The Grind

It's been FOREVER since I posted here. Sorry!

But if you knew what we've been up to lately, I think you would understand.

We've been doing the thing that I probably hate most about our job: Moving.

Moving Day: Chaos hits our living room

Me by our "moving truck". The guys who loaded it kept giggling about being in a photo with the American lady.

Our daughters' last moments in Payo, saying goodbye to our house & to some very special people we had to leave behind.

And moving 3rd-world style: packing up every last thing ourselves, hiring some guys with a huge vegetable truck to come move all our household goods, and discovering that the house we've moved into hasn't been maintained in a very. long. time.

The veggie truck backed up to our new home (which is behind the little pharmacy on the left)

It's been stressful...all the expected stresses, compounded by unexpected stresses have worn me down. All the paint in the new house failed, so after a week in the house, we had to move all the furniture and paint sealant on every wall. The fridge stopped working. We had to buy a new toiled because the one we hadn't already replaced had "issues" and had been installed incorrectly. ...And the list could go on for miles, but I don't want this to be a whiny pity party for us. That's not really what this is about.

Some dear friends helping to unload that pesky fridge

It's just that I've found myself reflecting back on the past 8.5 years we've spent in one place on this island. A place that had finally started to feel a little bit like home. I've been thinking about how God was faithful to us in all of that time, & how he'll certainly be faithful to us in the future here in San Andres, no matter how uncertain it feels to us right now.

And it's weird, because one of the things I've found myself most thankful for is another thing that I really don't like about our rural, 3rd-world life: the daily grind.

You see, it takes a lot more work just to live out here. It seems like everything takes more effort: there are no convenience foods, so everything has to be made from scratch. We didn't grow up in the school system here & still find it completely foreign, so it takes a lot of effort to shepherd our children through a system that we don't really understand. The power goes out a lot, and the internet is super sketchy, and...well, you get the picture.

Our youngest daughter hanging around in our new living room after a morning when she puked all over our new teammates' table at breakfast. Good thing Tom got the TV working that day so that she could just hang out while we unpacked.

It can be a real grind to raise a family out here, and sometimes I feel worn thin, exhausted from the heat & the effort it takes just to survive out here, much less reach outside myself to do something productive that might be a blessing to the people around me.

So why in the world am I thanking God for the daily grind of this life?

Because it has changed me in ways that I don't think I would have changed if my life was more comfortable. (Now, I'm not picking on anyone who is living back in the West...we all need to be in the place that God has called us to. I just seem to have experienced a lot more positive changes in who I am since we arrived on the mission field. Maybe I just need a bigger kick in the butt than most people.)

For those of you who are parents, think about your early days with your child(ren)...sleep deprived, always unsure of what was coming next, feeling like your whole life had changed, and not always for the better! You wondered what you had gotten yourself into. You discovered the depths of your own selfishness (at least I did). During that time of my life, I sometimes found myself wishing that parenting was a 9-5 job, with time off in the evenings, on weekends, & for scheduled vacations.

But I never would have been as invested in my children, discovered nearly as much of my own selfishness & sin, or changed half as much if I could have set my own schedule. It was the 24/7 nature of parenting that demanded I step up, take responsibility, & examine my own life & choices. It was what made me run, over & over, to God for his help. Because it was glaringly obvious I just couldn't handle it all on my own.

Our missionary life has been similar. It's the 24/7 daily grind: the inescapable heat & cultural ambiguity, the insanely long stretches of time away from loved ones, the thought of eating rice again, the necessity of getting into the culture just to survive, that have been God's loving touch to change me. He has grown my faith, helped me understand his love, planted seeds of compassion in my heart, & given me a joy in him that I did not have before we started this cross-cultural life.

It's strange to thank God for one of the things I intensely dislike about our life, and yet, such a relief to see that he has been using even the most difficult things to bless me. And so, sometimes, when I'm ranting about the latest power outage or the fact that there doesn't seem to be any butter on the whole island, anywhere, this week, I am encouraged to remember that my God has shown me his faithfulness in this, too.

"And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose" -Romans 8:28

Some local boys who came to watch us move in

So this is Christmas...

I have to admit it, Christmas morning was really hard for me this year. And it wasn't because something bad happened to me or to my loved ones; it was because I am selfish.

Nice, huh?

Here's the deal: Out here in the rural Philippines, Christmas morning is NOT a time for family celebrations. Instead, it's a time when kids, moms, & grandmothers go all over town, door-to-door, asking for candy, crackers, & money. To put some perspective on this, the kids in our town usually start doing this every night from December 1 through Christmas Eve. It's like Halloween, except with Christmas carols & no costumes, going on for almost a month! Then, they wrap up with the big finale by going all over town for hours on Christmas morning. You can imagine that all of this wears a bit thin by December 25.

