A Little About Me

Before we go much further, I’d like to tell you a little about myself. Not because my story is remarkable — it really isn’t — but because I’ve found that knowing a bit about the person behind the words can make those words feel more like a conversation and less like a lecture. And I hope what we do here, you and I, feels like a conversation.

I was born in 1967 in Walla Walla, Washington, where wheat fields stretched out behind the house and Saturday mornings were for cartoons on a tiny black-and-white television. I had a good childhood. My dad worked hard, played guitar in the evenings, and took us for frequent motorcycle rides. My mom was steady and loving, and she read to us often. Grandma lived a few miles away, and some of my happiest memories took place in her little house with its crocheted afghans, hand-ornamented Christmas tree, and flowers outside under the front window.

I grew up going to church, and I asked to be baptized when I was around ten. I remember riding to school on the bus the next morning with a quiet awareness that something inside me had changed, that my life had stepped into something larger than I could yet understand.

I’ve been walking with the Lord ever since. Not always well, and not always closely, but always. He has been patient with me in a way I’m still learning to appreciate.

Along the way, I’ve become a Bible college graduate, a bride, a widow, a wife again, an accountant, a small business owner, and a mother to a son who came to us through adoption in a way only God could have orchestrated. I’ve loved and lost, celebrated and grieved, been surprised by both joy and sorrow. I’ve lived long enough now to know that life doesn’t usually unfold the way we picture it — and that God is somehow always in the middle of it anyway, weaving something beautiful out of the threads.

My husband Tony and I now live in a place with lots of sunshine and opportunities to enjoy nature. We have a son we adore. I still do accounting work, I love vegetable gardening, and I’ve been slowly learning Spanish for most of my adult life. I am, as I said in my first post, just an ordinary person. But I’ve come to believe that “ordinary” is not a disqualification. In God’s economy, it might even be a starting place for adventures beyond our wildest imagination. I hope you’ll come along!