A Birthday Gift to Myself

Hiking Toward Home was a birthday gift to myself.

At the time, I was seated in a foreign coffee shop with my latte and my laptop and inputting blog name ideas in the Google search engine to see if the one God had given me was taken yet.

I was so relieved to find it wasn’t.

Of course it wasn’t.

I had prayed and God gave me the perfect name just like He did for each of my other four babies.

There I sat. Alone. In a coffee shop, amid chatter I could not understand, internally squealing with glee.

And Hiking Toward Home was born.

That was six years ago.

 

 

One international move, two stateside moves and three dogs later here we are.

In the beginning, I blogged to have an outlet and to have a way to share what we were up to with family on the other side of the world.

I was inspired by Emily P. Freeman of Chatting at the Sky to blog about unwrapping gifts from God that were hidden in my week. Tuesdays Unwrapped.  I wrote about dirty boys, toddler toes, sledding, and rats.

I also wrote rather cryptically in first few months of blogging about hiking trails in the dark. Being careful to not say too much about our situation and how other people’s choices affected our family. Now that it has been a few years I can reveal that the day I began Hiking Toward Home was not only my birthday but also the day the decision was made that we would be leaving the mission field and heading back home.

To what?

We didn’t know.

We just knew that it was time to move forward and that meant leaving the mission field.

 

 

The ministry, Liberty In Christ Baptist Church, we planted still continues to grow through the Lord’s provision and leading, with Pastor Jong Jong still at the helm. The blue canvas top has become a building. It is now solid cement walls and glass windows and tile floors (the following photos are actually a bit old). The church now looks more like this:

 

 

Flashback Fridays, back then hosted by my blog friend Jo, of Mylestones, became a fun way of sharing the past with the present and I wrote about darkrooms, and about what develops in darkrooms, and washing machines. Jo has since moved on to All Seven Seas.

In 2010, I went to my first blogging conference for Christian women.

Back then it was called Relevant and I have attended every year since and am looking forward to going again this year. I made some bloggy friends in real life and several of them were very supportive when my husband and I went through a deep valley ministry-wise. The conference is now called Allume. (More on that in another post.)

After having met Ann Voskamp, of  A Holy Experience, at that conference back in 2010, my unwrapping gifts on Tuesdays morphed into Gratitude Listing on Mondays. Though here on Hiking Toward Home seems to fizzle at 1925, I did list up to 2000 and as my gratitude journal fell apart, the cover no longer holding in its contents, I moved onto just keeping track in my regular journal amid the daily entries and devotionals.

This blog has become a place to share my art, my painting and my photography, as well as my words and I look forward to sharing more about my journey back into ART with you in future posts.

For now here are some feathers for your day.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Thank you for hiking down this memory lane with me as I look at where I’ve been and forward into the coming year. Click around the links and peruse the past (and dare I say leave a trail of comments behind you?) I appreciate every one who reads along and treasure every comment left like pebbles along a trail to remind us of where we’ve been… or to let me know where you’ve been. 🙂 They are great pushes of encouragement as I often need a shove or two for confidence to keep writing.

Thanks for being here.

Much love to you all.

Hiking in His Grace,

Sharon