The Lone Prairie Blog

We went looking for trouble. In 2004, my friend Sabine and I traveled to Washington state to housesit for relatives, and we went to see a lightly-active Mt. St. Helens volcano. From the visitor center, wisps of smoke fluttered from the top of the rim. The tidy terrain maps and stories of the eruption in May 1980 only mildly made that smoke more threatening. Fast forward to January 2020. Another friend and I decided to repeat that trip. Unfortunately, it was winter, we had no

While working on some art projects recently, I had sermons running in the background. I don’t always catch everything but I suspect God gently whacks me upside the head when something comes on I need to hear. “People are educated beyond their intelligence,” the speaker said. 1 Wait. What? I pushed the progress bar back a bit to hear it again. “People are educated beyond their intelligence,” he said again, but this time I had a pencil ready to write some notes. He went on to d

God sparing the life of a sibling in the days between Christmas and the New Year had a way of making me think. The pressure of Christmas,...

Did you know that the book Argentine Road Race, from The Crossword Puzzle Mystery, is a real book? When I was a kid, it was a book I...

Remember your starting point. Remember where you want to go. When my friend and I go hiking, we always take a photo of the starting point sign or map. If the phone battery dies it’s a moot point, but since most trails no longer offer paper trail maps, it’s just a way to know: Where you are. Where you are going. How far you have come. How far you have left to go. A reference point if it seems like you’ve been traveling too long. That there is an end somewhere. If you’re walkin

There are a lot of missing people from North Dakota, but the story of 81-year-old Lloyd Liken, a war veteran who went missing in...