Feeling very ordinary

I don’t like being in a season where margin is almost non-existent. I try not to go there, but sometimes it’s unavoidable. Thankfully I have daily and weekly routines that help sustain me through them, but it’s not a healthy place to be. 

It feels like that for weeks I’ve been dwelling in the land of the urgent: dealing with what’s most urgent each day. And important things have had to wait until they are urgent before they are dealt with. As I look at the weeks ahead, I hope that that crazy season is coming to an end for now and that I’ll be able to take a few more breaths between the urgent tasks.

Last Friday I was able to combine a household responsibility with being a friend and being heard by a friend. I drove, with a friend, to Costco (about 45 minutes from here). Lots of time to talk in the car and over lunch, punctuated in the middle with the practical task of acquiring items for each of our households. This is something we do every 2–3 months. Noting that we don’t talk while we shop! I need my wits about me at Costco, and shopping is one thing I struggle to multitask on.

On Saturday the most urgent thing seemed to be to rest, but there were a few “household” things to do also. As an adult, and a mum, and a wife, many responsibilities don’t simply fall away when you are tired. But I managed to have a pretty restful day, nonetheless

Ironically, one of the urgent things I’ve been plugging away at these last few weeks is the working on latest issue of Japan Harvest magazine. The theme of the issue is “rest”! I’ve got a pretty cool job, in that to do it involves learning and thinking about life in ways that are often quite personal. This magazine issue has been both helpful and confronting, as I've read about other people’s journeys and thoughts on the theme of rest. When you work on a magazine you work first on the bits, but then gradually the bits come together to form a whole and it can be a surprise to see the final result. I’m looking forward to seeing what it looks like as a whole. 

Now I’ve committed something of a writing crime here—I started this blog post, not knowing where it was going or what I really wanted to say. What’s my purpose in writing this? My goal to writing one blog post a week propels me onwards (and I missed last week), but my overarching goal for this whole blog, what I’ve been doing for nearly 13 years now, is writing about my “ordinary” life. Trying to give you, my readers, a glimpse into what the life of this person, who’s called to be a missionary, is like. Too often people called missionaries are put up on pedestals and believed to be something beyond ordinary. I feel pretty ordinary at the moment. I’m tired. I’ve got some very ordinary responsibilities weighing on my shoulders, as well as a few more unusual ones. True, my life as a missionary means I face some less-than-ordinary things, but I face them as an ordinary human.

My ordinary life last week included being a single mum. David was away in Kyoto helping with the accreditation assessment of a school there. We were not able to talk while he was away as his schedule was so full. …. So my lot has been all my own jobs, plus his, plus a busy week of work, plus looking after my boys (who are older and easier in many ways than when they were younger, although emotionally I think harder). Thankfully David got back on Thursday evening, and we both fell into bed exhausted.

This week has been a lot slower paced. School had its long-weekend, so called "winter break", which meant a five-day weekend for students and less for teachers (David got about three days off). Because I was still tired, I also worked minimally on Monday and Tuesday morning and I'm glad I did.

This morning I took one of my sons to a doctor's appointment at a hospital. It wasn't local, so took up most of the morning. It was also stressful for a few different reasons, so I took my time over lunch. It's really strange, after so many weeks of only having time for the urgent, that this week I'm finally out in front and able to take a few deep breaths. I'm thankful.

I won't lie to you, I've not been a bundle of cheerfulness this week. But I recognise that with the burden of frantic busyness lifted for the time being, I've got time to process some of the emotions of the last couple of months that have been pushed aside along with the other important and not-so-urgent things that I haven't had time for.

I was brought to tears by a post from Proverbs 31 ministries yesterday morning: 

Oh friend, we see you. We know you’re tired. We know you’re worn out and weary. We know your circumstances are weighing you down, with a heaviness on your chest that never seems to ease up.

It may feel impossible to keep going when the circumstances we face each day don’t seem to let up. But there is good news for us today: God is strong enough to carry us through these hard times.

Psalm 24:8 describes God this way, “Who is the King of glory? The Lord strong and mighty, The Lord mighty in battle.”

