I’m not sure I’ve shared my heart in such a raw way in this context previously, so please be kind and gentle with replies.  I think with Mother’s Day approaching this is an appropriate post. This is from my heart and specific to my life.  One of the difficulties of living the life we live is spiritual warfare. I know people who don’t really believe it exists or think it gets overblown. I believe without a doubt that it’s real and that our unseen enemy can rip those who follow Christ to shreds in seemingly the blink of an eye.

We have seen our share of spiritual warfare as we fought to get here and fought to stay here. In all of it I’m a really easy target.  There’s a reason for the saying “If Mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.”  I’ll go from another angle and say “If Mama’s under attack, everyone is under attack.”  And so I’ve been attacked. I mostly have lies fed to me (not infrequently by other people) that I’m not good enough to be Toffer’s wife or the mother of my children, I’m a poor wife/parent/daughter/friend, and the hit of all hits-I’m a huge disappointment to God and a failure in what He wants me to do.

God apparently decided that this is an unacceptable line of thinking and has graciously been fighting for me day in and day out.  The way He fights? He says to me “This is what pleases Me.”  I heard it the first time a few weeks ago in church as I stood with my husband and three boys-”This is what pleases Me.” I heard it when I rocked and nursed my infant son-”This is what pleases Me.” I heard it as I did dishes (a much lengthier process here than back home)-”This is what pleases Me.”  As I go about my day caring for my family and our home God has repeatedly shown me that this is the life He called me to and this is what pleases Him.

The most important job I have right now is to raise my children.  At a different stage of life I would certainly be off with Toffer on some of his adventures. And let me tell that I wish I could be off with Toffer on some of his adventures. He’s seeing some incredible places in God’s creation I someday hope to see myself. But that’s not what God intended. God put me here at this stage of my life for a reason.  My obedience to go to the ends of the earth with two toddlers and a baby on the way pleases Him.  I am not a failure. I am not a disappointment. I am a good wife and a good mom (though very admittedly imperfect). I love the Lord and desire to follow and please Him with my life.

So this Sunday I get the opportunity to fight for my life, my sanity, for the knowledge that I please the Lord and celebrate three of the greatest gifts God has bestowed upon me. They are very precious gifts that take great and painstaking care to bring up properly, but every day is worth it knowing that they feel loved and knowing that I please the Lord in doing it. Happy Mother’s Day to all of you who take great and painstaking care to raise your children to love the Lord, each other, and those around them. It’s the most important job you’ll ever have.

Toffer asked a while back if I could make chili some time.  Chili powder is not available here, but I had already asked someone to send some, so I told him as soon as I could get the ingredients together I’d make it.  Well, that was probably close to 2 months ago and I finally made chili a couple days ago.  My mom had brought some magazines with her when my parents came earlier this year and one happened to have a number of chili recipes in it.  I looked them over, realized I couldn’t get all the ingredients for any of them, then made up my own recipe using bits and pieces. So, here’s my 6-location chili named such because the ingredients came from six different places. I very rarely make something that I was able to get all the ingredients in one location.  It’s part of life here, one that’s been a big adjustment.

*1 lb of ground beef (3-150 gm ground beef patties from the frozen food store)
*2-3 cloves of garlic, chopped (from the wet market)
*1 onion, chopped (from the wet market)
*1 tbsp. chili powder (very thoughtfully sent from America by a kind friend)
*1/2-1 tsp cumin (purchased from the gift shop at a local garden)
*1/2-1 tsp. paprika (purchased at the same gift shop)
*2 cans diced tomatoes (from the Wal-Mart type store)
*1 can kidney beans, drained (also from the frozen food store-it has non-frozen goods, too)

Brown the beef until it’s not quite fully cooked, add in the garlic and onion, let that all cook together until the onion gets a little soft. Add the chili powder, cumin, and paprika.  Stir it all together.  Add in the tomatoes and kidney beans, then let it all simmer together for a at least 15 minutes.

Top with cheese (from the 6th location-a mini market that specializes in imported Western goods) and sour cream (which was purchased from the frozen food store).

