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!