Here’s something I’ve learned as a journalist over the course of my many interactions with missionaries: Don’t entrust your schedule to the hands of missionaries, unless you’re prepared to spend the whole day with them visiting all sorts of people and places.

You see, their ideas of time management and efficiency may differ from yours. For them, spending a three-hour lunch with someone, traveling long distances to visit a family in the middle of nowhere—all those long periods of seemingly doing “nothing” aren’t nothing, but mission work.

A while ago, I was visiting a homeless couple in Los Angeles for an interview when the man—let’s call him “Bill”—began to mock another man for being “feminine.” I didn’t know this other man well, so I couldn’t judge his apparent femininity, but I knew Bill. 

Part one of a series on California’s housing woes

Renata Sanchez didn’t plan to be a teacher. When Sanchez signed up for Teach For America after graduating from Stanford, the plan wasn’t to remain teaching but to save money for law school.

Here’s a New Year’s resolution for you: If you don’t already have a missionary for a friend, find one. I have the incredible blessing of being born into a missionary family, but I can never have enough missionary friends who remind me of God’s mission for us on earth: to proclaim the Good News of Jesus Christ. 

I recently wrote a story about homeless women. The main purpose was to highlight one of the most vulnerable populations in our country, particularly at a time when all sorts of groups are calling attention to gender inequality and social justice issues. 

Mary Nolan was having a wonderful 10th birthday. She had two parties that day and was walking home from the second one when a man grabbed her, slammed her onto a snowbank, and raped her. Nolan didn’t understand exactly what was happening: All she knew was that this man was hurting her, and she couldn’t stop him. Nolan says that was Dec. 22, 1964, in Moquah, Wis.—the day she learned about evil.

When Chinese scientist He Jiankui appeared onstage at the Second International Summit on Human Genome Editing in Hong Kong, the news of what he would say had already zipped across the world. Two days earlier, on Nov. 25, He had told an organizer of the conference that he had helped make the world’s first genetically edited babies—twin girls by the pseudonyms Lulu and Nana—by altering their DNA while they were embryos to become resistant to future HIV infection.