November Marshall Musings

Here's something I've been working on in the last couple of days. This is a blog-version of our prayer letter. If you'd like the full two-page version that includes more family news, please let me know.

Baking—one of my loves

I've been thinking about baking recently. It's something I do regularly, as you probably know. I've shared quite a number of recipes here as well as wrote about my kitchen just the other week.

Cooking and baking is something I really enjoy. I find it is a soul-refreshing thing to do. I've always loved creating. My mum would tell you about the Childcraft Encyclopedias we had when I was young. The volume themed "Make and Do" was the most worn out. I was always pulling it out and making (or thinking about making) something. As I've gotten older I'm less likely to make things that are not of some practical use. I've had to move too many times and throw too many things out. Not to mention that I have less leisure time to fill these days.

However, baking is very practical and doesn't clutter up the house. And with teenage boys in my house, I have plenty of need to cook. However, what I do goes beyond what is needed. I love to make food that the guys love to eat. I enjoy planning meals that we will all delight in. It's so fun to tell them in the morning what that evening's meal is and having them exclaim positively (doesn't happen every day, mind you). I look forward to having time on the weekends to make snacks that will help keep them satisfied between meals in the week to come. 

I also love making food for others, when the need arises and I have time to do so. I even love helping others with their baking. In the summer I tried to help a friend learn to make a cake. Just recently I gave advice to another expat about the challenges of Japanese flour and biscuit/cookie baking.

I know that I'm starting to be settled after a move when I can begin baking again. I know that I've been too busy or too stressed if I haven't done much baking recently. It's like a litmus test.

There's been lots written about the benefits of baking for others. This article calls it a stress-reliever, a mindfulness activity, altruism, and meditative. Of course, if you don't enjoy it or never had the chance to develop some skill in baking/cooking, it isn't those things. For example, knitting and sewing are not stress-relieving for me. I can do the latter (simple stuff), but more often than not it's more stressful that I'm bargaining for. And don't get me started on knitting!

As I baked on Sunday, I was thinking about lots of things (as usual). Three rose to the surface:

• Baking is an act of creation, I'm made in the image of a Creator (See Genesis 1:26-27), so of course it is satisfying to create using well-honed skills. Much more satisfying that just going to the shop and buying a packet of biscuits.
• Baking always connects me back to my roots. My mum taught me to bake and quite a number of the biscuit/cake recipes I have are hers. I've also collected a number of recipes from other people over the years. So, on Sunday I made "Honey Biscuits" (also known as "Stamp Biscuits" by my boys, and pictured on the right), a recipe my mum made for me as a child, and used an old cotton reel that she gave me many years ago to make the patter on the top. I also made a newer recipe given to me by a missionary colleague. Making these recipes is an act in remembering those relationships.
• Baking gives me time and space to reflect (that is noted in the article above). It's a structured activity that I'm relatively competent at, so while it keeps my hands doing something practical, my head it often partly somewhere else, processing a conversation, or thinking about a verse I've read, or considering a plan for a future event.

It is very common in Japan to talk about your hobbies. For most of my like I have not considered baking a hobby (it's too practical, isn't it?), but I think that is worth revising.

Feeling a little off-kilter

While I didn't particularly stop and ponder long here,
on Thursday—knowing that my To Do list was a little
lighter than usual—I took a detour of a couple of hours
to visit this old garden in the middle of Tokyo.

Today I'm feeling the usual Monday blues: not keen to get started on work. But it's bigger than that. 

When I feel out of sorts, I try to think things through a little to figure out if there is a good reason (and often there is, though I know that people who struggle with mental illness don't necessarily have that privilege). So I'm writing here today, thinking about this.

I've discovered a few things that are contributing to this current season of feeling a bit low and unmotivated:

• These last 20 months have been quite frantic in many ways: 
• our eldest son moved to Australia, 
• we've done two international moves (which of course involved changing houses and schools and churches and pretty much everything else), 
• the craziness as we tried to achieve our goals for home assignment in just six months, 
• plus some personal crises in our family that I haven't been able to share publically.
• My work schedule is such that June to September is a bit crazier than usual, due to an effort to keep our magazine production away from the busy month of December, plus extra family demands during the 10 or so weeks of school holidays. 

Both these "adrenaline-inducing" periods are over and it's the "come down" emotion I'm experiencing when things aren't quite so urgent.

It was drizzling, so not inviting to sit (wet
surfaces everywhere), but lovely for wandering.