Also on Christmas morning, anyone for whom you are a godparent (& we've got a lot of godchildren after almost 11 years in the Philippines!) is allowed to come by your home for snacks, drinks, & gifts. We usually try to head some of this off at the pass by going around to our godchildren a few days before Christmas & giving them gifts then. It works pretty well, but it's not surefire by any means. 

This year, we had a lovely family stop by on Christmas morning. We really like them, & we love their little daughter. She's 2 years old, & since we are her parents' godparents (via their wedding), we are considered her grandparents! She actually uses the Filipino terms for "grandpa" & "grandma" to refer to us, so I am "Lola Kristin", & my husband is "Lolo Tom". It's really cute when I don't let it make me feel old before my time.

Our "granddaughter", trying out gingerbread cookies for the first time

 The family that stopped by brought a sister & some of her kids, too:

Having Coke & cookies on our front porch

 We had a lovely time with them, but it was long. Probably one-and-a-half hours long. It started to rain. Hard. And they couldn't leave. And it was all ok, because I reminded myself how special these people were, & how it was wrong to just make Christmas about myself & my family.

Finally, when the rain slowed down, they left to go home:

First, we took a photo on the road outside our house

Then, they all piled on their motorcycle. Can you fit this many people in your family sedan?

And I finally relaxed. Because the visitors we had expected were gone, & the people coming around to ask for candy & everything were slowing down. Soon, it was going to be just about us again.

Or not.

Because then a lady & her daughter stopped by. My husband knows her from ministry, but she has no claim on us as godparents. We didn't have a gift prepared for her, & we weren't expecting her. It was hard to figure out what she wanted, but we went through the whole ritual again, of getting out snacks, pouring more Coke, sitting, down, listening, etc. It was time for me to make lunch, & our kids were getting a bit cranky. So was I! This didn't fit with my plan for MY special holiday.

It got worse when this lady, who had always seemed sweet before, began to gossip about other people in the community where she lives. I had gone in to make lunch, but my husband was still out on the front porch, listening to her & growing increasingly uncomfortable. I can't say I was sad to have an excuse to get away from her. She went on for a long time, & then, as it began to drizzle outside, she started to move toward leaving. However, before she left, she began to hint around that we had extra umbrellas, & she really wanted one. We're used to this kind of thing from people we don't know here, but it made us feel sort of used by someone we're supposed to have a bit of a relationship with.

Our sweet 9-year-old daughter, however, generously offered up an older-but-still-cute umbrella of her own for them to take home. She took joy in giving it, having no idea of any manipulation or wheedling on this woman's part. I fumed inside the house.

Joyous, right?

Later, after lunch, we shut up our house, took a nap, & had a family Christmas celebration. It was great! Family from the USA had sent special gifts for our girls, & we had a wonderful family time around the tree:

But later, I got to thinking: I had missed the boat completely. In my selfishness, I forgot what Christmas was all about - the incarnation. When God became one of us so that He could share love, Truth, & the gift of eternal life with us.

I came to the Philippines, also to share Christ. But I wasn't too incarnational this Christmas. I forgot about becoming one of the people that I came to serve, & I forgot about serving them. I went through the motions, but without a truly generous, incarnational spirit. I have so much to learn & so much growing to do. I went back to God, confessing my sinfulness & thanking Him that He showed me this ugly part of myself, so that I can give it over to Him.

I praise God that He's willing to use me, warts & all, to be His hands & feet here in the place where He's led me. Even more, I'm grateful that He loves me just the way I am, but He also loves me enough to help me keep changing into someone more like Him.

The Bitter & the Sweet

Wow. We're still stuffed from Thanksgiving. Hope those of you who are Americans had a wonderful Thanksgiving this past week.

A lot of people wonder how we celebrate Thanksgiving out here in the sticks. For us, Thanksgiving is one of those holidays that has seeped into our pores since childhood, & it feels like there's sort of a "right way" to celebrate it.

You know: Turkey. Stuffing. Gravy. Mashed potatoes. Green bean casserole. Pumpkin pie. Etc, etc, etc.

One of the things I'm thankful for at this time of year is that, with a little planning, we're still able to have most of those things most years. When we were in Manila in October, we picked up a turkey (Butterball!!) to bring home to our freezer until Thanksgiving. My husband was in Manila for meetings last week, so I sent him with a list of things to buy - we actually had real celery in our stuffing this year!

Here's a pic of a few of our little pilgrims:

And here's a picture of the spread:

Not too shabby, huh?

We were blessed to celebrate with teammates who have become our family out here in the Philippines. We had Americans who were reliving their own holiday traditions, and Filipinos who have graciously adjusted to ours. It was an awesome day.

But that's not the whole story.

