By Cara Taylor Director of Outreach Blogging is so odd because I hope to connect my experience with yours, but we are separated in time and space. Whether we are engaging publicly online or working from home, our modern reality can lack the genuine connection we need. To affirm the personal, unconditional, extravagant love of God […]
It All Matters!
Do you ever feel discouraged even though you know what you do is important? Your heart is grateful to God and generous toward others, but you doubt it matters or is worth the effort? This week brought such a sweet, surprising reminder that the Spirit is working through us when we all can use encouragement. […]
Belonging Beyond Boundaries
When a mother and her teen daughter magically trade bodies in Freaky Friday, the spring musical opening this weekend at Peninsula High School, audiences will experience a hilarious and very literal lesson in empathy. Who do you find exasperating? Or maybe just hard to figure out? Would you be willing to swap places in order to […]
What makes a Mexico trip life-changing?
When facing a new experience, are you more likely to dive in or dip your toe? “Dive in!” is the theme for our high school global outreach team leaving for Mexico one week from today. We were inspired by God’s promise to Isaiah: Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do […]
How to pray while you shop
One month ago today, a health crisis struck our family. Yet the holiday season still hustles along. Each day, we float in and out of prayer…longing for hurts to heal. For sparks of joy to keep hope burning. For patience with each other and strength to meet our daily responsibilities. For a lifetime’s worth of […]
To see past life’s distractions, pray together
Short people learn to leap over obstacles. Being short all my life (climbing cabinets, projecting my voice and my personality, lifting heavy stuff both literal and figurative), I can attest with Zacchaeus: obstacles are made to be overcome! In our passage from Luke last week, Zacchaeus was seeking to see Jesus, and once Jesus saw […]
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Right where God wants us
Since Jesus isn’t here in person, but we are, the church isn’t our building. The church is the people with his Spirit…and the Spirit blows where it wants! (John 3:8) That makes my job coordinating our Beyond These Walls gifts very exciting. This time of year, we celebrate people like Curtis who stepped into a […]
Clues for a life well-lived
I met someone last week who gave me a clue for how to be more joyful and compassionate. Pascal Bimenyimana visited Chapel Hill from Haiti where he leads our global partner there, World Relief. He is a survivor of the Rwandan genocide in the 1990s, and he has served among the most devastated places in […]
Building on Faith
Two of the students on the high school Mexico GO Team will be among those baptized tomorrow! I’ve gotten to know and love them during this year of learning to live on mission. One of our Ensenada projects with our global outreach partner Agua Viva was to build a home addition alongside a foster mom […]
Seeing miracles up close
I met six-month-old Aurora in the men’s prison last week. She’s a fluffy white doodle training to be a Diabetic Service Dog. We watched her detect the scent of hypoglycemia off her trainer…a man who has been incarcerated for many years. Learning to alert her master before he loses consciousness is a skill that could […]