I served it with cornbread I made from scratch.  We used to very much enjoy the cornbread from the recipe I made. It’s from the America’s Test Kitchen Baking Book and when the ingredients are good it’s very tasty. The cornmeal was NQR, so it was a little off and not nearly as tasty as past attempts.  We’ve learned to not have our hopes up too high when trying a recipe we used to really like with local ingredients. Things just taste different and with the heat and humidity act different, so some stuff just ends up NQR or completely NR. The cornbread itself had ingredients from at least 3 different stores, one of which was not included above. So if you include the cornbread it was actually a meal made with ingredients from seven locations.

I probably could have gotten the tomatoes at the frozen food store or the mini market, so in the future it might just be 5 location chili.  For most of you it will likely be 1 location chili.  Or for some this is too much work and you’ll just buy a can of Chili Magic, a pound of Laura’s Lean, and a can of diced tomatoes with a box of Jiffy for your cornbread. That’s certainly what I used to do on days I had little time and wanted chili and a corn bread type side. Enjoy!

My previous post was about how our life is a little NQR.  This one is random facts/figures/tidbits about our life for the past six months with lots of parentheses and dashes because that’s just how I roll.

Facts/Figures
*Number of children added to our family: 1
*Number of cars we own: 1
*Number of car accidents: ZERO-praise the Lord!
*Number of Ikea furniture items in our house: 26 (I think)-and this doesn’t include all of the soft goods we got there
*Number of stories in our house: 3
*Number of stamps we’ve gotten in our passports since leaving the US: Toffer-13, Becky, Samuel, and Benjamin-9 each, Isaac-3
*Number of countries we’ve been in since leaving the US: 4, though only Toffer was in one of them
*Size of the boys’ “bathtub”: 25 L
*Distance Toffer walks to work (when he walks): Not quite a mile, the last stretch of it is up a steep hill. He gets his exercise in when he walks.
*Length of our only family plane trip since arriving: about an hour each way-we’ll leave the lengthy plane trips for when we’re not doing it with a newborn.
*Cost of a gallon of milk: Doing the math of how many liters there are in a gallon and then factoring in the exchange rate, a gallon of milk is about $6.20.
*Number of eggs in a carton: 10
*Number of levels in the closest mall: 9
*Number of stations Toffer has helped with: 2-a new install in Nepal and putting up a new tower/antenna/transmitter (essentially redoing the station) in Thailand. We’re hoping this number goes up quickly.
*Number of partners who participated in training the first 2 weeks of April: 5-2 from Thailand and 3 from Indonesia
*Number of Units in our housing complex: 68
*Typical Temperature: 27 to 30 Celsius every single day of the year
*Length of Daylight hours: around 12 hours (give 30 minutes or so during some stretches) year-round because we’re so close to the equator.  Sunrise is around 7 am and sunset is closer to 7:30 pm right now, though it had been about 7 pm during the “winter”

Random Bits About Our Life
Common Prayers in Our House: “God Help!” and “God-don’t let us do anything too stupid.”  So far He’s faithfully answered both.
Favorite Indian dish (We eat at a couple Indian places quite frequently): Chicken Butter Masala
American eateries we have here: Chili’s, TGI Friday’s, McDonald’s, Burger King, Baskin-Robbins, Pizza Hut, Domino’s, Subway, Starbucks, Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, and KFC (though we have yet to eat at the KFC)
Length it took to eat at one: Not even a day-we had McDonald’s the first day we were here. Theoretically for comfort food, but we rarely ate at McDonald’s in the US.
Household conveniences I’d like to have again: large washing machine/dryer and the dryer has multiple settings, a garbage disposal, a dishwasher, hot and cold water out of the taps, drinkable tap water, and central air conditioning.
Things that are QR (See NQR for context): Baskin-Robbins, the smell of Gap, McDonald’s hot fudge sundaes, the boys playing with their trains, rocking & nursing my baby boy
Most Disappointing Treats: Twix-they’re made in the region and don’t taste good at all. And the “ice cream” we got for my birthday that we discovered was actually “iced confection” and realized that all real ice cream is actually expensive.  And the “ice confection” fiasco was before we knew about the Baskin-Robbins, otherwise I would have wanted an ice cream cake made with real ice cream.
Oddest flavor of potato chips: seaweed
Random canned item: grapes
Favorite places to shop for groceries: wet market and the baking store (2 of many places I go to get my groceries)
Huge Blessings: Our House (we ended up with more space in a gated housing community-which houses usually aren’t behind gates, just condos-for less than other houses we looked at that weren’t gated. With Toffer traveling having our family behind a gate made everyone feel a little better even though we live in a fairly safe city.), Our Car (the big blue wonder-it’s not really a van, it’s not really an SUV, it’s just an NQR multiple person vehicle),Our Church (a lovely community made up primarily of western ex-pats and a Canadian pastor who I gain more respect for every week), Our Financial and Prayer Support Teams, and Our Teammates (I hope I’ve bragged on them enough, but I’ll do it again here-we have an amazing group of people we serve and do life with)
Things we miss the most right now: family, friends, and food

