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Home: A Letter to Maddox

My Dear Sweet Son, You've had a whirlwind of a week. You've been hauled across three states, put to bed in an unfamiliar room in an unfamiliar apartment. Honestly, I feel I've ripped you away from anyone who knows you well. You'll never know the Northwoods the way you could have, so there's a couple things I want to tell you about the place where you were born. I'm very proud to have been born where I was (in East Michigan), and...

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Ordained

Our lives have been absolute chaos lately. We've moved (a mile away) and have had several youth events since my last post. Camp. Camp. District Conference. Holland. A missions trip. And countless hours around bonfires with friends and students. And to top it all off, my husband got ordained in the Wesleyan Church almost a month ago. And while I can sit back and soak in what this day means, what it felt like to sit with friends and family and...

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The {Messy} Art of Intentionality

On March 17th, it happened again. That moment where I read exactly what I needed to read. Patrick and I were in the middle of a disagreement. It had been one of those weeks where we had about thirteen and a half seconds in between work, meetings, and youth to look at each other and say "Hi! How was your day? What's for dinner?" Between prior engagements, work obligations, and general busyness of day-to-day life, we had failed to have any...

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When Cooper Met Ashley

Who likes being set up on dates? Me either. That’s why it’s a Christmas miracle that Patrick and I got together. In the beginning of Fall 2011, I was sitting at my parents’ kitchen table as I overheard our friend Amy talking about Cooper from work (It took me a solid month to learn his first name). While the staff at our church had grown a great deal, I still knew names pretty well so I was confused. “Who’s Cooper?” Amy didn’t skip...

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