Sudden Grief

I was in the front seat of the taxibus entering a big town, an hour from home and halfway to my final destination. Suddenly a pickup overflowing with people pulled up honking right in front of us, forcing us to stop. All cars on the street stopped too and we were boxed in, so all we could do was sit there and see whatever was going to unfold.

Island funeral procession

Men started hopping out of the truck and then a sudden wail rose above the clamor of men. Some men went up to the house directly at our right and said something, soon another woman joined the wailing. Shaking her head back and forth, crying out the name for God in Arabic again and again and looking like her legs might give out from under her. That’s when we saw the men start to lift out what could only be a body, draped with shawls, from the back of the truck.  Another woman, her face contorted in shock and sadness, ran urgently toward the house next door, no doubt to share the horrible news that their loved one was dead.

As our taxibus pulled around the chaos and left, all I could do was lift up my prayers for this family amidst this horrible shock. I wondered to myself why might God have had me see this disturbing tableau? I wasn’t able to speak words of comfort to anyone. No one in the taxibus was impacted, they merely speculated about what had happened. Why had I been given this glimpse into the devastating nature of sudden grief?

Students singing national anthem

A couple days later this same week, we got a message that one of our teammates had lost a loved one in a car accident. I was the one who sat our teammate down and broke the news to her.  After walking with her through that evening, I wondered if perhaps God had been preparing my heart, preparing me to weep with those who weep by reminding me earlier in the week how devastating sudden grief can be.

Yesterday we got news that one of the small inter island airplanes was missing, having been forced to turn around in stormy conditions. As the afternoon turned to evening, the search boats started finding debris and floating luggage but no survivors. As the news came in, I couldn’t help but play out in my mind how all those family members would be hearing the news. How the shock and grief would hit them, catching them completely unawares.

We must lament! Lament is different from despair. It does not say that there is no hope and that everything is lost, but it doesn’t shy away from expressing the pain, shock, loss and hurt. Lament is the right response, but to lament I have to let things touch me, I have to open my heart enough to let them impact me.

It is easy to become desensitized to all the news stories of death and loss. It is easy to forget that with every death there is a group of family and friends, whose hearts are wailing in pain and grief. This week helped knock off some of the calloused shell on my heart. It has helped me to remember the pain going on in this world of loss, renewing my empathy and breaking my heart for the brokenhearted. May we lament all the hard things going on in the world!

Our big kids!

PRAYERS ANSWERED
Our island brothers and sisters made it safely to mainland Africa— we continue to pray that they would come back safely from these meetings this week encouraged and ready to share. On the big island one of our colleagues met a family of ladies with openness to studying and learning— this is very encouraging (especially for the big island)- pray that the openness leads to change and growth in that family. Our landlord looked through our house and has agreed to renew our rental contract for another year (not sure that it was ever a question, but we don’t want to take it for granted and not be thankful). Our medical teammates got their annual visas renewed and our colleagues on the big island may have found an easier path for getting their visas in the future (on the big island, they have had a much harder time getting visas than here).

PRAYERS REQUESTED
Pray for the islands and for all the families that are grieving. Pray for the dive teams working to recover the bodies from the sunken wreckage. Pray for our grieving teammate— she will be able to live-stream the funeral service on Tuesday. Pray that our God of comfort and peace would be with everyone. Pray for our teammate as she grieves while also attempting to make good inroad and habits in language learning and relationship building (this is still only her first month on the islands). A short-termer on the French Island has been robbed for the second time— pray for her as she processes these traumas and for the situation on the French Island which continues to be plagued by crime and unrest. This coming week we are having some face-to-face meetings linked with the year-long leadership training program that many of us island workers are doing. Unfortunately our main facilitator can’t make it and will have to facilitate via Zoom, also the plane crash creates extra nervousness to the idea of flying between islands. Pray for all those flying in, for calm hearts. Pray for a good time together and that the needed technology and internet connections would work for us to be able to be encouraged and equipped through the training. We are going to have several meetings this week looking at the future of work on the islands- pray for clarity and unity of vision for the coming years. There is a women’s gathering this week— pray that many would make space in their busy schedules to attend. Please also pray for our good friend and house helper who is 9 months pregnant that she would have a safe and healthy delivery! Pray also for our hearts and priorities to be in the right place as we begin Lent this week.