Kids
-Samuel’s newest hobby: sending postcards (if you want to get one, seriously let us know and we’ll put one in the mail-he LOVES doing this)
-Favorite Question Samuel has asked: Do the Hindus have Legos?
-Sweetest Prayer: Benjamin saying “Thank you God for bathtub” when we had a bathtub during a recent trip to Singapore-had no idea how much he missed having one
-Most Surprising Scripture Memorization: Samuel said all of Psalm 23 not too long ago-didn’t know he’d learned the whole thing. And at bedtime a couple days ago Benjamin said most of Psalm 23:1 and a few of the phrases from Romans 8:38 & 39. God is good!!
-Isaac’s weight gain since birth: 1.8 kilograms (4 pounds)
-Number of times Samuel has asked to go home: Too many to count-he asks every single day and that’s okay.
-Animals the boys were most excited to see at the zoos we’ve visited: MEERKATS, kangaroo, elephants, emus, zebras, baboons (they have red bottoms)
-Things they do in creative play: pretend to Skype/text/talk to people on the phone, lots of things travel on planes and have to go through security (including some little trucks one day), make lots of food-pepperoni pizza (we miss good pepperoni-here it’s made from beef and is not the same) and roti are the most common foods

Vocabulary
Highchair: baby chair
Stroller: push chair
Shopping cart/buggy: trolley
Line (like one you stand in): que
Elevator: lift
Crib: baby cot
People ask where we stay instead of where we live.
A buy 1, get 1 free sale (or something similar) is simplified to just buy 1, free 1.
When a store is out of something they say “finish.” For example-Me: Do you have minced beef? Store clerk: Finish
Meat is called minced here, not ground, and has a different texture.
Can/Cannot are common responses instead of yes/no.

I have been itching to write this post for a month now. I have been eagerly awaiting the point when I could triumphantly say “We have lived here for six months!” Well, today it’s been six months and two days.  I have three napping boys, which means an opportunity to write. I’ve been thinking about what I should write about to honor this momentous occasion and it came to me the other day when I was going to our Wal-Mart type store to buy some bread and bananas: I need to finally write about how we live an NQR life. What, you are wondering, is NQR?

NQR, my friends, is Not Quite Right.  Our teammates introduced us to this concept very early on and it has served us well in describing an abundance of things.  Some things are sort of NQR, some things are just NR (Not Right), some things are really NR, and then there are those few glorious times when something is actually QR (Quite Right).  A silly example of how to use the NQR scale.  The capital city has two donut chains we are familiar with: Dunkin’ Donuts and Krispy Kreme.  We found Dunkin’ Donuts on our first two trips down, but knew that Krispy Kreme was too far away from where we would be to go.  So, we went to DD.  It was just a general case of NQR.  It was fine. We liked having something familiar, but it wasn’t anything too big to write home about (though I think we still might have).  Then we got to go to Krispy Kreme when we went to get Isaac’s passport in February. And, oh, it was almost QR and tasted SO good.

We’ve been here six months and NQR is the best way I know how to describe us right now.  We’ve figured out how to drive on the opposite side of the road from the opposite side of the car.  Toffer’s local English is much better than mine, but I’m working on it. He’s also better at backing our car in than I am-something that has to happen much more frequently here than it did at home.  Our stove hits me right about at mid-thigh and the counter where our kitchen sink is hits just below my hips. And I’m not a particularly tall person.  The floors in our house are all uneven. I think it’s starting to make us a little uneven.

The beds in the entire region are all hard (seriously-thank God for 6 cm thick memory foam mattress toppers for our bed).  A lot of brands of food that are familiar to us are often made in-region and not imported from the US, so they’re all a little NQR. We buy milk and petrol by liters instead of milk and gasoline by the gallon.  Our kids weight and height are measured in kilograms and centimeters when they go to the doctor.  Everything we see is in at least two languages and often 4 or more.  We have no fewer than five different currencies in our house right now (this makes me feel a bit like a spy) and all of our kids have stamps in their passports for multiple countries.

