Naomi's Blog

Today, I’m reading Psalm 143. It reminds me that many days are hard. The Psalmist himself is being pursued and crushed. He feels like he’s dwelling in the darkness and going down to the pit. And some days we relate to that.
This week has been hard. One of our lovely deacons at church

We have three dogs at the moment. That’s one more than normal. Our mad Beagle and our Maltese X puppy have been joined by ‘Poppy’, who’s an exceptionally well-behaved chocolate Labrador. She’s staying with us for a fortnight while her owners (our friends from church) are away.

We’ve been studying Hosea at church this month, and it’s not a book that I read very often. Actually, it’s not familiar at all, so on re-reading, I was struck by almost everything. This is how God feels towards his people. He pursues them passionately. He longs for them. He knows them…

This week I’ve been re-reading ‘God’s Smuggler,’ by Brother Andrew. Has anyone else read it? I’m enjoying it, and remembering the first time I read it, back in the early 1980’s. I was about 13 at the time, and I’d just heard about Jesus at the Christian group at high school. I was

We’ve just returned from two and a half weeks in Nepal. It was wonderful. We had 27 dal bhats in a row, with our Nepali friends in Pokhara, Dhulikhel and Kathmandu. Amazing! Many of them were our original friends back in the nineties, so back then…

We released ‘The Zookeeper’ children’s chapter book in October! I’m so excited. It feels like it’s been a long time coming. In early 2013, Scripture Union emailed me and asked me whether I’d like to write and perform…

We attended INF’s ‘Experience Nepal’ event on Saturday night. It was lovely. Our old friends were there and we sang Nepali worship songs and we heard stories from the field and we ate lots of dal bhat. At some point in the evening, we realised we’d been…

It’s been exactly ten years since we lived in the middle hills of the Himalayas. We still miss it. So, to mark the occasion, we ate dal bhat together and read chapters 16 and 17 from ‘No Ordinary View’ – reminiscing about our old life on the Dhulikhel ridge…

We all spend a lot of time waiting – for the train, for the phone call, for the tickets, the bathroom, the bell, the lights, the dinner, the news that might change everything. Right now I’m waiting on two emails. They’re to do with two of my creative projects…

On International Women’s Day, I’m thankful for all the women I’ve met, and cried with, and lived with, during our years in Nepal and India… and then while gathering stories for ‘The Plum Tree in the Desert.’ I could tell you about all of them… but here’s Iris.

Darren and I are part of a local group that read the Bible together on Tuesday nights. It’s lovely – the kind of group that welcomes you in your slippers, or lets you cry if you need to. Two weeks ago, one of the couples had twins! The rest of us have got grown up kids or teenagers, so

It’s been 25 years since we were married, so we got dressed up, walked down to the big rock and renewed our vows in front of the boys and the mad beagle. It was lovely. Afterwards, we ate bacon and eggs with them, and we reminisced, and we played old wedding music. And then we…

Ten years ago, it began to rain. I sat on our Himalayan porch and watched the rain pour down on our terraced garden. Darren rode off to work at DMI, in the rain. The boys did three hours of homeschool and then made mudslides, near the corn crop. The Maoists called yet another

I met a lady in Singapore last month and she wanted to know, is it safe? Is it safe to go the Middle East with Interserve at the moment? I said I don’t know. Then I met a lady in the supermarket last week and she said, is it safe? Is it safe to go back to Nepal at the moment? I said I don’t know.

Our most recent Zookeeper tour to the Tamworth area was so wonderful, back in March this year. We performed at six schools, to a total of 2,000 children and we loved it, especially all the conversations afterwards. Since then…

Thanks for praying for the earthquake relief in Nepal. Darren was able to be there for two weeks, spending most of his time at Dhulikhel Hospital (where we used to live and work), helping the physios with the inundation of patients from nearby villages. There are triple the normal number of patients in the hospital at the moment.

At the beginning of the week, we felt torn. We were pre-booked to fly to Singapore for the World Physio Congress and an Interserve event. But our hearts were in Nepal. We wondered what we were doing. But now it’s the end of the week…

: I love making new things out of old things. It’s the challenge of it all. The leftover material from my bridesmaid dresses (25 years ago) is now holding back the curtains in the sunroom. Our gagri (water carrier) from Nepal is now sitting in the living room, holding up the Christmas tree every December.

I will not always be the mother of three teenage boys, so I’m going to give you my top tips now, in case I forget them. 1. Windows. Keep most of them open, most of the time, even if there’s a frost. 2. Soccer balls in the house. This is a tricky one. Start by telling them they can’t…

It’s a hard day, Easter Saturday. It can feel like it makes no sense to any of us. Why did it have to be that awful? Why was there so much pain and weeping and mockery? Was there no other, easier, way? And what sort of ending is it that after all of that, Jesus’ body was taken down and wrapped in spices, because it was going to rot.

We visited Jerusalem in 2013 and we spent weeks walking down narrow laneways and cobblestone streets, imagining what it might have looked like, 2,000 years earlier… especially on that first Palm Sunday – when Jesus rode through the streets on a donkey and…