I've been reading The Prince Warriors series by Priscilla Shirer and Gina Detwiler lately (more on that in a future devotion, because trust me, there's a lot to say). I just started book three, and I came upon a scene that made me laugh so hard I had to put the book down.

Two of the Prince Warriors, Evan and Manuel, were rowing across a pond in a rickety old rowboat. Naturally, because it's an old rowboat in an adventure story, it started taking on water. Evan kept rowing like his life depended on it and hollered at Manuel to grab the bucket and start bailing. Manuel lunged for the bucket floating at the bottom of the boat, only to discover that it had a big crack running right down the side. He let out a huge sigh of frustration, and I almost lost it.

I didn't laugh because it was side-splittingly funny. I laughed because I felt it.

My husband, Jason, loves to bake. Give him some flour (or wheat berries to grind his own), yeast, and a stand mixer, and he's happy as a clam. This week, he decided homemade rolls were on the dinner menu, and everything was going smoothly...until the dough started climbing up the side of the mixing bowl like it was trying to make a great escape.

Now, Jason knows the drill. When dough sticks to the bowl, you grab a rubber spatula and scrape it back into place. Simple. Easy. Effective. But Jason, in a stroke of "genius," decided he didn't want to dirty another dish. (Bless his heart!) He'd already used his handheld dough whisk, so surely that could double as a spatula, right?

Wrong! So very wrong!

What followed was a mechanical collision of epic proportions.

If you've been watching the news, you've probably heard that Wales has had its driest, hottest summer since records began. July was the driest in nearly 200 years, and by mid-August, some parts of the country had received a meager six percent of the expected rainfall. Six percent! My garden looks less like a garden and more like a crunchy doormat. Even Henrhyd Falls (known as Batman Falls from The Dark Knight Rises) has run completely dry for the first time in recorded history. When Batman's waterfall stops falling, you know things are serious.

Naturally, all this heat and drought have turned Wales into kindling. Firefighters across England and Wales have battled nearly a thousand wildfires already this year, with fires occurring frequently through the first weeks of August alone. The large, dramatic blazes have mostly hit the south, but even here in mid-Wales, smaller fires have popped up along our hillsides.

Have you ever put something off, telling yourself you'd "get to it later," only to discover that later, the job had grown three sizes bigger and twice as stubborn? Oh, friend, do I have a story for you, and it comes straight from the pages of the Old Testament, tucked into the often-overlooked books of Ezra, Haggai, and Zechariah.

When the Israelites finally returned home from their seventy years of Babylonian exile, they had one big, holy assignment waiting for them: rebuild the temple. And bless their hearts, they actually started strong! They gathered together "as one man" in Jerusalem, set up the altar, and laid the foundation of the Lord's house with singing and shouts of joy so loud that some couldn't tell the weeping from the celebrating (Ezra 3:1, 10-13). It was a beautiful, hopeful beginning.

But then opposition showed up, the way it always seems to.

I need to confess something right up front: I love people... in small, carefully rationed doses. Put me in a quiet room with my dog, a book, and a cup of tea, and I am the sweetest, most pleasant version of myself you will ever meet. But stick me in a crowded family reunion for six hours straight, and something happens. My smile tightens. My patience evaporates. By the time I finally climb into the car to go home, I am basically Mr. Hyde in a denim skirt.

For years, I thought something was wrong with me. Good Christians are supposed to love being around people all the time, right? Shouldn't fellowship fill me up instead of wearing me down? I quietly filed myself under the label of "flawed" or “broken” and moved on, feeling guilty every time I turned down an invitation just so I could recharge alone.

Then I learned about grasshoppers, or more specifically, locusts. Stay with me here! This gets good.

I can quote James 1:5 in my sleep: "If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God..." I've said it over prayer requests, tucked it into cards, and repeated it so many times I could probably say it backward. But for years, I stopped right there. I let the verse trail off into that little ellipsis before it ever got to the best part.

It turns out that "ask of God" is only half the sentence.

James 1:5 actually reads, "If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not; and it shall be given him."

Those two phrases, "liberally" and "upbraideth not," are so powerful, yet I had skipped right past both of them like a kid skipping vegetables to get straight to dessert.

Little did I realize they were the dessert!

For the past few months, my personal devotion time has taken an unconventional turn. Instead of working through a specific book of the Bible or following a structured study guide, I've been exploring selected fairy tales, fables, and classic stories, searching for spiritual truths buried within them. As a lifelong lover of stories who has spent more hours than she'd care to admit curled up with a good book and a cup of tea, I thought this might be a fascinating exercise.

I have not been disappointed.

I know it sounds like I've traded my Bible for a bedtime story collection. But stick with me, because this study has led me to powerful truths and spiritual lessons I never expected.

Today, my lesson revolved around a character most of us met in childhood: Peter Pan. You remember him, right? The boy in green tights who refused to grow up.

Picture the scene: a dusty road just outside Capernaum, packed shoulder-to-shoulder with people who had dropped everything because word got out that Jesus was in town. A synagogue ruler named Jairus had thrown himself at Jesus' feet, begging Him to come heal his dying daughter, and now the whole neighborhood was tagging along to see what would happen. Front-row seats to a miracle? Nobody was missing that.

So, there they were, pressing in from every side, so tightly packed that Jesus could barely move. And in the middle of all that shoving and jostling was a woman nobody wanted to stand next to. She'd been bleeding for twelve straight years. Twelve! She'd spent every coin she had on doctors who only made things worse, and under Jewish law, her condition made her ceremonially unclean, which meant she wasn't even supposed to be in that crowd, touching people, brushing up against their clothes.

I've never been much of a gardener, but I've become a bit of an accidental tree-watcher since moving to Wales. Between our hikes through the countryside and my endless fascination with anything that grows without complaining, I've picked up a few strange little facts that have stopped me in my tracks. For example, when drought hits, a healthy tree doesn't just stand there and wilt dramatically as I would. It has an ingrained survival strategy.

The tree stops producing new leaves. It pulls back from growth mode and turns its energy inward. And then, rather than throwing a fit about the lack of rain, it sends its roots down deeper into the soil, searching for whatever moisture is still hiding beneath the surface. The tree essentially says, "Fine. If it's not coming from above right now, I'll go find it below." No drama. No dying. Just digging.

I never expected to nearly bring down the song service with a botched lyric, but there I was, hymnal in hand, feet planted, voice lifted... and disaster struck on verse two. We were belting out that grand old hymn, "Jesus Paid It All," and I opened my mouth to sing about the power that can "change the leper's spots"... except what came out was "leopard's spots."

I froze. Did I really just sing that? Yes, I did. And once the mental image of a literal leopard, spots and all, standing there getting a divine paint job hit me, I lost it. I spent the rest of that verse biting my tongue, shoulders shaking, desperately trying to look like a woman having a spiritual moment instead of a woman about to snort-laugh in the middle of church.

Here's the thing about me: the laughter fades, but the pondering never does.