Ten years ago, I came back home to the US after spending two years in Namibia, a country in the southwest part of Africa. I lived in a little seaside town called Swakopmund, which was later made famous when Angelina Jolie decided to go there to have Brad Pitt’s baby. (What a thing to be famous for, right?)

I lived there long before blogging, but I kept journals of my time there. My mother did better than I did, though, by saving all the emails I sent to her, printing them out, and putting them in two huge binders. So, there’s no shortage of remembrances from that lifechanging, incredible time period, even though there are some things I don’t even remember until I read about them in all the words I wrote way back when.

People often ask, once they find out about those two years, what it was like. And while I can tell them the details of what I did, the people I met, and what my life in Africa was like, the whole picture really gets missed, unfortunately. There are so many good stories — some of them mine, some of them other peoples’– that are waiting to be told. And in telling them, I hope that people are moved to have a heart for another part of the world, for foreign missions, and for what God is already doing in places far, far away from where we sit here in the US.

So, I’m going to take some time periodically, to tell some of those stories here. Look for the first one tomorrow…