Q: How can we not worry with all that is going on in the world?

I woke up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat. My heart was pounding and my mind was racing. "Will I be able to pay our bills when our first child arrives?"

Q: How can we not worry with all that is going on in the world?

I woke up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat. My heart was pounding and my mind was racing. "Will I be able to pay our bills when our first child arrives?"

After years of listening to people in my counseling office share their own "shouldas, couldas, and wouldas," I decided I'd live to regret it if I didn't write about this topic. Not that I didn't already harbor my own compunctions. I would love to relive plenty of conversations or open doors of opportunities I left closed.

Even though I grew up in a pastor's family in Germany, that does not mean I lived as I should have lived. I didn't. I needed to find out for myself what the world had to offer, and I certainly did. Today, as a youth pastor in the Netherlands, I see young people beginning the same journey and discovering the same things. The world offers them what it offered me: fun, contact, action, and food. As churches, we try to keep up with those needs in the lives of congregation members.

HT: How did you become interested in missions?

From the time I was a young girl, missions was interesting to me. I wanted to tell others about Christ and his great love.

Most people are looking for a life that pleases them. Who wouldn't? In 1 Thessalonians, the first book of the New Testament to be written, the apostle Paul talks about a life that pleases God. Actually, the life that pleases God also pleases us. Our experiences and Scripture teachings demonstrate that we can never find a life that pleases us until we find the life that pleases God.

If you've had your ears open around church, you've heard the term "postmodern." For more than a decade, culture specialists and sociologists have announced the coming of the postmodern generation—a generation that would upset all we know about the growth of Christianity.

In 25 years, HIV has infected 65 million people, and killed 25 million of these through AIDS. Currently 17.3 million women live with the virus, 13 million of them in Africa. Indeed, in several sub-Saharan African countries more than 25 percent of the adult population is infected with AIDS. Epidemics are growing in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, including India and China.

"Anywhere with Jesus I can safely go . . ." When I was a child attending church, we often sang that chorus on Sunday nights. And our congregation sang the chorus with exclamation marks: "Anywhere! Everywhere! Fear I cannot know."

I thought of the song while pondering the psalmist's question: "How can we sing the songs of the LORD while in a foreign land?" (Psalm 137:4). At various times in our lives, we feel we're in some foreign land—exiled from the familiar, from all we had relied on, planned, and hoped for.

In her memoir, Paula Deen: It Ain't All About the Cookin', the internationally recognized chef and food network personality explains why she refers to some of her favorite dishes as comfort food: food that she turns to for soothing and security. When she married her high school sweetheart at a young age, her parents, with whom she was very close, gave her the option of a big wedding or a stove and refrigerator as a wedding present. Something inside her compelled her to say: "I'll take the stove and refrigerator," a choice that she later said, "set my destiny."