My home is the sprawling prairie of South Dakota.  I never realized how much I loved this place with its aching expanse of farmland until I left it for a semester in Europe.  Somehow the antiquity and beauty of traipsing around foreign countries followed me home and caused a new appreciation for the prairie to grow in my heart.

This blog is sort of the like the prairie where it was born.  Many don’t find much to love about the flat, rural countryside of South Dakota.  My students generally don’t, despite my attempts to “enlighten” them.  My goal with this blog isn’t to write exquisite prose or elegant poetry.  When I was younger, that was more my style.  Now, I just write–plain, simple, heart-felt ramblings about my life, the Lord, this world, this heart, and the hope that somehow this draws someone else nearer to encountering Truth and Beauty.

The following is a list of my favorites, for one reason or another.  Some are my favorites because I think they are written really well.  Others because I had a revelation that greatly impacted my heart.  And others are because the experience I had compelled me to write about it.

So, without further ado, an incomplete list (in no specific order) of some of my favorite blog posts from the past eight years of teaching and life.

  1. The start of being a Missionary of the Classroom
  2. My older sister’s final vows in religious life
  3. The other older sister’s tenth anniversary in religious life
  4. Pretty much all of the “Camino Memoirs”
  5. God works on my heart, even in Wal-Mart
  6. Strength
  7. The world seems to be looking for a few good men
  8. Choosing reality when my expectations fail me
  9. Essentially G.K. Chesterton’s quote: “Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.”
  10. When Jesus heals
  11. The beautiful and broken reality of the Church
  12. The Lord transforms the little we have, the little we are
  13. Lenten penances
  14. Resting in my own poverty
  15. “Does truth matter?“–conversation with students
  16. Beauty isn’t necessary
  17. Co-workers with the Lord
  18. While we can’t always see what the Lord is doing, He wastes nothing
  19. The Gospel: ever ancient, ever new
  20. When the Lord heals others through our own healing
  21. The gift that prison ministry has been
  22. When the Lord doesn’t do what I want: it should be all the same to me