Discouragement and Hope

I was sitting down at an English ceremony when a thought hit me like a smack in the face. 

At an English Ceremony

Things were getting going and they were starting the ceremony as they always do with a word of prayer and a recitation from their holy book.  As I looked around at all the young faces holding their hands out in the customary form of prayer with blank looks on their faces and repeating “Amen” and “Amen” with every phrase in Arabic that they hardly understood, I thought of how this young generation of English students was already joining in a culture of bland religiosity and shallow faith.  I thought about how little seems to change, how dead and empty their eyes all seemed in that moment.  How I have lived here for nine years and have seen only small glimmers of change against the mostly unchanging whole, and I felt the despair wash over me—a feeling of futility and waste—“They will never change. It’s all a big waste of time. It looked like this 40 years ago and it will look like this a hundred years from now.”  Every so often I feel this way.  A passing shadow of gloom, when the lights of hope are shaded from my eyes.

Sunlight peeking through the clouds

The funny thing is, in a similar way, I have passing moments of great hope.  About a month ago I went to pay my respects to a friend whose grandfather had passed away.  This is a friend I’ve been studying with and whom I feel I’ve gotten to know pretty well. Still his heart and mind are no more in harmony with mine than the thousands of others who live here. I wanted to show him that I care for him and so went to the event.  It is not my habit to enter their house of worship, so I felt rather uncomfortable when I was ushered into the very center of the room for this memorial event.  At first I felt extremely uncomfortable, surrounded by men chanting in a language I didn’t understand in a place that I didn’t want to be.  And then suddenly, like dawn light peeping over the horizon, it struck me as wonderful.  Here I was, shining my light at the center of one of their most important cultural spots.  And I began to imagine all the men around me transformed—their eyes full of light, hope and peace.  Prayers offered in thanksgiving and praise.  Lives and families transformed and the very neighborhood changed into something new and wonderful.  I left the memorial service smiling.

Hope and despair.  Dark and light.  Status quo and radical change.  They all live here in this place and inside my heart.  I know just how hard it can be to see change.  We are creatures of habit and our minds are not easily changed.  But I also know that a mountain that has been dormant for hundreds of years can, in the blink of an eye, become an erupting volcano transforming a landscape and changing the horizon.  And scientists tell us that what looked dormant to us was actually building to something explosive.  Like the pebble that starts the avalanche, the spark that starts the fire, the straw that breaks that poor camel’s back.  Sometimes, change has been coming for a long time.  Can we be patient enough to wait for it?

Tom and our son on a hike

When the gloom comes, sometimes it is hard to shake it off.  I am comforted by the fact that I am not the first to feel that way.  King David’s words come to mind, “How long, oh Lord. How long?”  I’m also reminded of the changed lives that we have seen here. It may not be many compared to all the people on the islands, but change is possible.  It may not have come yet.  It may be I will not see it.  It may be that the bright day will be seen by others.  But I hold onto one thing.  It will come.  The day will come.  And so I have hope.

PRAYERS ANSWERED
The two sick toddlers on the small island are doing much better. The taxi strike ended, though it is unclear whether things were resolved in such a way as to prevent future strikes. Our medical colleague came from the French Island and had good meetings both here and on the big island. We are hopeful that these kinds of trips will lead to improvements in healthcare on the islands. It was also great to have our friend with us for a few days! He was also able to put in a good word for our medical teammates with some top health officials (they are still waiting for approval to start medical work). Our family and teammates were all granted our new year-long visas— we are very thankful that for English teachers on this island it has continued to be an easy process. Five new islanders were dunked last weekend — may they display new and changed lives to all those around them. Our new teammate finished her weeklong stay with an island family— she is well and the family were sad to see her go.

PRAYERS REQUESTED
Pray for our new teammate as she settles into her home and neighborhood and starts her new routines of language learning and building relationships. Continue to pray for our teammate suffering from long COVID that she’d see a marked improvement in her achiness, breathlessness and brain fog. Megan is hoping to finish the new edition of the grammar book in the next couple months— pray that she can find the time for the remaining edits, proofreads and formatting. The team is working on a collection of simple books in the local language. Once finished they would be used to promote local literacy— pray that this project would be a blessing and for wisdom in how to proceed. Some island brothers and sisters are traveling to mainland Africa for some meetings— pray that they would return encouraged and ready to share with others what they learned.