Our taps only have cold water, so our showers have small, tankless hot water heaters attached to all of them so we have hot water. I have to boil water to be able to wash my dishes in hot water. Samuel and I were doing his Before Five in a Row book the other day (we started preschool at his request a couple weeks ago-fun!) and I asked him what someone would wear in the snow. His response “I don’t know.” Of course he wouldn’t, he’s not seen snow, or even a cold day, in over a year.  The coolest temperature we have experienced (with the exclusion of Toffer during his trip to Nepal) is probably around 75* Fahrenheit.  We don’t even bother checking the weather forecast-it’s always between 28 and 30 Celsius for the high. The only difference is how likely it is to rain and what time of day that rain will come. In the fall it came mostly in the afternoon.  Recently we’ve been getting nice overnight thunderstorms.

We get in ques instead of lines.  I have no fewer than 5 places I go with some regularity to buy groceries and, with the exception of the wet market where I buy a lot of our produce, I don’t know whether they’ll have what I’m looking for.  If we find something that’s imported or stock seems to be spotty we buy several because we don’t know how long it will be before they have it again. Wish I had done that with Bisquick.

Then there’s the list of all the things we can’t get here (like lined paper that lower-elementary kids use) or are so expensive we can’t afford them or can only get them on very special occasions (like sharp orange cheddar cheese).  Or how we had to adjust to lots of new smells (except the couple times I’ve gone in the Gap store-it smells the same) and new architecture (everything is made out of concrete, including our house) and new food (Indian has become a favorite in our house).  We’re still adjusting and learning and growing.  Some day life here will feel less NQR and more QR.  Everyday is an adventure and new things happen (like having more cockroaches in our house last night to get rid of than we’ve had in our house total since we moved in five months ago).

God has been incredibly good and faithful to us as we’ve walked/stumbled/had to be carried through this adjustment time.   He has sustained us, loved us, given us silly things that shouldn’t even matter (like the Easter things we found in Singapore so the boys could have a little egg hunt), and given us guidance and wisdom every single day.  Our last six months have by no means been easy, but they have been full of growth and I can honestly say that I look forward to what the next six months brings for our family here.

I’ll be quite honest that post-partum hormones hit me like a load of bricks this time around.  I had a much harder time than I did with Samuel and Benjamin.  Apparently being in a drastically different environment without family and only having a few friends around along with being older can do that.  So, I sought out anything that seemed to help me feel better. About two weeks in I figured out taking walks seemed to help a little, so any time I started feeling really off I told Toffer I needed to go out for a few minutes and out I went.

I spent most of that time praying-usually asking God to bring back my clear and sound mind and more regulated body, but also for this place.  We live in a community with about 70 units in it, but the community is within a neighborhood. So, I’ll walk around our small community  and then out into the neighborhood.  As I was walking in the neighborhood I turned onto a road and out in front of me were palm trees, red-tile roof houses, and a hill beyond the neighborhood.  I had this thought at the moment “This is where I’ve always wanted to live.” God clearly put that thought in my head because at that point in time all I wanted was to go home.

I was walking again a week or so later and had a similar experience. There’s a condo building right next to our community.  In fact, the only things that actually have addresses on our street are that condo building and our community. The rest of the houses that are along the street are either the backs or sides that face other streets in the neighborhood. So, anyway, I’m walking along in our community and come to the dead end and look up at the condo building. I see a woman on her balcony on the 4th or 5th floor talking up to someone on the balcony of the floor above her. As I watched the interaction I had the same thought again-”This is where I’ve always wanted to live.”

I began to process what that meant.  I’ll honestly say if someone gave me a world map and say “Pick a place to live” our location would not be the one I’d choose. If I were choosing, I’d head right back to Murfreesboro.  We really liked living there and hope that at whatever point God puts us back in the US full time that we will live there again.  But I’m not in the business of getting to choose where I live. I’m in the business of letting God choose where I live. And this is where He put us.

