The Best Supporters in the World

This is a blog I have been meaning to write for several months. You may guess that everyone in my position says this, but they don’t. The sad fact is that many people like us are under supported financially. Many people don’t like to go on home-leave because it’s draining. Some feel as though they don’t have support, that they are all alone on the field. What is even more common, though, is others in our line of work who go home to unwelcoming supporters who are ready to send them back out immediately or the opposite extreme, supporters who just try to convince them to stay home.

That hasn’t been our experience. We have all the support we need. You all are so generous and give so sacrificially. When we are on home leave and visit all of you, we are so energized to hear that people are praying for us, thinking about us regularly, and invested in our work. We don’t feel alone on the field. You communicate with us. You tell us how your praying, and you think about our needs. You are happy to have us home, and make us feel a part of your congregations. At at the same time you know our calling is not in the U.S., and you always send us off well.

We have the best supporters in the world. You have welcomed us into your homes for meals, taken us out to restaurants, let us borrow your cars, given extra special gifts to take care of specific needs, made us feel at home in your churches, surprised us with your thoughtfulness, prayed regularly, loved on our kids, and sent us off well with us knowing that we are just the visible parts of a much larger team.

Thank you.

Buying Time

It has been way too long since I wrote an entry on this blog. Life, motherhood, school, and just general cranial disorganization has contributed to a serious lack of content. We recently moved into our new flat, and the craziness of it all has left me thinking about how I can manage to cram all the things I need to do into a day. At the end of the day, I often feel like the "to do" list has only grown longer. Those same days are typically ones filled with the frustrations of trying to teach two toddlers to grow into godly children despite their being the seeds of the Fall just like their parents and all the time that is consumed trying to keep a house cleaned, laundered, and fed in the South Asian context where neither electricity or water are particularly dependable. I have been challenged by the thought of how one, whether overseas worker or person living at home, buys more time. How do you carve time away from other less important things to place that oh-so-valuable time where it really belongs? We know that time is precious, but how do we get more?

In those few moments I have to just be quiet at the start and close of the day, I have been reading a book called One Thousand Gifts about a woman's journey to transforming her life from one of ingratitude and dissatisfaction to one of thanksgiving and joy. Eucharisteo. She commented in the book of the difficulty of taking time to say thank you when she had so little time to begin with. In giving thanks for all the little things throughout a day, from the warm smiles of her children playing outside to the curls of cheese she piled on a pizza, she began to feel a sense of having more time, similar to when Jesus gave thanks before feeding the crowds--that thanks took a little and made a lot. Essentially, this slowing of the heart and mind to recognize every gift from our Maker slowed time, gave her more, because she began to live fully in every moment. Another person in the book commented, "Wherever you are, be fully there." This week, I have been battling my scatterbrained nature to instead stop and live fully in each moment, rather than rattling off "to do" lists in my head while someone talked to me. I am learning, despite the fact that my flesh does not want to be taught, that thanksgiving has a transformative effect. Maybe it really is how we begin to buy time in this precious, short life.

2011 is over

Well today is the last day of 2011. We have been in America the last 6 months, and therefore, very little has been posted to this blog. All that is about to change. We will be back in Asia in two and half weeks, and life will be more interesting. It's not that life in America is boring, but it's normal. We enjoy normal, but we are ready to get back to our crazy home half a world a way.

2011 has been a great year for us because of you guys. Your prayers have accomplished much. God has done great things. If you are thinking, "But I haven't been praying," then you are missing out on an amazing opportunity to be a part of what God is doing. The first half of this year was full of firsts. Being in the studio recording the first worship songs in the Tazig language, recording the first scripture in the Tazig language, and P.J.'s first trip to Tazig land to deliver those first scriptures and songs. We are so thankful for the work God has given us and the wonderful partners He has brought us together with to learn from, encourage, and labor together with.

The second half of the year has been a wonderful time with all of you and our amazing families that love and support us in all we do. We have seen God provide as He always does and have partnered together with three new churches! We've been able to spread the news in Illinois, Ohio, and Virginia, about the great need for workers all around the world and share specifically about the Tazig people.

It's been a great year. 2012 is going to be even better. We can feel it.

Content

After our first three years in South Asia, we had a long list of things we were looking forward to in the U.S. On the top of that list then and now was, of course, family and friends, but that was just the beginning of our list back then. We had a long list of things we wanted to do, experience, eat, and see. We couldn’t wait to dry our clothes in a dryer, drink water out of a tap, eat some ribs, go to Wal-Mart (and Home Depot), and frequently visit that beautiful American invention called the supermarket! After three years, we were desperately longing for advanced western civilization.

We find ourselves in a different position now three and a half years later. We have been back here in South Asia for another two and a half years, and we find ourselves ready to be “home”, but not desperate to be there. We have been thinking and talking a lot about this and asking ourselves the question “Why?” What is different this time? Have we just become more South Asian and feel more at home here? Yes, possibly. Is it because we are now living in the place where we feel like God wants us long term and so we have put down more roots and made this place more our home than our previous city? Yes, I think that is part of it, too. This place is our home. We have now lived more than five combined years in South Asia, and our personal culture has changed. Naomi has lived in Asia nearly 90% of her life. Ezra has lived here 100% of his life. They know no other home than Asia. So we have changed, and our kids have grown up here.

