Imagine you are….. abandoned at three days old found in a trash can raised in a Soviet orphanage abused repeatedly by an adoptive father found freezing on the winter streets of St. Petersburg thrown in jail beaten and abused by peers forced to carry the body a young friend to the outskirts of town for burial institutionalized If I had experienced only one or two of these events, I’d break.  Fall apart.  IF I survived it, I’d need years of expensive therapy to recover even slightly. My friend Alex lived through all of this before he reached fifteen. Today, Alex […]

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According to the UN World Food Programme and UNICEF, almost 18,000 children die every day from hunger. For the third year, Pathway Community Church opened its doors to Feed My Starving Children, an organization that harnesses the power of community to, well, feed starving children. Members of LifeBridge, Pathway, and a number of community groups volunteered in 2-hour shifts beginning on Thursday, and together, packed 404,568 meals this weekend. That will feed 1,108 kids for a year. If you do the math, you’ll find that statistic is based on one meal a day.   One meal a day. One. Even though […]

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It’s been a rough week at work….month…face it, it’s been a rough season. There are a lot of reasons that have nothing to do with me. But I’m not arrogant enough to believe that I’m wholly blameless either. I let my intuition grasp a situation in a split second, and then rather than hand it off to my brain to figure out, process, and present reasonably, my emotion just runs off with the idea all half cocked and charges at the windmill. This is not a good thing. There have been many days when I just wanted to throw in […]

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As a dog returns to its vomit….. ….so a fool repeats his folly. I saw this verse on Twitter recently (Prov 26:11 for those who are playing along at home). At first, I laughed. Because, well, vomit is kinda funny. Unless it’s on your frisee rug. Or under the dinner table. Both places where we’ve experienced the special awesomeness of dog vomit in the last month, by the way. Then comes the image of the dog actually coming back to it. We’ve all seen that. The idea that a dog’s mouth is the cleanest place? Not buying that. I’ve seen […]

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The intensity of this trip has been surprising, at least to a newcomer like me. We worked hard, we played hard, but most importantly, we invested a lot of emotions in a very short time. And because of that, today was filled with laughter and tears. We began the day with a late breakfast and quiet time before the worship service in the upstairs rec room. Worship today was centered around praise songs and some amazing testimonies of how God has worked in the lives of the Dulce Refugio kids as well as some of our team and other volunteers […]

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