Hello Friends! I am thrilled to write about something I am passionate about—loving your friends well. Thankfully it is finally February, the month of love. It is easy to get bogged down from seeing love all over the place if you are single or going through difficult circumstances, but, no matter your relationship status, it is helpful to your friends and yourself to love others well!
I turn 30 next month, which feels like a big deal—the end of a decade! I have been thinking about what it has been like being single through these incredible, weird, formative (and at times flailing) years in my 20s. My guess is that if someone who spent most of their 20s embarking on marriage and/or parenthood was reflecting on that same decade, we’d use many of the same adjectives of beautiful, painful, full of life and loss and adventure and growing pains.
“Kyla, it’s 100% cancer. There’s nothing else that looks like this.” Those were the radiologist’s words the day I went in to check out the small lump I’d felt on my right breast two months prior. I was just going in for a quick appointment to clear my conscience of this annoying little spot that had crept up seemingly overnight. Instead, I received this crushing news, alone, on March 8, 2018 at the age of 35. I needed a friend
Our world is hungry for connection. People are desperate to belong somewhere. Because of technological advancements and virtual social platforms, we are seemingly more connected than ever online, yet, in reality, we are more isolated than ever. The need to be known and loved has become more apparent in each of us. The culture we live in has found momentary solutions for this isolation with a resurgence of spaces like food courts, clubs, and interest groups.
This is my year to be healthy! Does that sound familiar to you? I have declared that many times, yet I haven’t always (ok, hardly ever) reached or followed through with my health goals. I’m guessing many of you reading will admit that you are not the most disciplined in this area either; whether you are or not, please keep reading!
Hiking isn’t that hard, right? It’s basically just walking, and I walk everyday, so I can totally do this. This is what I kept telling myself as my trip to hike the Grand Canyon from rim to rim in one day (roughly 26 miles with 4,000 ft of elevation lost and then gained) came closer and closer on the calendar.
The year was 1986 and I was at a missions summer camp called Camp Nunny Cha Ha, held on the grounds of Falls Creek Baptist Assembly. It was a camp I looked forward to every year, where campers and counselors studied scripture together, sang songs, heard testimonies from foreign and local missionaries and had lots of fun in the Oklahoma heat. On the last night of camp, the guest speaker led us into a commitment time explaining that he felt the Lord was speaking to some of us in the room, calling some to accept Christ and others into special service (which was the term used for a call to ministry of some sort.)
