A Summer of Travel

Back in 2008, when my husband was considering the offer by East-West Ministries (E-W) to change from a legal-administration career to serve as their East Africa field leader, I had one main reservation: I would not get to travel any more. I feared we would not be able to afford airfare.By the end of that year, I prayed, "Enough! Dear God, just one month in my own bed, please!"That was seven years ago, and it was the last summer I stepped on African soil. So today I'm scheduled to return to Kenya. The plan is for me to have a travel and a rest day with my guy, then meet some of the nationals with whom he works that I have never met. After that, I am to return to the states via Dubai while he goes on to Ethiopia with the rest of the team.Yes, a team. Six of us are headed out—taking an advancement team from E-W, who will get an up-close-and-personal look at the field in order to inform people back home about developments there.It has been a summer of international travel. It began with a two-week course I led in Italy. Eighteen people from DTS learned about Medieval Art and Spirituality, as I was co-teaching with a colleague. Marvelous! A week after I returned, I taught a three-week course in Creative Writing with a great group of students and a wonderful teaching assistant. Now Africa.Late in August, I am scheduled to go to Oregon to take a shift helping with my dad's care, to meet with my agent, and to whisk my older sister off to the coast for an overnight to celebrate her birthday.In the meantime, I've been working on a redesign of Kindred Spirit magazine, and recruiting contributors for a compilation work I pitched to Kregel that the publisher accepted. The working title: Vindicating the Vixens: Men and Women Revisiting Stories of Sexualized and Marginalized Women in the Bible. As the subtitle suggests, the work takes a fresh look at people that we've wrongly sexualized (e.g., Tamar, Bathsheba) and/or marginalized (e.g., Hagar, the Virgin Mary). I now have a wonderfully diverse group of male and female scholars committed to helping.But it hasn't been all work. With summer's slower pace, I've enjoyed reading The Girl on the Train, a bestselling work of suspense by a first-time author. And right now I'm learning about the universe in A Brief History of Time. Yes, the author is an atheist. I ignore that part. It is still full of wonder that leads me to marvel and worship. Did you know that part of how we determine the distance from Earth to a star is by the color it emits as it moves? The movie The Theory of Everything, which I loved, led me to read more. In conjunction with that, I'm listening to a Mars Hill Audio podcast interview with Michael Hanby, author of No God, No Science. Hanby talks about why there is no “neutral” science, and how all accounts of what science does and why contain metaphysical and theological assumptions.Another interesting read this summer that I've not blogged about was I Am Malala. It's about Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani schoolgirl who stood up to the Taliban and defended her right to an education. So many books, so little time!Please pray for us as we come to mind this week.