River of Thoughts

Christine Royse Niles — Changing the world one word at a time

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You Are The Salt

This is a guest post by Joseph Iregbu. Joseph leads on purpose and is passionate about raising the next generation of leaders. He blogs at selahblog.org and is a Coach and Mentor to young leaders. He is the author of a book (Even in the Well) and is married to Temi. They live in Germany. You can find him on Twitter | Facebook | or his Landing Page For 5 years, l sent mobile text messages to over 100 recipients everyday. That’s thousands of texts!  I called it my own version of the “Daily Word.” Why?  To encourage! A good number of my […]

Creating or Curating?

I am not a good curator. When I think of curator, I think of a musty dusty museum and someone who likes to type little cards that go next to a fragment of bone: Fibia (fragment). Wooly Mammoth. 10,000 b.c. They don’t spend their time or energy finding out that the mammoth’s name was Joe, or that he had a mate and sired about 15 baby wooly mammoths, or that he broke his left ankle during a stampede and walked with a limp which is why the lion got him and ate him and he ended up in the museum. […]

Zach Needs Help

You know the drill.  No red pens…   The girl looked at Zach, her head just tipped to the left. “So, um, you’re from…where?” “Outside.” Her eyebrows furrowed as she thought about this. “Outside?” “Yeah.  Outside.” Then she spotted his hand as it slipped from behind his back. She shifted her weight to her back foot.  “Oh.  Um…” The rot was bad right now, and Zach swore under his breath as he slid his hand behind his back again.  “It’s not what you think.  Really.  Please.  I need your help.” “Look, I don’t think you’re supposed to be here.  How […]

Five Lessons From A Blog Experiment

Seth Godin posted recently that experiments are only experiments if you’re intentional about learning something.  If you don’t approach it this way, it’s not an experiment.  It’s a failure. You can still learn from failure, sure.  But you’ll learn faster from an experiment.  So….. With this in mind, I just wrapped up a 4-week experiment where I edited and re-posted daily excerpts from when we were in Ukraine adopting Masha five years ago. I learned: Weekends suck for blog traffic. More frequent posts do not equal increased subscriptions. Very few readers left comments. People emailed me that they loved the adoption story posts […]

Interview with Masha

Exactly five years ago, Masha left everything she knew to move halfway around the world with two strangers that smiled all the time (a sure sign of diminished intelligence…)  In honor of her anniversary, I have asked her to give us a little glimpse of what this was like for her… What was it like to leave Ukraine? It wasn’t that hard to leave i was actually very excited and yes i was kinda scared to leave my home and go to a different country but it was mostly a great experience. It was like half of me was happy […]