I’ve wanted to be in our line of work for many years now.  The past few years in particular have been spent working towards living this life and following God where He was leading us.  And that is why this is where I’ve always wanted to live. I’ve always wanted to live where God called.  For a number of years now I’ve specifically wanted to live in Asia.  And for the six months before we moved I wanted to live in this particular location because it’s where God put our team to spend time in between traveling. Having that thought come into my head not once, but twice, was just another confirmation that we are where we should be.  For better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness and in health, this is where we live. I may not love right now. It’s not my favorite place in the world, but it’s where I’ve always wanted to live because it’s where God has for me to live and that is what I want most of all.

After months of speculation about whether Tadpole is a boy or girl we got our answer about a week and a half ago. Tadpole is a boy!!  Isaac Timothy made his grand entrance into the world a mere 2 hours after we got to the hospital.  We feel so blessed to have another healthy, beautiful baby boy.  Samuel and Benjamin are quite smitten with him and have been great about sharing Mama.

We feel like naming our children comes with some amount of responsibility.  We came up with some guidelines as we’ve named each of our children-they have Old Testament first names, New Testament middle names, gender specific, most traditional spelling, solid names that have meaning, etc.  We continued those traditions this time around as well and feel like Isaac’s name is quite appropriate for this point in our lives.  We went round and round about names back in December trying to figure out what Tadpole’s name would be if he was a boy.  We’ve had a girl’s name picked out for years, so we did the routine “You still like the name?” and that was the end of that discussion.

We liked Isaac, but talked about others.  The original middle name was not Timothy.  In December God prompted me to read through I & II Timothy all in one stretch.  The more I read the more appropriate Timothy seemed to be for a middle name-he was serving God full time like we are, he had a great legacy of faith in his family like our boys do.  Isaac Timothy had a nice sound to it, so we put that at the top of the list, but still kept a few others in case it didn’t suit him at birth.  Obviously we decided it did.  The day after Isaac was born I read through some of the biblical account of Isaac. In reading it God reminded me that Abraham and Sarah were not in their homeland either when their Isaac was born.  So, a fitting name for a boy born to a family living outside their homeland serving God full time, just like Isaac and Timothy.

The second in our “If you…” series.

If you want to buy things locally you’ll need local currency or money in your local bank account.
If you’re using your US bank account you can use any atm that you can find.
If you’re using your local bank account to get cash you’ll need to find an atm for your bank. Thankfully ours has atm’s at both the Wal-Mart type store and the mall, both of which we go to fairly frequently.
If all you need is cash, once you’ve visited the atm you’re set.
If your local account needs to have some money added to it to do things like pay rent and electricity  along with getting cash you’ll have to go to the bank.
If you’re getting that much money out you might want to check the exchange rate for that day.
If you’re going to the bank you might as well run other errands that are that direction, like the post office or the wet market, which both require cash.
Once you make it to the bank (provided the one-way alley that you have to use to get around the building isn’t blocked) you’ll have to pay the parking attendant, which you hopefully planned for by having some change in your wallet or in the car.
If you make it to the bank and pay the attendant, get the kids out of the car (they go with you everywhere) and go inside the lobby.
If you’re getting cash out of your US bank account first, make sure you use the correct atm that is for withdrawals.
If you screen keeps saying “Sorry, you’re over your withdrawal limit” look at your card and make sure it’s actually your debit card and not your credit card.
If you finally get the right card in the machine get the maximum amount out of your account that you can.
Do all of this while trying to keep track of two toddlers who are going in opposite directions and/or trying to push all the buttons on the machine.
If you finally get your money out, you’ll have to go down the line of machines to a deposit atm.
If you got out the maximum amount you will probably put all of it in your account, or at least attempt to.
If your kids are wandering too far or pushing too many buttons consider buying a leash for them and then remember that you’re not that kind of parent and you’ll just have to feel like you’re herding cats while going through this process.
If you remember your pin number and get into your account you’ll have to put all the cash into the machine.
If all the money isn’t accepted by the machine, pull out what gets spit back.
If you put the money in too soon it will spit all your money back and you have to start over.
If you push the wrong button it will spit out all your money and you’ll have to start over.
Continue trying to deposit cash and having some spit back until you’re satisfied with the amount in your account versus the amount in your hand.
If you haven’t beat your head against the machine in the whole process you had a good experience and hope that you will have a positive experience next time.

Two posts for the price of one today. A dear friend requested that I share some stories of crazy things that have happened, so I will share two. One that will be new to all and one that will be new to some.