• I've been doing this magazine editing for nine years now, that's the longest I've worked in any job, so I wonder if it's just an itchy-feet thing? I'm not really looking for something different to do, but still, emotions don't necessarily follow logic (interestingly I wrote about a similar restless feeling about this job in Feb 2013!)
• My social media job I've now been doing for two years and it is by no means dull (neither is the magazine), but it is relentless and that can get tiring.
• And then there was the news we received on Thursday that David will spend 10 days in hospital in November to get a skin graft to replace the skin he lost to surgery in September. Thankfully no cancer was found in all that was taken, but it is a long stay in hospital that will mean, along with two work trips earlier in the month, he will be away about 50% of November. I don't cope well with him being away and I'm sure the anticipation of that is affecting me.

Then yesterday we had almost a whole day without any children at home. They both left before 8am to go to an international cross country competition on the other side of the city and stayed overnight there. It was delightful, but also just plain weird, to have the day to ourselves. We had a great day. But it's going to take some adjusting to move from the busyness of intense parenting over the last couple of decades to couplehood living again. Thankfully the change will not happen overnight!

So, I've probably got good reasons to feel a little off-kilter.

I was challenged and encouraged yesterday during church by this passage:

So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal (2 Cor. 4:16-18 ESV).

I've taken a bit of a look back this morning at some of the blog posts I've written in the last few years about the challenges of slowing down and not being totally consumed with the need to be needed or frantically busy. I found this one from March two years ago, it includes a quote from our Field Director, who passed away about six weeks after he wrote this. It talks about the importance of slowing down:

Many of us these days seem to live life simply moving from one thing to the next with little time in between to catch our breath, far less having time to reflect, meditate or even spend some unrushed time with God. And that can creep into family life, church life, corporate life, organisational life. . . But while we might desire to be ‘about the Lord’s work’ to use an older phrase, that does not seem to me to mean that we should simply be dashing around in a constant blur of activity.

Busyness can certainly help us avoid unpleasant emotions and rescue us from having to think too hard. But I don't think that's how God intends us to live. Live life with a passion and not slothfully, for sure, but not so busily that we can't keep our eyes fixed on him and lose any ability to hear what he's calling us to do. All that being said, I need to get better at living it.

But as for now: I need to get back to the less urgent (and potentially less exciting) bits and pieces of my job.

My kitchen

Inspired by a month of posts by expats about their kitchens by Taking Route Blog #thisglobalkitchen, I'm going to tell you about mine.

My kitchen is not glamorous, but it is functional and I love it. It's bigger than a usual Japanese kitchen, but nowhere near as large as a kitchen would be in the usual three-bedroom house in Australia.

Looking back to the dining room and my corner office from the kitchen sink.

When we first came to Japan, one of the biggest challenges at home was the kitchen. We were in a much smaller place (we were a smaller family then, just one boy less than two-years-old). What drove me crazy was no bench space (i.e. "counter"). It is pretty typical, we've discovered, for a Japanese kitchen to have little food preparation space. The only place we could prepare food in our first Japanese kitchen, was on the sink-drainage area. 

Thankfully this kitchen (and house) is much larger, though I'm not sure if I would have appreciated it as much if I hadn't had had to work in a much smaller space (that first kitchen shared a tiny room with the laundry and shower ante-room).

When visitors who know Japan come to visit, one of the first things they usually comment on is our kitchen. It has an unusual amount of storage room. These built-in floor-to-ceiling cupboards are unusual, what's more, a crafty previous resident has added tasteful internal curtains to these glass-doors. But there are other unusual elements that we've added.

This house has had numerous missionaries live in it previously. It is not owned by a Christian and was not purpose-built for foreigners. However, when we moved in the kitchen had a most unusual element: an ancient American gas oven/stove. It didn't fit, being far deeper than these cabinets were. In our small attic we found the original under-stove cabinet that was removed to put the oven in. A former missionary had brought an oven with them from the US!

I loved that dinosaur of an oven, even though we had to practically lie on the floor to light it. Its large four-burner top provided pseudo-bench space that was so valuable. Ovens are not usual in a Japanese kitchen. Most people use toaster ovens and microwave ovens with convection functions, which are obviously much smaller.

Alas, four years ago that oven started leaking gas. You can read about that drama here. The Japanese repairmen who came to look at it had never seen the likes of it! There was much sucking in of breath over the teeth (a clear sign in Japan that there is a major problem).

The end result of that drama was that we lost that old oven and bought this Japanese oven and three-burner stovetop to replace the dinosaur—that was not a cheap decision. We reasoned that we'd be living here for some years yet with our three growing boys (they were aged 10, 13, and 16 at that time). One of the things I love to do is cook and bake, I really struggled with the idea of going back to just two burners and only using my microwave/convection oven (even though it was the biggest you can buy here). 

