Stories, pictures and prayers from Indonesia
One of Food for the Hungry’s tag lines is “We go to the hard places.” When Ryan and I were applying to serve overseas with FH 3 years ago (which seems like a bazillion years ago) I liked the sound of...
Being away from home for the holidays stinks. I know not everyone would unilaterally agree with this assertion, some people aren’t very sentimental about the holidays and/or aren’t big fans of their homes. However, I am quite sentimental about the holidays. A few weeks ago, we were trying to “create Christmas” in our tropical home by listening to a playlist we made of Christmas music, lighting candles that smelled like museum gift shops with the Mac fireplace app flickering in the background. I was trying very hard...
Junior year of college I studied abroad in Thailand. Before leaving for the program, we were often told to “have no expectations.” This was an easy enough ideological nugget to digest, and I felt comfortable with my ability to “have no expectations.” I mean, I had studied abroad in Africa just a year earlier, I knew how unpredictable traveling and living overseas could be. I was practically a “no expectations” expert.WIthin days of arriving in Thailand and finding out that my dream internship-the main reason I had...
Obviously, a lot in my life has changed recently. I am living on a tropical island (that sentence sounds MUCH more exotic than it really is), in a crowded, hot, dirty city, I don’t (currently) speak the language, I can’t (currently) drive, I don’t know the culture, I have a new job, a new house and having nothing to do with our move...a brand new diet.It might sound silly, but as far as transition and adjustment goes (and there has been a lot to adjust to! See above.) food has been the biggest deal. Learning to eat...
Having been in Indonesia for 2 weeks now, my grasp of Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian language) is virtually non-existent. I have some basic words down of course; left and right, yes and no, water, bathroom, spicy- the essentials. But one word I have perhaps the best grasp of is ‘belum’. Belum (rhymes with ‘balloon’) means ‘not yet’. Its also an ambiuguous ‘not yet’; it could be minutes or days until ‘yet’ happens. In the past 48 hours I have heard “belum” more times than I want to remember. We attempted to move into...
It seems like whenever I speak out a sentiment such as “ A person couldn’t handle any more transition!” like clockwork more change comes reeling at us. As such, I’m really going to try to stop making hyperbolic statements about change and transition. I don’t know if I ever ran a gamut of emotions more than I did last Tuesday. Tuesday morning: within 3 hours of from waking up we went from 97% of our support to 101.6% of our support. It was AMAZING!! We were jumping around and yelling and singing. We then launched...
I don’t like to put too much of my life out on social media. We all have people we know (who knows- maybe this could be you) who are letting us into just waaay too much of their lives via Facebook and Twitter. Women tweeting during labor, people updating you on what they had for lunch every single day, people airing their familial issues, its all just too much for me. Sure, I love to share my life and to be part of others lives (obviously...see:this blog) but I have lines. One of my lines of personal privacy is medical...
Today I sold my car. You would think, wouldn’t you, that I wouldn’t be so depressed since I have at times mocked and complained at length about my vehicle. Yes, it couldn’t drive much faster than 50mph...
Carolyn and I have been having a often repeated conversation about how I should be contributing to ‘our’ blog. Up until this point, she has been the only author of our blog posts (with my stamp of approval). But, partly to end the ‘conversation’, and partly because I have something to say, I am writing this blog update :) God gave each of us a verse last week that is taking on new meaning to us. 1 Peter 5:6-7 “Humble yourselves, therefore under God’s mighty hand that He may lift you up in due time. Cast all your...
These two crazy kids fell in love in Africa. They wanted to put love into action all over the world. So, they got married, grabbed their passports and got to work. Currently you can find them in Indonesia!
Their back up plan is to write a sitcom based on their lives.
People having been asking for it. Really.
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