Coffee and Mercy
What Does It Look Like? What does it look like to be a light? What does it look like to minister to refugees who are living the longest nightmare of their lives? For us, it looks like sitting in people’s homes and partnering with local ministries, walking into tent cities and tiny, cold cinder block […]
The River of Life
Streams in the Desert The Middle East is a land of striking contrast. Some regions are lush and Mediterranean, while others are vast, dry deserts where survival depends on wisdom, endurance, and careful stewardship of limited resources. Summers can be brutally hot, winters can be unexpectedly cold, and rain is precious. In these landscapes, water […]
The Bedouins
The Indigenous People of the Middle East The Bedouins are the indigenous people of much of the Middle East, whose presence in the desert stretches back thousands of years, long before modern borders, cities, or governments existed. Their lives have always been shaped by the land, by movement, by family, and by a deep knowledge […]
Empty Bottles On The Rez
Alcohol Abuse, Responsibility, and Historical Trauma Broken Cycles To Cycles Broken Addiction in Native communities is often misunderstood and oversimplified. While alcohol abuse does involve personal choices and moral responsibility, those choices do not arise in isolation. They are deeply connected to historical trauma, systemic injustice, and the intentional use of alcohol as a tool […]
Winter
A Poem Winter, winter, where are your leaves? Billowing blossoms and nests within trees? Why do you hide the most precious of sights? The music and lullabies of birds taking flight? Oh winter, harsh winter, so cold and so dim… Reaching out for me…yes, biting within. I hide in shadows of fire dancing on logs, […]
Dark Night Of The Soul
Trust or Despair “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me? Why are You so far from helping Me, And from the words of My groaning O My God, I cry in the daytime, but You do not hear; And in the night season, and am not silent.” Psalm 22:1 In April 1992 while […]
Jesus, Man of Sorrows
Find His Kindness He is despised and ]rejected by men, A Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And we hid, as it were, our faces from Him; He was despised, and we did not esteem Him. Isaiah 53:3 When you think about Jesus, what comes to your mind? Is it a miracle? The collective […]
Apache Warriors
One couple’s story of reconciliation, healing, and heartbreak. In October of 2011, my husband Justin and I visited Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kansas, for the first time. Just beyond the school grounds, hidden behind a modern sewage tank, lies a place few speak of: the cemetery from the original Haskell Indian Boarding School […]
The Singing Feather- The Encounter
Where It All Began In August of 2008, my husband Justin’s grandmother passed away. After her memorial service, we were sitting together in her old ranch house in Redwood Valley, California. I was in her living room, slowly looking through the books on her old bookshelf. She had shelves filled with treasures, books on history, […]
Tunnel Vision: My Beautiful People
A Foundational Encounter With God As I made my way through The Singing Feather, I realized just how much I didn’t know about Native American history. In my mind, I had reduced it to arrowheads, basket weaving, and old western movies. But God began to take me on a journey in my heart, back before […]