Yesterday I wrote about my funk and how I wonder if it might be depression. A dear brother in Christ commented: “

I am currently several weeks (or months?) into an extended funk. How does one know the difference between a funk and something more serious, like depression?  All I know is that I don’t feel like myself. And I feel like I have to exert effort to avoid sucking the joy out of anybody I am around. (And sometimes I fail.) I am trying to figure out if this is circumstantial and temporary or if something got busted inside me. I’m sincerely hoping it is just circumstantial. 

For years my understanding of “God’s will” was pretty darn limited. “Seeking God’s will” was something that came up only at certain major forks in the road of life. Which college do I attend? What should I study? Should I take this job offer or not? Is this girl “the one”?  I grew up reciting the Lord’s Prayer on a regular basis each Sunday morning in worship. But even then, “thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” meant “Lord, guide my major decisions so I don’t depart from the path you have for me”.  It wasn’t…

When teaching English, especially to 8th graders this year, I have to be conscious of opportunities to expand vocabularies. Supposedly, the typical young teen knows between 8 and 12 thousand words – as compared to 20 to 40 thousand for adults. That’s a big gap!  Sometimes I will ask the students if they know a particular word and then have them rate it on a scale of 1 to 5 fingers: 1 finger up indicates “I’ve never seen or heard that word in my entire life” while 5 fingers up means “I know that word well enough to use it…

I am struggling a bit tonight. Tomorrow is Samuel’s graduation from North High School and I should be excited and happy. But our plan for years had been that Samuel would be graduating from Cap-Haitien Christian School along with his friends, Brandon, Frantz and Fabio.  Instead, Brandon, Frantz and Fabio gathered tonight 1,500 miles away from here to celebrate their graduation with a special dinner with their families and teachers … and we were not a part of it. Tomorrow morning those three guys will receive diplomas in Haiti and Samuel will receive his in Columbus, Indiana.  And it just…

Last night we got word that a fellow missionary in Haiti was shot during an attempted carjacking. His name is Mike and he and his wife work with a medical mission. They were our next door neighbors during our last year in Haiti and still live in a house that is part of the little missionary community composed primarily of Cap-Haitien Christian School teachers.  Mike and his wife were returning home last night around 8:00, turning sharply off Route 1 Nationale to head up the mountainside drive just as we ourselves did hundreds of times. But we were never confronted…

Tomorrow I give one more final exam and by 3:00 PM I will have all my grades turned in and I will be ready to walk out of the school building and into the summer sun. It’s a weird mix of emotions tonight: Relief – I am ready for the semester to be over. Regret – Did I cover everything I needed to cover these past few months? No. Anticipation – Looking forward to reading more, writing more, and working around the house. I have a hundred projects to finish and a hundred more to start. We also have a…

Since January 1st, I haven’t experienced any “writer’s block” like I anticipated. If anything, I seem to have writer’s ADHD when it comes to these daily blog posts – and I don’t know if that is a good thing or a bad thing.  Sometimes I spend 2 or 3 evenings exploring a single topic, but mostly I hop from one topic to the next. Sometimes I start on a topic thinking “an entire book could be written on this!” and then I get distracted the very next night and move on.  I have two more days of school and then…