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Stories Around the Table

This past Sunday, while preparing supper, I stabbed myself with a piece of bamboo. Not in the kitchen, out in the driveway on my way to collect tomatoes from the garden. It was a freak accident. The boys had left a bamboo lance in the road and someone ran it over, shattering the long piece of bamboo. Company was coming for Sunday dinner and I wanted everything to look nice, including the driveway. So I picked up the shredded bamboo lance and tried to toss it into our burn pile, but as I threw the bamboo, somehow a shard of […]

By Paula October 27, 2016

A Month of Sundays

It feels like a month of Sundays since I last posted a blog. So much has happened, I really don’t know where to begin. Last night I emailed Far Side of the Sea to my editor. What a relief! Now I’m praying she likes it, and other folks enjoy the story too. Getting the book finished felt like such a battle. I thought for sure after harvest, with the boys all in school, I’d have more time to write. Wrong! Each day little emergencies arose the kept me from writing. I can’t even remember all that went wrong in the past two […]

By Paula October 19, 2016

Far Side of the Sea

Here she is… Roman’s headstrong little sister, Maria Vasquez. The girl who’s driving me crazy right now. I need to nail Maria down. Make her go home. The trouble with Maria is I can’t make her do anything. She’s a lot like many of us. Her own worst enemy. Rachel in Until the Day Breaks was such a manageable heroine. Maria is not manageable. Maria is running from God. And the man she desperately loves. Because of the lies she believes. Have you ever run from God because you’re following the wrong voice? The enemy’s voice or perhaps your […]

By Paula August 22, 2016

Meeting Your Mountains

The weirdest thing happened to me before we went to the mountains. I was boiling potatoes to make potato salad. While draining the potatoes, boiling water splashed into my eye. Searing pain shot to my brain. I thought I’d blinded myself. I spent twenty minutes rinsing out my eye with cold water, praying that I hadn’t burnt my eyeball out of my head. A half hour later, I called my aunt who was an emergency room nurse for years. “I got boiling water in my eye,” I told her. “In all my years at the hospital, I’ve never heard of boiling […]

By Paula August 15, 2016

The Happiness Dare

In the midst of losing a dear friend to cancer this summer, I was invited to read Jennifer Dukes Lee’s: The Happiness Dare before its August release. I adore Jennifer, and her prior book: Love Idol really touched my heart a few years back. After Love Idol, Jennifer and I became friends and we discovered that we have a number of things in common: her husband is a farmer, she has two daughters, she once wrote for newspaper, and Jennifer loves back country roads and Jesus just like me. Jennifer is a journalist at heart. “I used to cover crime, politics, and […]

By Paula August 2, 2016

Is it time for a Facebook break?

What do butterflies and Facebook have in common? Please give me a minute to explain… One day while working in the yard a butterfly lit upon me. Clung to me, really. I didn’t want to touch this butterfly because I didn’t want to hurt it, so I waited for it to fly away on its own. But it didn’t fly away. It just kept hanging onto me. Something was wrong with this beautiful insect. Butterflies aren’t supposed to cling to people. Eventually one of my boys gently removed the butterfly from my arm. I told my son to be careful carrying […]

By Paula July 25, 2016

Should you take your kids to family camp?

Over a decade ago we were invited to family camp. A few years earlier, we’d changed our lives, trading in hangovers for Sunday morning church, and pursuing our dream of having a large family. Scott was asked to teach the college group at family camp and I followed along with a baby in my arms and a toddler hanging on my leg, as well as trying to keep up with our three bigger kids. I have to be honest, I had no desire to camp with a bunch of people I didn’t know. Spending a week at camp with our […]

By Paula July 19, 2016