say personally .  That was a breeze for the first week and the first part of the second....

A group from San Antonio spent the last year planning a mission trip and fundraising for it.  They got a group of 50 youth and sponsors together and drove 12 hours to serve the Lord and others for a week.  Their destination? Vera Lloyd Presbyterian Home for Children.  Their mission? To build a campfire pit, low ropes course, and prayer/meditation path for the youth and staff here to use, as well as put on a "camp" in the evenings for us with a band, speaker, and games.  What an experience for me to be on the recieving end of mission.  A new one for sure...it was strange to say the least.  In fact, it was not even quite a year ago that I was on a mission team very similiar to theirs for the same reasons and purposes.  When we entered the gym with our girls the first night for "camp," I couldn't place my feelings.  I loved that this group was here, and there was some awesome teens on the trip as well as some incredible youth pastors and spon...

"Hello, welcome to the Barton home!  My name is ______ - Come on in!"  [This is how you would be greeted by the 8 girls living in our house if you were to ring our doorbell right now.] We'd love you to sit down and meet our girls.  We just completed our first full week with them at the Barton home doing life, hearing their stories, and learning together.  For their personal privacy, we won't use their names or very many details. Meet "A", our almost-18-year-old long-termer who has shown great leadership since we arrived and has been a joy to get to know.  She's learned through the experiences in her life to demand her desires and manipulate if needed to get what she wants; however, we survived our first Wal-Mart trip together yesterday without any impulsive purchase or arguments!  Meet "B", our what-you-see-is-what-you-get girl.  She is truly a leader and has been a huge encouragement and help.  A 16-year-old long-termer, she has...