Because something else happened last week that made us feel a lot more homesick than missing our families on Thanksgiving. People we love, who are our family members back in the USA, experienced a tragedy last week. I'm not going to go into specifics, because it's not my story to share, but it's the kind of gut-wrenching, heart-breaking stuff that will change these precious people for good. It's not the kind of thing they'll get over; it's the kind of thing they are living through.

And we weren't there.

Not there to weep with them. Not there to pray with them. Not there to wrap our arms around them and grieve silently because there are no words. These are the times when we most feel our distance from home & family - when we can't give to the ones we love in the way we want to.

But maybe those are the key words: in the way we want to. We still gave: we prayed, we sent our love, we asked about their well-being via family members. We just couldn't give in exactly the way we would have liked to. We had to fall back on what God desires for our family - to be right where we are, in the Philippines, giving thanks for His abundance & His tenderness on a bittersweet Thanksgiving.

Family Photo Time

This past week, it was family photo time again. Every year, we take a family picture sometime in the fall. Being missionaries, we send out family pictures every year in our Christmas cards to a lot of people...so, every Christmas, we need a new family photo. This usually results in my husband and me experiencing full-on panic sometime in late October, when we realize we STILL haven't gotten around to taking that crummy family picture.

You see, we can't go to a photo studio anywhere on our island to do anything professional, and we always find ourselves trying to take a photo that somehow looks "cultural". We also feel this odd pressure to top whatever photo we took the year before - we want to look better, with happier, more contented children.

However, that's where the fly enters the ointment of this whole enterprise: children. God has blessed us with 4 amazing daughters, and we are indeed very grateful for them...most days. But not always on family picture day. There's nothing like sitting out on plastic chairs in the middle of a random rice paddy while 1 of your local friends dances around like she's got ants in her pants, trying to get your kids' attention. Meanwhile, another long-suffering friend stands by your trusty, tripod-mounted camera and just keeps hitting the button. Meanwhile, my husband and I paste on our, "What a fabulous day in the rice paddy!" smiles and pray the kids don't look too unholy.

Not a chance.

It's a good thing my Photoshop skills have improved over the years. This year, I couldn't find a single photo where all the kids even looked pleasant, much less happy. Thank goodness for the ability to swap out heads between photos.

In the photo I'm sharing with you today (I can't share this year's pic, because that would spoil the surprise for our Christmas cards), I believe we finally settled on using take #76. Yup. Apparently the first 75 were none too great, and I believe the total count of takes was well above 100. Also, after the photo was taken, I realized that it looked like a tree was sprouting out of my head. I had to "erase" it in Photoshop.

Here's one of our less successful takes. (Note the tree & the "happy" children.)

It takes a miracle to get 4 kids to smile at the same time while actually making eye contact with the camera. And sometimes, those are the miracles I need to get through my day. Not every day can have 14 baptisms or 8 new decisions for Christ or even 1 new Bible study. But each day we experience out here does have its own miracles: a better day for one of our daughters who is struggling in the local language at school, an unexpected jar of salsa for sale at the grocery store in the capital city (yum!), or a decent looking family photo that turned out despite stress, grumpiness, insects, & heat.

God has been faithful to us every step of this journey - to Him be the glory for the big things, but also for the little things, like another family photo successfully behind us.

A blog? Now? Why?

So...I'm finally taking the plunge. I'm starting my own blog! For a while now, I've been trying to decide if this was the next step in communication for me, and I guess it is! But why? It feels sort of self-centered to think that I have anything to offer that isn't out there on cyberspace already, and maybe that's true...

But I've been thinking about the person I was when we began this whole journey as missionaries, and the person I've become in the years since. I've thought about the things I would've liked to have known before I started this life, the things that would have encouraged me so much when I didn't know if I was "good enough" to be a cross-cultural missionary.

What's the thing I would most have liked to know? It's this: Missionaries are NORMAL, sinful, human people. They're not super-spiritual; and they didn't wait until they became flawless to go out to the nations. They just...went. With all their emotional baggage, sin issues, uncertainties, and foibles. Because God didn't ask for perfect people to go; He just asked for people to be willing to go if that's what He asked of them. That just happens to be what he asked of me. 

During those times when we're back in the USA for a while, we'll go to church. Almost invariably, some thoughtful person will come up to me and say something like this: "I just really admire you for going over there to serve. I could NEVER do that." The thing is, I could NEVER do this either, aside from the strength of the Lord. No one can. It's not about what I can do that makes me special; it's about what God did for me. So in His strength, I can handle all the craziness of this life, even if it's not always fun or comfortable.

So I'm not afraid to start sharing about all the ways that I'm a "Monday girl" - someone who isn't a spiritual giant, but just a regular person. Maybe God will use it to encourage someone else in their journey, the way I would have been encouraged to know that God was happy to use me as I am, because that's the way He loves me - just as I am!