simply me

As my missions travels for the year have come to an end, I would like to take some time to reflect on the experience as a whole. About a month ago I returned to my hometown in Pennsylvania where life began to flow more traditionally. Many times people return home from traveling, school, missions, vacations, etc. and say “back to reality!” But I would argue that these experiences were also a reality, and are real parts of our lives. In my case: I had real experiences and encounters with other real people and with our real God. Real relationships were formed with other real people. All this in tangibly real places where all of us can realistically return to; where other people live their real lives in real time, all the time. Just because an experience doesn’t look like my life traditionally does doesn’t mean it’s an invalid reality… (food for thought!) That rant aside: Here are some other thoughts through which I will share some things I have learned, or am learning, as a result of m...

Morning view from the back door View while walking up the driveway one morning They say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. From a human perspective this seems true. But what if things are beautiful even when we don’t prescribe them beauty? What if things are beautiful even when we don’t acknowledge their beauty? Over the years I have noticed that I am most acutely aware of beauty while traveling, especially while traveling to new or unknown places. I reckon the difference of my surroundings makes me stop and take notice. Through the past two months I have travelled quite a bit. Kansas, Victoria (Australia), New South Wales (Aus.), and airports in many cities between Pennsylvania and those places. In each of these places (maybe not quite so much the airports…) I have marveled at the beauty all around me. Then - for the first time ever - I flew into my hometown’s little 1.5 gate, single runway airport. It was a warm, sunny Saturday morning in late July. The...