At this time tomorrow, I’ll be reading through my ‘to do’ list one last time before heading off to the airport. We’re meeting our team members at PDX at 3 pm Pacific, for the beginning of the long journey to Terre Blanche, “our village” in northern Haiti.
By Friday evening we will have arrived in the village just before dark. The stars will be bright — much brighter than the North American city girl stars I am used to. The generator will be humming in the compound, bringing just enough electricity to fuel the stove for cooking our dinner, and the lights will stay on just long enough to help us unpack and settle in.
And then…it will be dark. Really dark. The generator will fall silent, and we’ll slather up with Sawyer’s time release formula mosquito repellent by the light of our headlamps and crawl into our sleep sacks in the dorm-style sleeping area.
Morning will come quickly, heralded by braying donkeys and crowing roosters, and our Haiti life will begin again – days filled with reunions with friends, the blessed dust that covers everything, instant oatmeal breakfasts, pill counting, and beautiful smiles.
Please pray for us — for hearts to serve.
I spent most of last week looking forward to a couple of weekend projects that most people would dread — namely, cleaning out the garage and organizing the office/studio space in the small bedroom upstairs. It must reveal some sort of neurosis that I got SO MUCH JOY out of the process of hauling junk and recyclables to the dump, doing a Goodwill run, buying hooks and pegs for organizing the yard tools on the garage wall, sweeping debris, vacuuming cobwebs, and generally creating some semblance of order. Sometimes I fantasize about what I would do with my days if I didn’t have to work…if I were a lady of leisure, so to speak.
The answer, among other things:
I would organize my recipes in a binder with various section dividers.
I would clip coupons and file them in an accordion file.
I would sort through our clothes and give away anything we don’t need.
I would create a better storage solution for our tools and hardware.
I would catch up on filing.
I would alphabetize my spice cupboard, and put the spices in matching jars.
I would finally, once and for all, determine how to keep our CD collection from looking like a dusty, disorganized pile.
In short – I would transform this house into an efficient, sanitized, organized, methodical, but of course quite lovely, environment. (If my dad is reading this: Thanks a lot for passing on your neurosis.)
Suffice it to say, I am not (at press time) a lady of leisure, and I don’t get to indulge in this obsessive compulsive dream life. But this weekend I made some good progress, and the result was that now we can not only store our lawnmower, wheelbarrow, gas grill, and various and sundry home and garden tools in the garage, but there is still room for parking the car, AND [drumroll, please...]
I now have a little workout space in the garage, which includes my new (to me) elliptical trainer, a TV/DVD unit which serves to distract me from the pain, and a carpeted area for stretching, ab work, and weight lifting. It still needs some finishing touches, but I love it and am happy to have a good workout alternative in this frigid, gray, dreary, blustery, (did I say depressing?) weather.
I’m thinking about marathons. Not the literal 26.2 mile foot race, but the kind of endurance challenges God asks us all to run in various aspects of our lives…the things that don’t change as fast as we wish they would, that require us to persevere for what feels like an excruciating length of time.
One of our close friends is enduring a very painful recovery from shoulder surgery, and it sounds like it’s going to be mid-summer before he’s as active and agile as he was pre-surgery. Six months is a long time to be patient with your own limitations, to be faithful about stretching and working toward healing, and to simply live through some agonizing pain.
He has been referring to the healing process as a marathon versus a sprint, and it’s gotten me thinking about the various other marathons that we’re running at present…
The Arteest is in the midst of illustrating his first book. He’s about one third done, and sometimes he feels like it will be forever before it’s finished. I have been in my job for three and a half years, and I often feel like the novelty has worn off and the challenges are ever increasing. Marriage is a marathon of its own, too. And of course, bigger than all the rest of it, the epic marathon of our lives is the process of trying to know God and follow Him, come what may.
Once upon a time when I was an aspiring cyclist, I trained for a century ride, which culminated in riding 100 miles one 103 degree day in the shadeless territory of central Oregon. A few months later, I rode up to the rim of Crater Lake, which was essentially riding up a hill that was 43 miles long. I remember what it felt like, about two thirds of the way there, looking down at my odometer and realizing I had only gone 0.1 miles since the last time I looked down, an eternity ago…it felt like the fight was never going to be over.
This week, I’m realizing that in its less glamorous moments life feels like that ride up Crater Lake. In the end, I hope I will be able to say I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, and I have remained faithful. (2 Tim 4:7)