The first incident happened while Toffer was in Nepal.  I have found that I am treated differently when I’m out alone and depending on the gender and ethnicity of the person I’m interacting with that can be a good thing or a bad thing.  Surprisingly the awkward situation I’m about to relate was from someone I would have previously thought would be appropriately friendly with me or just smile and move on.  Not so on this day.  Benjamin had been asking for days to go to our favorite Indian restaurant, though some of that might be that it’s the only restaurant he knows the name to because we ate there so often when we first moved.  We really like the food and the staff are friendly and like our boys, so I was game. It’s a place I know and felt comfortable going by myself with the boys.  We sat down to eat, half a dozen restaurant employees came by to talk to/play with the boys at various times, it was a typical meal.

I noticed a couple sit down at the table next to us, closest to Benjamin’s side of the table. I wouldn’t have expected either one of them to interact with us.  As we’re eating the woman reaches over and touches Benjamin and makes a comment about how much he’s eating. We get lots of comments like that because our boys eat a ridiculous amount of food for their ages, so at first I didn’t think a lot about it. Then she starts asking questions, while continuing to touch Benjamin while he’s trying to eat-rubbing his head, pulling on his arms, etc. I can tell he’s getting uncomfortable and so am I, but I didn’t know what to do. She asked how much Benjamin weighs, how much he weighed at birth, how he was born, and several other odd questions.  Then she asks if I take care of myself, which I thought meant if I had taken good care of myself when I was pregnant.  Her dining companion clarified that question by saying she meant partner/housemate.  Then she asked if all my children had the same father and is Benjamin’s father European (all Caucasians are called Europeans).  A few more odd questions that I can’t remember were asked after that.  For the record-I’m very much married to one man who is the father of all of my children. He’s half “European” and half Chinese (though at the store the other day he had a lady ask if his wife was Chinese because she could see it in the boys and apparently thought it didn’t come from him).  I don’t particularly like essentially being called a woman with loose morals. And I have rings on my ring fingers on both hands, so in any culture it should be easy to see that I’m married.  Regardless to say it wasn’t the nice, relaxed dinner with the boys that we were all looking forward to.

And for story number two.  We went to a neighboring country last week for a couple days, so we were staying in a hotel.  A vast majority of the people staying there were ethnically Asian of one kind or another, so like most places we go, we were really obvious and stuck out.  We ate breakfast at the hotel for sake of ease. They claimed it was an American buffet, but I don’t know a lot of Americans who eat fried rice or roti with chicken curry gravy for breakfast. Maybe just the concept of a buffet was the American part.  We actually liked the food as did the boys, so it was fine. Anyway, that doesn’t have much to do with the story except the roti part (which only Toffer ate with the curry gravy).  Roti is a sort of crepe-like bread dish that’s really tasty.  We first had it in Singapore a couple years ago and can get it here, too.  You can get it plain or with fillings.  For breakfast I like it with egg inside and a little sugar on top.

So, there’s a sweet girl (who looked like she’s actually from the country we spend most of our time in) making the roti fresh for breakfast. I stood in line both days to get it for myself and for the boys, so ended up going up more than once both days.  On the second day I went up a second time to ask said sweet girl to make me a roti with egg for Samuel. The guy in front of me in line sort of laughs and says something along the lines of “You like this very much. I see you have gotten much of it for two days now.” Wow-CREEPY!

Okay, first of all, most of what I ordered was for my toddlers and their aforementioned voracious appetites.  Apparently he wasn’t watching me too closely, otherwise he would have known that. Second, I’m not some silly westerner who is enjoying the novelty of this new food. We have a place three blocks away from our house that makes it and we eat there all the time.  Thirdly, you’re a creepy guy with a creepy laugh and I don’t like that you’re watching me. Please stop. Thank you very much.

And that’s my life, folks.

It’s been a while since I wrote anything and have been mulling around various ideas. I’ve sat down multiple times to write and nothing that made sense or seemed interesting came out.  Toffer’s been doing this crazy thing called work, so while he has plenty to write about, especially his trip to Nepal, his brain is a little taxed right now.  So, I’ve decided I’ll write another post about something we spent some amount of time talking about at training and that is a very common topic of conversation in our house-transition!

