I Lost Joy: The We-Wu for July 20-24, 2026

Not the feeling. The person. But more about that later.

I started my week by wearing two different shoes. Both were black (duh). Both were wedge heels. Both were made by the same company. There was one line down the center to differentiate them. (What can I say, I know what I like.)

Fortunately, the different shoes were not a harbinger for the week. I was able to change them at lunch. I briefly considered leaving it, but one was tighter than the other, and it just felt weird.

Aaaaanyway. I think the different shoe thing was countered by the fact that my mom was in town! As you know, I am my mother’s boss, and she came to Greenwood for a couple of days to work on some things for Village Church Planting. It was lovely to have her here, and we had a great time. Plus, we got a lot of work done!

When I wasn’t working on process documents, I was working on Kirundi and Chinese files. Kirundi is our newest language, and I’m working on transfiles to send to the translator once we get our test file back. The Chinese files actually relate to the title (in a way).

Joy was our intern for the summer. (Well, I say our. Really, she was the intern for the Global Training Solutions Group - namely, Sarah. But she sat outside my office, and we did spend some time together.) She also did some translation work for us on the Seed Sowers training that Dynamic Women does. I have been working on publishing it all week (and probably next week). This is one of those side projects that doesn’t necessarily fit into our normal process, but it is still important. It’s a little more complicated because there are a variety of images involved. Many of those have to be inserted manually because our current process is not great at doing that.

Anyway, since this was Joy’s last week (or it may not have had anything to do with that), and the county fair is happening, we took some time on Wednesday to all go to the fair and introduce Joy to the joy of fried food. (I don’t think she was convinced.) But at one point, Sarah was chatting with someone we knew, I was getting free stuff from a neighboring booth, and Joy was wandering. And that’s when I lost her.

Obviously we found her again. But I did laugh a little bit. And we had fun at the fair.

I had my usual meetings this week, but I also had a few impromptu meetings (the good kind). I think all of them were actually useful. No longing for email.

I think that’s about it for the week. I hope you have a great weekend, and if you feel the urge to watch The Odyssey, stick to the 1996 version.

Bye!