My husband was recently interviewed for an article you can read here, in Character First Magazine, about our time piloting a microfinance project in rural South Africa. That was what brought us to Africa, but as you can read in my book, most of the time the work was no garden of roses blooming left [...]
Archive for category More about Into the Mud
It Is Well
Apr 30
Once at a night time prayer meeting, Moses asked for prayers for his wife and two teenage children, who were back in his home country. He had wanted to raise enough money to bring them with to South Africa, but then found out it would be too hard for his high school aged kids to transfer schools anyway…
More about Charmaine
Mar 27
“It’s so hard to stay clean in all this mud,” I said as I wiped a glob of mud off my calf and stepped into my car. Oddly, these would be the last words I spoke to Charmaine (of chapter nine) before leaving for the United States, perhaps the last words I spoke to her [...]
Writing and Development
Mar 18
A friend just passed along this comment from a dear friend whose story is included in the book, who is now reading her own story in print: “How Chrissy so SMART? You tell a story and she hears so much, it helps to tell the story but how she hears small things?” Shakes her head, “uh uh uh.”
I [...]
Rich I Am
Mar 1
While I was teaching English at Glen Isla School (see chapter eleven), I gave the older students the assignment of writing stories from their childhood. Most students had barely legible grammar, some had clearly plagiarized from each other or other sources, and many did not turn in the assignment. But one group of students wrote [...]
I’ll be sharing this week at the Faith and International Development Conference at Calvin College, as well as a number of college and church gatherings in Michigan. One story I’ll be focusing on in some of my talks is from chapter eight, “Just in Time: Phakamile.” In this chapter, my daughter asks if we can [...]
Nothing profound today
Nov 23
“Beware of allowing yourself to think that the shallow aspects of life are not ordained by God; they are ordained by Him equally as much as the profound. We sometimes refuse to be shallow, not out of our deep devotion to God but because we wish to impress other people with the fact that we [...]
