Why Mornings?12The motherless mom blogger. It didn’t make sense, but
God doesn’t usually pick the obvious choices.
When I started my blog, the first thing I wrote about was
my morning routine. I made it into an e- book, actually. I
shared how I’d wake up before the kids and what I did in my
morning time. Riveting, right? I am a party wherever I go. A
wild one, I am.
But, very unexpectedly, that e- book was shared far and
wide. Eventually, a reader asked if we could do a group challenge
based on that morning routine. We called it Hello Mornings,
and, over the years, thousands and thousands of women have
joined together and encouraged one another in the journey.
By fall 2010, the blog was doing really well. So well, in
fact, that I got a message from Shaun Groves, the director of
the Compassion Bloggers program.
Compassion is a child sponsorship program that our fam-
ily has been involved with for years. At the time, their blogger
program selected writers to take on trips around the world
to show what Compassion does to help children. I’d followed
every single one of their trips because some of my favorite writ-
ers went and shared their experiences. I wept buckets at Ann
Voskamp’s stories and laughed at the adventures of Melanie
Shankle, and I added a new sponsor child almost every trip I
followed. Now it was my turn— Shaun invited me to go with
them on their next trip.
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Growing up, we weren’t a world- traveling family. Sometimes
we’d drive up to Green Lake, Wisconsin, during the summers