Pent-up energy is ricocheting off our walls during an extra long, extra loud, extra rainy school holiday. I'm giving my all, but my autistic son needs more than that. The rest of my family gets less of me, and my son still doesn't have enough. I start each new day already storm-battered.

I tiptoed to my Bible one morning while the house slept to see if Jesus was still in the storm-stilling business.

Imagine... Political chaos is on the rise. Justice is at an all-time low. You're hungry and crippled by a reckless kind of hurt - for your family, your future, and humanity itself. You don't see a way for things to be different.

You hear there's a man who performs miracles. The neighbors say He's heading to a desolate place. There's nothing there for anyone, but there's nothing to stay for either. Almost 20,000 people are already there when you arrive. You strain to see the man called Jesus from tiptoes in the back.

Join me in a conversation with Deb Weakly from Help Club for Moms. Deb is a long-time friend, and she invited me to share about my journey in special needs parenting to offer encouragement to moms all over the world. I’m very much still in the trenches, learning the hard way, and even shared that I had completely lost my cool on Benjamin an hour before we started recording! But we so often find God together, and in those valley lessons of learning to worship anyway.

Maybe this is a chat you can relate to, or maybe it’s one to share with a friend who can.

I remember what it felt like, years ago, when I first felt life inside of me. Every kick and hiccup of the child within re-proclaimed God's design for us as co-creators. I quickly realized both big and small decisions are weighed on different scales when you understand you are doing it with Christ.

Now, we are stepping into a new season of co-laboring with Christ. We are launching a new church in Cape Town! In some ways, I've felt the familiar weight of a new parent. We dream of a place for people to feel at home with Jesus and their neighbors, no matter where they've come from. We believe His House should be the safest place for a person to become their whole, dearly-loved self.

My husband and I went on an evening walk a while ago. We rehashed a painful season we'd traversed in the previous months and marked how God had used it for our good. The conversation went deeper as we turned a familiar corner in our neighborhood. Yes, we have successfully navigated external hardships... but what about the ones woven into our family DNA? My husband worried aloud,"Your personality has changed. You were so bubbly... laughing all the time.. and now I can see how heavy life is on you." I conceded that the relentless spiritual warfare, crippling corruption, decade of distance from family, and special needs parenting has dug deep, rugged trenches in my formerly light disposition.

We've been asking God for a particular miracle for a long time. Last week, another "not yet" hit hard, so I searched "miracle" on my old website. I borrowed hope from my own stories as I re-visited scenes where God met me. Today's call to worship is a miracle lesson I wrote to myself from the mission field in 2011.-----------

We started feeding orphaned and vulnerable children in a nearby community- a handful became hundreds in eighteen months. Last week, an unspeakable amount of hungry children came for hot food and hope...

Relevant Magazine recently reported "Christian music is finally having a real mainstream moment." For the first time in over a decade, two Christian songs made Billboard's "Hot 100" list simultaneously. "American Idol" aired a three-hour "Songs of Faith" special on Easter Sunday. Christian singer and songwriter, Brandon Lake performed "Hard-Fought Hallelujah" on Jimmy Kimmel Live and made a surprise appearance at Stagecoach Festival, co-leading 75,000 people from every walk of life in an incredibly relevant psalm.

I recently spent an afternoon with moms ahead of me in their special needs parenting journeys. A familiar knot twisted in my gut as they shared about unenrolling their children from school. My personal nightmare, one I push down deep, was tea time conversation. You see, statistics agree with every story I've heard. Children with my son's diagnosis are often unable to stay in school and endure so much just trying to grow up.

Have you ever read stories of the disciples and wondered, "How could you do that? Jesus is LITERALLY right there with you!" Luke 22 recounts Jesus telling Peter he would deny Him three times before the rooster's first morning crow. Despite the "warning", Peter fulfilled the prophesy that very same night.

Me too, Peter.

I didn’t know what I was standing in the middle of when I started playing worship music, trying to make it louder than the pounding pulse of life. I didn’t expect those long nights to minister to me - and then others. God’s voice broke through the noise of life while I listened to those songs. I wanted to tell my friends what I heard, so I started sharing through WhatsApp messages. Over time, I started sending it to a few more people - and then more. I committed to sending it out every Friday at 6am and called it “The Friday Call to Worship”. Nobody needed me to write it down except me. I was making a commitment to God to show up every week and to need to hear Him.

When the curtains close on 2025, my oldest son will be 18 and finished with high school. We walked through much together in his earliest years, but the stories are his to share now. I can confess, however, the sleep I've lost pleading with God that my first son wouldn't have to learn things the hard way. I have contended with the same Father who let His Son die for mine (who's actually His!) to spare my boy from wandering in the wilderness. But now I pray that he, along with our other sons, would know who they are in Christ above anything else... whatever it takes. Gulp.

My husband and I have the unique privilege of gathering with missionaries around the world. This week, we were on a call with our friends serving the deaf in Jamaica, internationals and locals in Haiti, the church in Europe, community development in Northern Africa, and the front lines of the war in Israel. We celebrated baptisms, breakthroughs and the ways God keeps showing up for our families. We supported one another over the inglorious strains of living abroad and raising children in foreign countries.

Corrie ten Boom was born on Good Friday in 1892. Her family's home in Haarlem, Holland would become part of the underground movement for Jewish people during World War II.

The story goes that Corrie's father comforted his daughter while she cried over a broken heart before the war began. "Corrie, love is the strongest force in the world, and when it is blocked that means pain... We can kill the love so it stops hurting. But then of course part of us dies, too. Or, Corrie, we can ask God to open up another route for that love to travel..."

My mom is the greatest celebrator. She flies across the world every April to be with us for Easter and family birthdays. We plan celebrations with great intentionality to accommodate our middle son's nervous system disability. He spends 364 days a year anticipating April 9th, when he gets to be the birthday boy. We want him to be able to enjoy as much of it as he can.

God's people entered the Promised Land through parted waters. (Joshua 3) Upon arrival, their enemies fell at the sound of their worship. (Joshua 6) It only took a few generations for those miracles to become distant stories, dimmed by the shiny veneer of man-made gods. The tribes that traversed the wilderness together turned against one another, slandering, shaming and needlessly engaging in a civil war.

My childhood Sunday School teachers told me Jesus loves me, and I took them at their word. I was baptized at ten-years old, never wondering if the grass was greener anywhere else.

I was barely 22 when I walked into my first graduate-level seminary class: Gospels at 8am. I imagined falling more in love with Jesus, plain and simple. My professor had another objective…

When my childhood home went up in flames, we spent our first "homeless" nights fed, clothed and sheltered by families from my church youth group...

When I said, "There's a boy who needs a mom in South Africa. He can't come here, so I'm moving there..." my American church said, "We'll help, and we'll come to you if you can't come to us."

I did a ridiculous thing. I ordered a walking pad to use for five days and return. I can explain. (A walking pad is a treadmill without handles to slide under a desk and walk while you work.)

My husband went out of town for EIGHT days. Our two youngest sons only attend school a few hours in the morning and struggled with Dad being away….

My husband and I like to walk along the oceanside promenade after dinner dates. We were awe-struck one evening by luminescent waves. The ocean was glowing!

We were witnessing bioluminescence, a natural phenomenon of living things producing light through a chemical reaction. The ocean glowed as microscopic organisms called dinoflagellates shone light from within themselves, much like the fireflies of my childhood.

We called last week "our turning point or breaking point". An autoimmune disorder building in our five-year old's system is wreaking havoc, exacerbating existing autism-related complications. We were losing sleep, and our son woke before 4am, requiring more than we had to give. The worst of us collided as we each found our end points.