Digging Up The Old Road

We woke up this morning to loud sounds on the road and were surprised to find that the road right in front of our house was being ripped up! I had just been noticing a couple days before that this past week’s rains were washing out a section of road, but I didn’t expect to see such quick action to repair it!

Digging up road by our house

 

Lots of island roads are not in great shape. Weather and wear lead to potholes and eroded edges. Nice roads stay nice for a year or two, but they will eventually become a bad road again. People will try to stop or slow the deterioration or at least ease travel by doing patch jobs, by filling in holes with rocks, dirt or maybe cement. But these are very temporary fixes because if you really want a nice road again, if you want to get things moving then you need to tear it all up and start again.

Some of the books we have been reading lately have been reminding and challenging us that a good leader needs to recognize when it is time for things to stop. They need to be able to see when it is time for one chapter to end and another to begin.

Stopping something can be hard, especially when what you have is still functional. It works. It’s familiar. You can admit that over time it might no longer be the best, and by now there might be a better way, but the work of getting rid of the functional and starting afresh is daunting. We are tempted to make do for a little bit longer. To pull us into the road analogy, do we tear up the road while it is still functional or do we wait until it gets really bad? Do we wait for accidents, for movement to stall and for people to be going nowhere before we initiate the rebuild?

Celebrating 1wk & 1yr on island!

As we look over our time as leaders and we can see times when we continued to hobble along with a certain way of doing things, or with a certain role, or with a certain colleague, when we should have been bringing things to an end and starting a new chapter. Those times stand out partially because when the end did eventually come, it came with a sense of relief and the thought: ’We should have changed that earlier!’

The winds of change are blowing for us this year. Our oldest will be starting high school in mainland Africa. Our older son will finish at local island school and will only do homeschool. And we are going to step into a new leadership position over not just our team, but all the islands’ teams. We know that we won’t be able to continue as we have before both as parents and team leaders. We’ve started to reflect and think about what needs to end for these new things to begin.  We’ve looked at our old ways of doing things and our current teammates and have been struck.  Our teammates are wonderfully capable women and leaders in their own right!

This past week we oriented our new teammate. Orientation can be an intense week with lots of sessions and training, but compared to other orientation weeks, this time we did very little. Our teammates were the ones organizing, facilitating and leading many of the things that we might have done in the past. Why didn’t we hand off more of this before!? Honestly, I’m not sure if we were ready before, but we are now.  

We continue to survey for “bad roads”, for those ways of doing things that don’t make as much sense moving forward. We’ve dug up some of the old but there is probably more that we need to let go of and say goodbye to. There are parts that will be hard, but overall, we are excited for the new roads to be built. We’re excited to see our teammates move into new roles. We’re excited to see the work on the islands grow. We’re excited for all the new things God has in store!

Our kids getting big!

PRAYERS ANSWERED
Tom tested negative for COVID on Monday, got a plane to the big island on Tuesday and a plane to Clove Island on Wednesday! He was able to be here for the second half of our new teammate’s orientation. She seems to be doing well. The orientation went smoothly and our new teammate has begun her homestay with an island family— the family is really excited to have her! Pray that the week would be fun and educational and that the beginning of those relationships would start strong. The consultant meetings for the small island translation project went well. Continue to pray for the projects progressing on all three islands.

PRAYERS REQUESTED
Two toddlers of our colleagues on the small island have fallen sick, one with measles, the other with chicken pox! It was a rough week for them, but hopefully the worst is over. Pray for fast and full recoveries and that no more children would get sick! There has been lots of inflation on the islands and this past week a big taxi/taxi-bus strike shut down most commerce. Pray for the island economy and for a stop to the inflation where even small increases can have a big impact on poor families. Pray for our friend and colleague on the French Island who will be visiting this week as part of an official medical delegation— pray for a good visit and for positive improvements in healthcare. Pray also that his visit could help get work approval for our medical team moving— as he will have visits with some of the top health officials on whose approval we have been waiting. We will be applying for the annual renewal of our visas this week for our family and several teammates— pray that we would get the needed letter to process our visas easily.

Stuck

It has been a strange week. 

View of French Island capital

Last time we wrote we were telling you about our visit to the French island and the differences of life there.  We also mentioned that we ended up staying an extra week because of residual COVID in our bodies resulting in positive PCR tests.  The thought was that surely by the next week we would be negative—and so we were—most of us.  Everyone except me, Tom.  So in a funny and strange turn of events, Megan and the children left the French island on Friday and returned to Clove Island, while I linger here, waiting for a negative PCR test.  

