The first people you meet in any place can have a dramatic and lasting impression on your overall experience there. Within our first few days, we met a couple, Bruce and Leigh, and their 5-year-old daughter Reese. Bruce was brought over to the islands by Wal-Mart, as a manager, to help establish new stores. His [...]

I’m usually grappling with fear to some extent and am sometimes nearly paralyzed by it. I’m mostly at peace, however, when engaged with present realities, such as loading the dishwasher, writing or rolling my cart through Safeway. For this reason and a few others, I genuinely enjoy most mundane tasks. But give me a few [...]

So there was another part to the ocean blessing story, and I wanted to tell it but I think I was having a bit of heat stroke last night after too many hours in the sun. My head was pounding so I had to be brief. Anna has been really struggling with church. Our community [...]

So today we blessed the ocean, which my husband thought was a wee bit ambitious–but, he said, “It might be a big ocean, but God is still bigger.” While we were praying, a few locals were fishing nearby, and frying the fish right behind us. During the blessing, we watched them tug one fish after [...]

Did I mention yet that coffee hour is a whole lot different out here on the Big Island? First of all, we have a tiny community, so we pot-luck on a few tables in the center of a large room without walls, the breezes washing through, surrounded by banana, papaya and avocado trees, overlooking the [...]