Blog

I recently had dinner with an urban planner who worked in transportation for the city government. I asked her how work was going, and she mentioned that upcoming local elections were throwing everything into a spin.  “Oh, are parts of your work impacted by the...

As a youth pastor, I took a group of high school and college students to a place called Camp Barnabas every year. Camp Barnabas is a summer camp in rural Missouri for children and adults with physical and mental disabilities. The camp functions by pairing campers with...

The first rule of volunteer recruitment is to make direct asks. You’re more likely to succeed with direct asks than a general appeal. The downside is that while direct asks do work, you have to make a lot of them. As a youth pastor, I remember going about...

This week, I asked my husband what he was working on, and he said, “Well, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about quaternions.” “What’s a quaternion?” I asked. “It’s a way of using a four dimensional cube to describe the orientation of something.”  My blank stare at...

 I stood outside Jeni’s ice cream with an old friend and her two elementary-aged children earlier this week. We were at the ice cream shop 8 minutes before it opened and were chatting on the sidewalk. The younger of the two children looked at her mom and said, “What...

My dad was a self-taught deep sea fisherman. It all started with him bringing one of his fishing rods from the lake and just casting it in the surf while we were on a family vacation to the beach. After a few little catches, he wound up asking some other fishermen on...