This Japanese oven is the most spectacular oven I've ever used. It heats up quickly and cooks very reliably. I'm still holding out hope that when we move from here we can take the oven/stove with us to a new place, but know that that might not be a reasonable expectation as we'd like to move into a smaller place after all our boys move out.

We have underfloor storage. This is a cool thing about Japanese houses (not sure if they exist in apartments). A place to put food and stores under the floor is very cool.

Underfloor storage.

Oil, potatoes, and cereal in this side.

Breadmaker with rubbish "drawers" underneath.

Other elements of the kitchen that I love are the breadmaker (we make our own sliced bread), the chest freezer, and a large fridge with lots of compartmentalised drawers. All these make providing food for my family much easier.

You'll see under the breadmaker the plastic drawers that help us sort rubbish as we dispose of it. The top drawer is glass and tin, then "unburnable" (i.e. doesn't fit any other category), and the bottom is paper and cardboard. The rest is in the bin on the other side of the kitchen next to the stove: burnable (raw food, scraps, etc.) and recyclable plastics.

Look closely and you will see that the lino is torn in places. The mat in front of the sink helps to hide that. Also, there is a gas-outlet in the floor that we don't use, but it dangerous for foot traffic, so it's covered with a carpet tile! The wall tiles are an ugly green, and the trim on all the doors are hard to clean.

It's not a shiny, new kitchen with fancy appliances. It's not particularly space-efficient and it's challenging for two people to work in, but it works for us and I'm very thankful for God's provision. Not just of this kitchen, but this house. Next year it will be ten years since we moved in here. It's an old house that has it's flaws and quirks, but we've done the majority of our child-raising here and we're thankful for the stability and convenience it affords (it's close to school, church, shops, and the train station).

Japan is not an easy place to live and work as a missionary, but we have many things to be thankful for in terms of ease of living and stability of society. Indeed "The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places" (Ps 16:6 NIV).

Typhoon and wall-less school

It's coming to the end of another unusual week in our house and I'm feeling restless. I've had a couple of great topics for blog posts percolating in my mind, but no time to write about them. But I think what's making me restless are two other things.

Just for fun I added in some other photos from yesterday.
I went to a missionary-women's prayer and fellowship
day and we went for a stroll in the nearby bush. Ironically,
not so far from where our 11th grader was hiking.

1. We're waiting on a large tropical storm (called typhoon in this quarter of the world) to run over the top of us this weekend.
2. School has been unusual this week: it's an annual event called School Without Walls (nickname—SWOW) and has meant only two of us have been home these last couple of nights.

Typhoon
This has meant things cancelled: so we get another sleep in tomorrow, instead of cross country! But also, thinking about stocking up on supplies. Plenty of my Japan-based friends are posting about empty supermarket shelves. I'm thankful I was able to get to the supermarket early this morning and had no trouble getting what I wanted.

I did some preparation: I put my couple of outdoor pot plants in more secure spots, put our washing poles (what we have instead of lines and only rest in slots, so therefore potential projectiles) down on the balcony, and filled the bath with water in case we lose electricity. We will also pull our gutter ramp into the carport. It also just sits freely in the gutter to aid driving in and out, so in the event of us getting the 600mm of heavy rain that is forecast over the weekend, it will probably float away and cause a traffic hazard.

Aside from that there isn't much to do except wait. And pray that the winds weaken before it gets here, so that little damage is caused.

A bit over a third of the ladies at the meeting.

Beauty!

SWOW
All high school classes were cancelled for the week and they focused on other things. Our ninth-grader has been doing various group activities designed to get the kids to think about leadership and group dynamics. My husband went with the 10th graders (aka sophomores!) to a science museum on Tuesday and then on Wednesday for a two-night "camp" at Lake Yamanaka (where I went to my retreat in May). 

Our 11th grader (aka junior) went hiking in the wilderness west of Tokyo on Tuesday. It's a big event where they carry all their equipment and food with them and trek. The yr 12s or seniors, flew to Nagasaki (not totally sure what they were doing, but I think it's more to do with Japanese culture and history than leadership).

Again for fun: this is the comfortable outfit I wore. I was
blown away by how many compliments I received!

Well, anyway. It's been a strange week. Tension as our 11th grader prepared to go on Monday and then wondering how he's going. Then since David left, I think I've seen more of our youngest son's friends in one week than I ever have. They've dropped in several times in the last couple of days! I'm sure it's got nothing to do with the chocolate chips biscuits I made on Sunday! It's certainly been an unusual, but enjoyable experience for me to see my son enjoying hanging with his friends here. Especially to see them so comfortable in our house.

I started this post not long before I got a text from our middle son asking me to pick him up from school in the car (a rare request as we live so close). It was drizzly and he had all his gear in a large plastic bag, which was awkward to carry. I ended up arriving there minutes before my husband drove the school bus in with a bunch of 10th graders and I took his small suitcase home too (he walked home a bit later).

