Love in LoCo

I’m a warm weather kind of person.   Anyone who knows me well is not at all surprised by that statement. I don’t like being cold and I always feel like I have more energy when the sun is shining.   I think I could be perfectly happy living in Southern California or Texas where the temperatures don’t fluctuate much throughout the year and the worst part of winter means you wear a hoodie outside.   Alas, that is not where I live and today, the second day of spring, March 21, 2018, we are getting blasted with several inches of snow here in Loudoun County.   I can’t say I’m thrilled about it, but one positive is that the snow forces me to slow down.   Knowing what was coming for us today, and that Loudoun Schools would be closed (therefore cancelling several huddles and meetings I had for the day) last night I felt permission to turn off my alarm for this morning and sleep in until (gasp) almost 7am.   For one reason or another, I haven’t been able to do that...

Have you ever struggled with feeling insignificant?   Like the work you do isn’t important?   Ever become depressed thinking about all of the horrible things happening in our country and around the world?   Maybe you have a job that you really enjoy but feel guilty sometimes because you’re not saving literal lives or solving world crises.   Or you have a job that you don’t love all of the time and there are causes that are really important to you but you need to you know, pay bills and put food on your table, so you can’t just up and quit.   I believe it’s a tactic of the enemy to make us compare our callings and become paralyzed from feeling unimportant.   Either we feel like what we’re doing really doesn’t matter or we get overwhelmed by the vast number of issues in the world that we could champion.   We should absolutely make ourselves aware of things going on in our community and around the world.   We cannot just bury our heads in the sand ...

Last Friday night I had an opportunity to speak at an youth event at Ashburn Presbyterian Church.   The middle and high school students were participating in an event to raise awareness and funds to fight world hunger.   I was invited to come in and share about my own missions experience over the past few years.   God was so gracious to give me this time to reflect on and share about my trips to the Dominican Republic in 2013 and 2014 and my trip to Uganda over Christmas/New Year’s 2014-15 as well as my transition to ministry right here in Loudoun County with FCA.   I started by sharing a little about myself, how I, too, grew up in Loudoun County with the same privilege and pressures that so many of them are dealing with now.   I then gave them basic background of the three overseas mission trips I have had the opportunity to go on, but instead of focusing on the day to day activities my team did while in the DR and Uganda, I shared a lot more about what I l...

Lazy. Entitled. Self-centered. Me-generation.  These are all words that have been used to describe the millennial generation of teenagers to twenty-somethings.  For nearly a decade now I have spent a significant amount of my time with this generation.  And while some of those descriptions may be true at times (and to be fair could probably be used to describe people of many age groups), I regularly get to see something different. I have worked with this generation in my professional and personal life, in athletic, academic and spiritual settings. This generation is resourceful.   They are creative and passionate. They have grown up with social media and, as a result, are incredibly aware of its power and its influence in the world around them.    I consider it a privilege that God has placed a call on my life to work with these amazing world-changers on a professional level.  I get to work every day with kids who, no matter what is going on with th...