Monday, February 6, 2017

Blessed to be a Blessing

Getting in some shoveling in before we leave
PRAYER UPDATE (Feb 9th): We’re supposed to be leaving for Africa but we're in the middle of a huge snowstorm!?! We’ve had to reschedule all our flights. We now leave on the afternoon of Feb 11th and arrive in Kenya on Feb 12th.  Please keep praying!

Last Sunday we told a large group of friends gathered around us that the next time they would probably see us would be in 2020—three years.  It’s possible we might make it back before then for a vacation, family reunion, or wedding, but those would be short visits.   No extended visits, not enough time to see and update all the people who care about us, not for another 3 years.  That’s just how it usually works in our line of work.

People often ask us.  “What do you think of as home?”  or “do you prefer island life or American life?”  Sometimes it feels like the “right” answer should be that we prefer island life since that is where we are meant to be.  But our honest answer is, “Both.”  When we’re on the islands we love the islands and feel fulfilled, inspired, happy and—truth be told—a little out of place, but in a good way. When we’re in America we feel happy, inspired, loved and also a little out of place.  This too, we think is in a good way.  We have become travelers, ambassadors, traders.  We live in two worlds.

There’s a wise word that was said to an old traveling man long ago, “You are blessed to be a blessing.”  We have found this to be abundantly true in our own lives. The people we’ve met, the friends we’ve shared time with have blessed us deeply.  At the same time, we’ve felt the immense satisfaction of blessing others with some of the things we have experienced and learned from our time on the islands.  We share things we’ve learned, which sparks an idea for someone so they respond to us with challenging questions, or integrate our thoughts with something they’ve been reading. Just yesterday someone gave us a book that had inspired them and thought we might in turn be inspired by it and so we were blessed again.  It’s been a wonderful cycle of exchange,  blessings while being blessed during our time in the States. But now we must go and return to our other home.

So we go.  And we take the blessings we have received and we bring them to the islands.  And there, in a different and yet equally fulfilling way we are “blessed to be a blessing.”  Again we feel so loved and blessed by the friends and neighbors who will greet us with big smiles and all sorts of island celebration.  They will bless us with gifts of food and time and sharing their lives.  We will be inspired to think and see the world in new ways.  And at the same time, we are given the opportunity to bless our island friends with a different view of the world, different ways of understanding, to help them in times of need and want, and to give them a new sense of hope and purpose.  And so we go with the prayers and blessings of one place and we carry them to another place.  There we give these blessings out and receive them in kind only to carry them back again at some future date.  Back and forth we go on our trade, like the spice traders of old, and like them we discover great wealth as we bring two cultures together trading and sharing and gaining from each transaction—only we do not gain in gold, but something far more precious.

Make Way for Ducklings & our kids
PRAYERS ANSWERED
This is our last blog from the States, next week we’ll be back in Africa. We are thankful for so many good months here in the States, for all the people who have blessed us time and again with their prayers, love, listening ears and generosity.  We are thankful for the American experiences we’ve been able to  have as a family over the past months from Disneyland to fall colors to Make Way For Ducklings in Boston.  We are thankful for how well our kids have done through it all with travel, homeschool and lots and lots of people.  We are grateful for the way our stories and reflections from the islands have been well received and blessed people.

PRAYERS REQUESTED
Our next blog will be from Africa, and in between we will have to pack, get up in the middle of the night and catch three planes to make it to our first destination of Kenya.  Pray for all the difficulties that go along with that, for patience and kindness with one another when we’re all tired out from long travels.  Our minds are both here and there, pray for focus and finding our way in this time of transition.  We would also ask you to pray for a family who are friends of ours.  The wife and mother has recently had surgery to remove a brain tumor and there have been complications.  The road to recovery will be long.  Please lift up her, her husband, and their two young children as they struggle through this hard time.

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