So everyone is home now. There's been lots of chatter about the week. The sorts of things mothers of (most) sons don't often hear. I used to hop in my mum's car every day and chat her ear off about what had happened that day. That really doesn't happen much here. First I don't pick up the boys, but they really don't tell me a lot about their days, and I doubt that would happen even if I picked them up in a car. I'm glad that my schedule was flexible enough that I could be around this afternoon, even if it has meant that my work has suffered. The good thing is that with cross country cancelled, and the likelihood of a long and wet weekend with nowhere to go, there'll be time to catch up on a bit of work later (if the electricity remains on).

The upshot of it: it seems like it was a good week for all. I'm relieved, especially when I consider how one of my boys was not coping so well with life this time last year and yet he's had a great week and done well. That is great cause for thanksgiving.

Most people have no idea what I do

Yesterday I worked with the admin staff of the organisation that publishes
the magazine.  We packed the autumn issue of Japan Harvest for mailing.
These ladies also help with advertising, translation, and fact checking
from Japanese sources. While I was there an OMF colleague dropped in
for a while and I also spent time on the phone with another colleague. I always
enjoy volunteering in this way. Though it isn't what a managing editor usually
does, it is a good opportunity to connect with some of my team, but also to
network. I almost always am introduced to someone I haven't met or meet
someone when I'm doing this. The office is in a Christian office building in
downtown Tokyo. Yes! There is such a thing. How that came to be is another
story in itself, but it is a great place to network with others.

"People, in general, don't understand what editors do." I've found this to be true in my time as an editor. It isn't until I've worked with a writer through the process of getting something they've written published, that they have a better idea.

I seem to have ended up in a succession of careers that aren't easy to explain: Occupational Therapist, missionary, and now missionary and editor! None of these work very well in polite conversation with a hairdresser. Finding an "elevator speech" for any of them is challenging.

So when I found this short video by a newspaper editor that succinctly described what we do, I was thrilled.

Here is his summary of various species of editors:

Developmental editor: works closely with the writer in early stages, working with the writer on the idea, focus, scope, organisation, writing, and revising.
Line editor: focuses on the macro editing of a completed text, though focus, structure, tone, organisation, legal and ethical issues often come into it.
Copy editor: takes a micro approach looking at factual accuracy, grammar, spelling, usage, and house style.
Proofreader: takes a text ready for publication and checks it for typographical errors, spelling errors, garble, and similar infelicities. They don't edit the text.

These can blur into one another, especially in a small organisation. I do all of these, though I have a team to help me and I try to keep my hands off the micro stuff if I'm dealing with a piece that needs work at a developmental stage. There's no point in correcting spelling or capitalisation if that word is not going to be used in the end.

He said that editors overall try to establish: what is appropriate for the writer, the subject, the occasion, the publications, and the reader. And they all work to keep the writer from looking bad in public.

Though I do all of these, I find it hard to jump between one and another. I find it hard to do developmental work with one piece of writing and then jump straight into copy editing another. I'm glad that one cycle of our magazine lasts about two to three months, so I can take the time to put different hats on as I go. I also have difficulty jumping into an editing conversation without having had some mental preparation for that (so an unexpected phone call or encounter with an author wanting to talk about a piece of writing is hard).

On top of the above "species" of editors, I'm a managing editor, so I oversee other editors as well as the rest of the members of my team. Plenty of variety, which is just as I like it most of the time.

Because I don't fill out timesheets and aren't paid by the hour I sometimes wonder if I am full-time employed. But I've pretty much come to the conclusion that I am. It's hard to measure how much you do when you're a full-time missionary. All sorts of things are part of ministry: building and maintaining relationships, language learning, dealing with bureaucratic requirements (like visas), and supervising/being supervised. 

But many of these things happen in "regular" jobs too. How much time did I spend at team meetings, doing statistics for the number crunchers, or answering email when I was working in health care? Even just driving to and from home visits or between workplaces on a workday, these were counted as work in the full-time jobs I've had.

The big difference is that my personal life is now much more mixed into my work as I work from home. But that's what I grew up seeing my parents do as they ran a business from home.

Not having an easy measuring stick around your work can make it hard to know when to say yes and when to say no. Being a relatively reliable person who's been around a while now, I often get asked to do things, to attend meetings, help run things, meet with people etc. But I'm finding that I'm in a season of having to say no. I'm close to my limit in what I can do and stay healthy, so I have to pick and choose carefully.

But...now I'm rambling and probably should get back to one of those non-editing jobs I have: writing our prayer letter.