I feel a country song coming on…
“..I love this crazy tragic, sometimes almost magic, awful, beautiful life…” or something like that. That’s about how I’ve felt recently.
We’re coming up on our 6 monthaversary here in Vanuatu. Everything was cruising along fine until it wasn’t. Nothing catastrophic happened. Just some parenting issues … a few hard conversations … some stressing about things … five days of being sick and not knowing if it was the flu or malaria. Oh yeah, and I was sick on my birthday. Eventually it caught up with me and I had a few moments of looking for the nearest plane back to the States.
It wasn’t that February was a bad month. We celebrated Matt’s birthday, he helped set up for the VISTA training module, trained and took over some new finance responsibilities for the team. I had a Sunday School teacher meeting, a new friendship blossomed, and was able to assist in the Scripture Use portion of VISTA to equip the translators with some Sunday School materials over the passages they have just translated. I loved it!
Sometimes all the “beautiful” and “almost magic” parts of life don’t completely offset the disappointing, sad, or hard parts. And being sick in bed for 5 days is enough to make anyone cry – and I did.
Our oldest son, Ethan, came in and sat down on the bed. He turned on some Christian music and then left. In a few minutes, he returned, picked another song and left again. Apparently he was playing the part of my personal DJ! About 10 words into the second song, the tears started to flow and I just closed my eyes and worshiped. I really needed that. It was so good for me.
We are nowhere close to being ready to leave Vanuatu. I am so glad we’re here. But there are still hard days and weeks. So when I post smiling pictures and encouraging stories, just know that there were probably some hard moments not too far off. And when I post the hard stuff, please know that we are not wavering in our commitment to be here and there was probably some laughter right around the corner.
~ Angie
