Knowing how much I enjoy writing, Dave often asks why I don’t blog more and has been nudging me to blog our trip. I love to express feelings in words but sometimes the feelings are so full there aren’t words enough to express them. Friends ask “How was Thailand?!” but how do you to express “shattering” in 30 words or less while your kids run circles around you in the school lobby or church sanctuary?

You see there’s this deep ache in me for what’s real. Raw experience of true beauty. For 10 days chronos time seemed to stand still while kairos time swept me (and my camera) into its transcendent current. You emerge from that a little dazed, like after a really good dream, and it’s the waking up what makes the dream sweeter.

There was a lot of waking up for our family in Thailand. Waking up 12 hours ahead. Waking up our senses to a culture and climate so very different than our own. Waking up our hearts to the hurts, struggles and triumphs of 32 little women half a world away.

The girls at Breanna’s House of Joy – they’re why we went. Not because they need us…because we need them.

Over our two week school break this month we traveled to Chaing Mai, Thailand with two other families from our school plus a friend of one family (ours now too!). This trip was born out of conversations about wanting to expose our kids to need/want and cultivate in them a heart of service. Those conversations materialized in a week long mission of love that allowed each team member to express their tenderness for the girls at BHJ through their particular gifting.

It’s no secret how I express love and I hope you can read my heart in these images.

The self-portrait never taken but forever remembered was me in the mirror the night of our tearful parting. The girls had covered my dress with stickers and my forearm with friendship bracelets all day that last day. As I stood in the mirror looking at their little gifts, tears flowed free.

The things that shatter you, change you.