For probably a good portion of the past six months, I have been been praying a lot about surrender. While I would expect that it would be really difficult for me to surrender my future, the most difficult prayer for me has actually been, “Lord, I surrender to where you have me in my life right now.” As uncertain as the future is, it is sometimes the present moment that feels the most rocky. The problem with this prayer is that I constantly feel like I’m failing. I can never surrender enough.

This week, one of my best friends from college asked me in an email how she could pray for me. So I sat and typed on my computer for an hour and a half, telling her how messy my life is. About five minutes after I started typing, I thought, “Wow, I really haven’t said all of this to anyone.” These past few days, I have been thinking a lot about why. I know that it might be controversial or a little bit awkward to write that my life is messy in my missionary blog. I mean, shouldn’t my life

Several times over the past year and a half, I’ve heard many people say, “You don’t have to give up your whole life to be a missionary.” It is usually said in reference to the idea that we have to be missionaries in our daily lives, that you can be a missionary wherever you are, whether that’s in a school, or in a workplace, or at the grocery store. This is true. We can be missionaries wherever we are, no matter what our age, or title in life. However, I think it is a lie to believe that

Today was a hard blog day for me. I have committed to writing blogs as often as possible and recently I have found myself in a rut. This is nothing new for me, last year I actually quit writing, I told my mission family I was done forever. Naturally, as this year started I decided to give it a go again, and somehow had managed to crank a few out. But today is different. Today I know exactly why I’m in this rut. It’s all due to a big blue book that is staring me down from across the table. I

At about five o’clock yesterday evening, the four Atlanta missionaries were driving back from a youth minister’s conference in New Orleans. There had been snow flurries floating around our car since somewhere in Alabama. We were about thirty minutes away from home, driving north on I-85 in a twelve-passenger van, pulling a 12-foot trailer behind us that was semi-filled with resources and shelving from our booth at the conference. Then the left tire on our trailer popped. Problem. When I was

What a strange day. This morning after Mass, I told God that all I wanted today was that He would hold me. I wanted to be a little child and crawl up in His lap and lean my head against His chest and listen to His heartbeat, and just be there in the Father’s embrace. I expected that this was just another prayer. In fact, I almost forgot that I had prayed it. Fast forward to this afternoon. For some reason lately, I’ve found it really easy to get distracted in prayer. So I’ve had to read the