“We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are. Sane or insane. Saints or sex addicts. Heroes or victims. Letting history tell us how good or bad we are. Letting our past decide our future. Or we can decide for ourselves. And maybe it’s our job to invent something better.”
-Chuck Palahniuk

The writer in me would love to neatly package my life’s events into a beginning, middle and end – complete with a heroic story arc and riveting climax, of course.

But my life, I’d assume much like yours, has been anything but tidy.

The long of it is here. The short of it?

I was raised in the Midwest. I left, then returned.
I was raised in the Christian faith. I wavered, then stayed.
I landed my dream career with HGTV, then walked away from it all.
My daughter was born at home. My son was born in another woman’s home.
I have traveled from Ecuador to Ethiopia, from London to Haiti, from Singapore to India. I have felt familiar in foreign homes; I have felt foreign in my familiar home.
I have lived both too fast and too slow.
I have started over more than once.
And then I discovered my life’s work, right where I least expected it.

That’s the thick of it, right there, isn’t it? There is nothing linear about our stories. There are arcs within that topple into circles, learning and relearning the same lessons anew. Leaving and returning. Wavering and staying. From heartache to mirth to heartache again – sometimes in a matter of minutes.

I’m still living the middle of my story, by God’s grace.

I can’t wait to see where, and how, ours will meet.