Many transitions exist in life and some are walked through much quicker and easier than others.  For us, we’re going through one of the most difficult transitions possible-a long-term cross-cultural move.  We’ve mentioned transition a lot, but I thought it might be helpful to write a bit more specifically about it.  In any transition there are five stages-settled, unsettling, chaos, resettling, and settled.  In our situation unsettling also brought a lot of loss, which brings grief with it, so we’re also experiencing the five stages of grief intermixed with walking (stumbling?) through transition.

Settled means you are in a place where you have a sense of belonging, you have friends, a general routine, things feel normal and comfortable a lot of the time.  Unsettling (or uprooting if you go by plant terms) is when things begin to change in the process.  For us unsettling in some ways started when we initially said “yes” to HCJB Global, though the majority of it was the last few months we were in the US.  It’s when things become uncomfortable and the realization of the changes that are ahead become more real.  During the unsettling period we said lots of good-byes, sold off or gave away most of our worldly possessions, did many things for the last time before the big move, etc. After unsettling comes chaos-the stage when very few things feel settled, normal, or comfortable.  Then comes resettling-the time when a new normal is beginning to be established, friends are made, life has a little more order and sense to it.  And finally, we come back around to settled-a time with routine, a place where you are known and know others, a normalcy and things that are comfortable.

Right now I’d say we’re pretty much smack dab in the middle of chaos. Chaos is the point when life is just about survival mode, few things seem settled or normal.  It’s mentally, physically, emotionally, and spiritually draining.  It makes our brains fuzzy and our bodies worn.  We ask each other questions and literally cannot come up with answers.  We aren’t doing anything wrong nor is chaos a spiritual attack, it’s simply part of the process in a transition and one that can come up even years later for those of us who live overseas.  In some ways transition is never fully complete for us because so many variables exist in our lives.

We’ve been told that we came to the field under some of the highest stress conditions possible-two toddlers, expecting another baby, right before my birthday and the holiday season.  The only thing that would have made it more stressful is if we’d not had family and dear friends to walk us through our last days literally to the security line at the airport and if we’d not had lovely team mates who have done everything from feed us for a week when we first arrived to house hunting with us to making sure we got Christmas shopping for the boys and each other done.

Life for us at this point is very much day by day and very often hour by hour.  Some days are easier than others.  Some days we feel more confident about living here and figuring things out, other days we all go to bed just wishing we could go home.  The great thing is that it’s okay to feel anything and everything we’re feeling.  And everything we’re walking through, experiencing, feeling is typical and normal.  We’re very much over any honeymoon stage (though the aforementioned stressors made our honeymoon period fairly short).

We’ve had a few people ask us if we’re adjusted, the kids are adjusted, we’re feeling at home, etc. No, we’re not and it would be completely unreasonable for us to think that after less than three months that we would be.  I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again now-it will take us 12-18 months to adjust, which means we’re maybe a quarter of the way through the process.  We think that by the holiday season this year (yes, months away from now) we’ll probably be feeling fairly settled here. We’ll have our household well established, we’ll be involved with a church, we’ll have made friends, we’ll know where and how to get most things we use, and we’ll have found our new normal.  The added transition of a new baby thrown in the mix does not make the process any easier and could lengthen the entire process for us, though we also won’t know how to do it any other way and it might not make as much of a difference as I think it could.  It’s also possible that this being the only home Tadpole knows might help us feel a little more at home ourselves.  We’ll see when s/he arrives how that impacts our current state.

We knew going into this that we were signing up for a difficult life.  The thing about it is that I’ve not found anything in scripture that says following God and His plan for our lives is supposed to be easy-full of financial stability, good health,low stress, and happiness.  Look at the life Paul led.  If he had believed that following God and taking His love to the nations would result in life, love, and the pursuit of happiness then he would have been sorely disappointed with the way his life turned out.  He probably would have been a lot angrier with God about the whole shipwrecked, beaten, imprisoned thing had he believed that the path he was on would be an easy one because it’s the one God put  him on.

Transition is difficult. I’m not going to sugar coat our experience and make it seem like we’re tra, la, la-ing through it all, which I feel like maybe I have at times.  We have had times of happiness and fun while we’ve been here. We’ve seen God provide in some really amazing ways and I don’t want to discount that at all.  I keep feeling like because we are what we are that we should have all these huge “ah-ha” God moments.  We honestly haven’t. What we’ve had is this steady presence day in and day out and something happen at least once a day when we can say “That can only be explained by the hand of God” (i.e.-meerkats at the zoo we visited in a neighboring country-a bigger God moment than you can imagine).