Something else has changed as well: Our memory of the beauty of American has become more realistic. When we were leaving the first time, America was more or less perfection in our minds, and as you all know, that is not true.
So, this time there is a shorter list of things we are looking forward to and now there is a list of things we will miss from here. P.J. is going to miss getting a real haircut, a straight-razor shave, and head massage for $1.50. We are both going to miss being able to go out to a nice restaurant and spending only $15-20. We will miss our friends here, and we will definitely miss our work.

Really what I am saying is that we are content. We are content here, and we will be content in the U.S, and contentedness is the best place to be.

Being the Entertainment

On this past trip we went to some pretty remote places. It always amazes me, while traveling around the sub-continent, how people have chosen to live in some of the most remote and difficult places. The set up their villages in the middle of deserts, in nearly barren valleys, and some villages seem to barely cling to the sides of mountains. These places prove very difficult for national infrastructure to reach, and therefore, many villages go without electricity, roads, indoor plumbing, and most shocking of all – any kind of digital entertainment. That’s right, no T.V., no movies, and sometimes even no radio.

So, when two white people walk into one of these villages, village life stops, and all focus is on the living, breathing entertainment that has just entered their world. To the western eye we may seem to be the most normal looking and acting people, but let me try to envision for you what we look like to the 12-year-old villager living in a remote place. Top 10 most entertaining things about two white American men (as recounted to their friends the next day):

10) They were so huge! One of them must have been 9 feet tall!
9) Their skin was so white! One of them was so white it hurt my eyes looking at him (sorry K)! And then they pulled up the sleeves of their shirts… and that skin was even whiter!
8) They slept outside in a tent. Don’t they know that you can get eaten by bears if you sleep outside? (Most South Asians seem to think their countries are crawling with bears.)
7) Then they went down to the freezing cold river and swam in it? That’s a good way to catch a cold.
6) And they washed their bodies with soap. Right in the river! Totally unnecessary.
5) Do you know what they ate? They ate just potatoes and some kind of meat with gravy. They didn’t eat any rice! How can you go to sleep without eating any rice!?! They must have been poor white people.
4) They had a horse with them. It was the oldest, slowest, and most stubborn horse our village has ever seen!
3) One of them had orange hair. No, I promise you it was totally orange!
2) Both of them had hair growing on their chins! What do they think they are--goats?
1) They had hair on their arms! All over their arms hair was growing just like it grows on our heads. The funniest thing was that when you pulled the hair on their arms… they acted like it hurt!

What Do You Do With a Slow, Old, Possibly Blind, Stubborn Horse?

If you are considering going on a long trek and buying a horse to save money on porter fees, I would recommend it. You have to be careful though, as not all horses are created equally. Here are a few things you want to avoid:

1. An old horse – Despite the obvious reasons for not buying an old horse (might be slow, can’t walk more than a few hours a day, horse arthritis*, etc) the main reason is you are also buying all the bad habits that have been going on for years! Our horse was allowed to set the pace for 9 years, and all of a sudden he has two Americans behind him trying to get him to go faster.

2. A Blind Horse – This one doesn’t really need to be explained. Horse that can’t see well + narrow cliffs a thousand feet up = not good.

3. A Stud – As a man, it is hard to say this, but unless the sole reason for the horse is to make babies, castration is the way to go. Our horse had always been a pack horse, but he secretly thought he was a stud and strove to make a change in profession.

Unfortunately, all of these things may have been true about our horse (we thought he was blind early on, but we aren’t so sure any more, maybe just farsighted). Despite all his inadequacies, he was with us for three weeks and walked carrying our load for well over a hundred hours. As the end of the trip drew near and we only had three days of walking back to the airport where we hoped the sell him, we thought our decision had really paid off. We thought we could sell the horse and save hundreds of dollars on paying people to carry our supplies. Well… 3 o’clock on day one of our three day descent he stopped and would not move. At all. We beat him (don’t worry P.E.T.A. not that hard), we yelled at him, we threw rocks (again P.E.T.A. not that hard), we pulled on his rope, we pled, begged, prayed, cried a little, tried to reason with him, but nothing worked. So we went to bed hoping he was just tired. Day two: Packed up ready to go at 6 a.m., and he won’t budge. So what do you do? Well, we wanted to take him out. Push him of a cliff? Knock a big boulder on his head? Anything (I have no excuse P.E.T.A. This horse was so bad you would have picked him off, too).
So what did we end up doing? Worse than killing him. We gave him away. The horse won. He was stubborn, and he got his way. We adversely affected another poor human’s life by giving him a horse named Lucky. I feel terrible.

* There may be nothing called horse arthritis.

The Life We Lead

When your child says that they want to go home that is a pretty easy request to grant, but what if you are not sure what they mean by home? About a month ago we were staying in a hotel in Bangkok for three days. A hotel so nice and a room so big that we parents wanted to call it home for the rest of our lives. We had just spent the last 2 1/2 months living on an island in the south of Thailand which Naomi called home. We were leaving for our "home" in South Asia the next day which, of course, Naomi calls home. So when we were playing in the hotel room and Naomi asks "to go home" we are not sure what to tell her. Unfortunately for our parents, home for Naomi is definitely not the U.S. She has spent less than 20% of her life in the U.S. So where is home?

For the most part, home is where Mom and Dad are, but there is one more element - her toys. When we walked in the door of our house in South Asia and Naomi headed into her room and saw all of her toys she had left behind for the past 2 1/2 months... she was home. Mom was there, Dad was there, baby Ezra was there, and all of her stuffed animals, blocks, coloring books, story books, baby dolls, and cars were there. So where is home? Geographically I am not sure, but Naomi needs very little for a place to be home, and for the life we lead, that is a real blessing.