The irony of this situation is not lost on us. First, so many Clove Islanders are sneaking onto the French Island illegally only to be caught and deported back, while here I am trying to get back to Clove Island and being stopped. Then there is the fact that I am not symptomatic or contagious.  The tests show that the levels of COVID in my system are quite low.  When I take a rapid test, it is negative.  In fact, if I wanted  to travel to Paris, I could do so, with just the results of a rapid test.  But Clove Island demands a negative PCR test.  Nothing else will do.  This is made slightly more ridiculous because life on Clove Island continues as if there is no COVID (most people don’t wear masks anymore and social distancing has been forgotten) yet, to get back into the country, I have to be negative.  I have taken the test 4 times now and it stubbornly remains positive…I find myself asking, “Why God???”

One island friend wrote to me saying “It is God’s will.”  Islanders say this for everything.  It’s important that you understand what he means by it.  Behind his, “It is God’s will” you might really hear him saying, “And nobody can do anything about it because God does what He wants without any thought to you.”

Kids last day on French Island

I wrote back to my friend.  I told him “Yes!  It is God’s will.  And God is always good and His plan is the best.”  Where my friend believes God does what He wants with no regard to us, I believe God does what He wants with every regard to us!

So, I too believe it is God’s will, and so, though it is disappointing to be away from family, frustrating to be retested again and again, sad that I am not there to welcome our newest teammate who arrived and started orientation today, I do trust that there is a good reason for all of this.  I can’t say I know why.  I can’t say I will ever know why.  It does mean I get to spend more time with my brothers and sisters here.  It does mean I get to think and pray about the situation here more than I might have.  It may result in me learning new things about myself, my team, my friends, my Lord.  Whatever the reason I trust that it is a good one.  And that’s the big difference between my island friend’s understanding of God’s will and my understanding.

Sleeping thru waves on boat

There is another part to this too.  This morning I had the privilege to join a study group with 4 other island brothers who live on the French island.  We were talking about prayer.   You see, my island friend who wrote, “Is it God’s will” probably thinks, “You can pray and ask God for things, but He does what He wants, and you probably won’t get anything unless you are really good and holy.”  But we were discussing this morning how God is like a parent.  You can go to your Mom or Dad and ask for stuff and they love to give it to you.  We can ask Him for things and expect Him to give us what’s best.  So if a son asks his dad for an apple, he’ll probably give it to him, but maybe not if it’s right before dinner.  Here I am asking Dad for a negative COVID test.  I believe it’s worth asking for.  I believe He would love to give me a negative COVID test, but it hasn’t been the right time.  It’s God’s will.  I can trust Him.  Another big difference between my island friend’s understanding and my own. I know He loves me and wants the best for me.  He’s shown me that many times before.

PRAYERS ANSWERED


4 out of 5 of us were able to travel back to Clove Island this past Friday!  The boat trip was a bit rough with big waves, but everybody made it okay and all our bags too.  This also meant that Megan was there to receive our newest teammate to our house today.  She’ll stay with us for a week of orientation, then do a week living with an island family and then settle into her own home.  We are thankful that she arrived safely, bags too, that orientation has gone ahead and Tom was even able to participate via video chat.  Tom is also thankful for the conversations and other things he has been able to do during his unintended stay on the French island. Our future teammates just gave birth to a son in France— we are thankful for this new child and for the ultrasound today that showed that cysts that had been on his kidneys in-utero are no longer there!


PRAYERS REQUESTED
Pray for Tom to get a negative result so that he can travel and be back with Megan and the kids.  Pray for Megan and the kids, as they have one less set of hands to help out around the house with guests, dishes, homeschool, etc. Pray for all the things our new team member will be doing that we mentioned above—orientation, home stay, language learning, new home, adjusting to a new climate, etc.  It’s a lot to take in.  May she have courage, stamina and humility as she enters into this new culture.  Please continue to pray for the French Island and its complicated connection to Clove Island and all the people who go back and forth between these islands.  Our medical team still waits to be granted permission to begin medical work in their village!  May they find favor and permission soon! The smallest island’s translation project is having meetings with an outside consultant on the big island this week, pray that those meetings would go well with clear communication and consensus on translation decisions.