We’re going to continue walking this walk, following this path.  One day it will get easier to live here, we’ll be more settled and more established.  We’ll miss things from home a little less-hopefully not the people, though.  We’ll keep doing “thank you God for…” with the boys at the end of the day to remember that God is always worthy of thanks and praise no matter our circumstances.  And we won’t try to rush the process of transition because of other people’s expectations or our own desire to feel less chaotic and out of sorts.  We’ll continue taking life a day at a time and as time goes this will feel more and more like home and things we do will feel more and more normal. Until then, we’ll give ourselves and each lots of grace and do the amazing work God has called us to.

In 13 days we will celebrate our first Christmas outside of the US.  We will not have any chance of snow nor will anyone else in probably a 1,500 mile radius.  We won’t have coordinating Christmas suits or matching jammies for the boys (nor would we want to inflict long pants/sleeves on them in this weather-Samuel asked for footie jammies the other day and we had to explain that they were unnecessary).  We can’t get peppermint flavored anything or a ham like we often have for Christmas dinner.  I haven’t been able to find some baking ingredients, so my tradition of making fudge for co-workers, friends, family, etc. and possibly making much of anything else just won’t be happening this year.  While ornaments are available along with trees and some other things, we haven’t been able to find the kind of ornaments we have purchased in the past as part of our family tradition.  When listening to “Silent Night” the other day I realized we won’t be going to our church in Murfreesboro for the candlelight Christmas Eve service and we haven’t seen a church here yet that does one.  I’ve gone to many candlelight Christmas Eve services in my life and will greatly miss this tradition.  We won’t be seeing our families on/around Christmas like we always have in years past with the exception of some time on Skype.  Many of our traditions are non-existent simply because of our location.

We do still have a tree and we brought some number of our ornaments with us to decorate. We still have Christmas music to listen to (though “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” gets skipped). And we have a kid-friendly nativity set to display.  Benjamin has been very concerned about whether Jesus needs a fresh diaper and Samuel asked if Mary had toes when examining her as we put it up.  No,  Jesus doesn’t need a diaper change and yes, Mary has toes.  So much of getting into the spirit of Christmas has to do with what’s around us that it’s honestly been harder to do it this year.  We haven’t found a church yet, so we’re not even connected to a local body of believers to share this time of the year with.  It’s hard and it’s weird.  It’s made us think/talk a lot more about what Christmas means. And it’s made me think about what it was like the night Christ was born.

Mary and Joseph were in a barn.  They had no comforts of home or even creature comforts of the day. Scripture doesn’t say if anyone else was at Jesus’ birth with them helping Mary through labor, delivery, and helping care for her and Jesus after He was born.  Even if there were people she didn’t know them.  They had no big meal, tasty treats, or fancy drinks.  They weren’t decked out in their finest clothes purchased just for the occasion.  They weren’t concerned with whether or not the twinkle lights were twinkling properly or the stockings stuffed just right.  They were probably mostly in survival mode-overwhelmed, exhausted, just trying to get from one moment to the next.

I can somewhat identify with that kind of Christmas-no family, very few people around who we know or are known by, some number of the creature comforts we’re used to gone, and being in survival mode-that’s more like our lives right now. And that’s okay.  The reason we live this life is so that people can know about Jesus-his birth, life, death, and resurrection-and they can celebrate Christmas with joy not because of presents and peppermint lattes, but because He came to save the world.

Ironically some number of stores here actually have “Merry Christmas” signs up (they also display signs for holidays from other belief systems-they just don’t coincide with Christmas here) and those who play Christmas music are playing mostly Christmas carols/hymns.  Some carolers were even singing at Ikea the other day when we were there.  All of this in a country where at most 10% of the population believes in Christ and His birth.  While it’s strange, it’s also amazing and my prayer this Christmas as I’ve been out and about is that God will embed the words of those songs in the hearts of those who don’t believe in Him and that He will use something that simple to turn hearts to Him.  We honestly miss many of the things we liked about this season as we celebrated and anticipated Christmas, but I can’t be upset about the opportunity to pray over very lost people in a dark place who desperately need the love of Christ.