Our God remains strong and mighty through every battle we face.

When our hearts are heavy, our eyes are tired and our souls are worn down, we can have confidence that God will hold us up and keep us going.

His strength will never fail us, friend.

This morning as I faced that hospital trip, I was trying to cling to the promise that God gives us strength. No idea how that works, but it's clearly there in his Word. I tell you, I'm leaning into this promise, and not just for this morning:

He gives power to the faint,
    and to him who has no might he increases strength.
30 Even youths shall faint and be weary,
    and young men shall fall exhausted;
31 but they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength;
    they shall mount up with wings like eagles;
they shall run and not be weary;
    they shall walk and not faint. (Isaiah 40:29–31 NIV)

The Lord himself goes before you

The workshop I've written about in recent posts has finished. I'm so happy to be at the other end of it. It's been lovely to get back to work at my usual tasks and really enjoy the largely uninterrupted time! Yes, I've had no meetings this week, tonnes of work, but no meetings. I've got several meetings tomorrow, and next week have the equivalent of two days of meetings, so we'll just count up till now.

I'm just not sure what to write here today. The bigger picture of our lives is that our personal future has become more uncertain over the last year. Of course we never know what the future holds, but our plan has always been, for 21 years, to stay in Japan until we retired, unless the Lord called us to something different. We're not so sure now, but maybe God will call us to return to Australia for a period? It relates to our responsibilities as parents. I can't divulge more than that on this public platform, which means it's hard to write about. It's not the most comfortable of positions because we're both feeling very settled and happy in our various roles. But it is a question we will carry into the rest of this year and probably through next year also. 

So, we learn more about patience and waiting on the Lord. He called us to this life in Japan, he's sustained us thus far, and he will continue to do the same, whatever the next chapter of our lives looks like. 

I just keep coming back to a beautiful card that arrived in mid January. It came from an elderly lady I can't remember ever meeting. She knew my mum when my mum was a nurse-in-training 50 years ago! This elderly lady send us this verse, along with her letter and reassurance of her prayers. She doesn't know the specifics of our situation, but her gift was definitely on point.

My writing journey

And to demonstrate how fried my brain is, I'm also
sharing a photo that is completely unrelated to this
post. But it is my most favourite sunrise experience.
Photo taken when we were camping on the banks of
the largest lake in Japan several years ago. It was
an accidental sunrise sighting: I'd merely gotten up to
use the toilet facilities (at 4am) and found this outside
our tent!

This is the second week that I'm helping facilitate a workshop for our organisation. It helps workers prepare to go back to their home country to connect up with those who've supported them and, very often, report back about the work they've been doing. This week we're focusing on spoken communication, in particular, a modular system of putting a presentation together that involves telling two-minute stories. I've had the privilege of sharing some examples of stories from my own life with the participants. Here's one I shared today, and I thought you might be interested to read and a portion of my journey:

Do you enjoy hearing people’s stories? Most people do. I have the privilege of working with people to share their stories.

Early in 2007, I was questioning my calling as a missionary. I spent most of my days at home with three kids under 8. Not just that, but I barely knew anyone locally besides the Japanese mums at my son’s kindergarten. We’d moved to Tokyo less than 3 years earlier so that my husband could follow his calling to teach missionary kids. I was happy for him, but I found myself without the capacity to do much—not only was I busy with three young boys, but my Japanese was pretty terrible.

I asked God: why did you bring me to Japan and yet I can’t do anything like what I imagined a missionary could do? That was a turning point.

That year David gave me a CD from a guest speaker at the school, one of the songs called “Seize the Day”, spoke to my heart: I should be seeking what God had for me to do that was in line with my gifting, limitations, and life stage. A colleague volunteered to take care of our kids so I could go to a three-day missionary women’s retreat where the theme was writing your story. By mid-year I‘d started exploring the writing world. I’d joined a small international writing group, entered a writing competition, and wrote an article about one of our experiences in Japan. Later that same year I did a one-on-one online writing course with an experienced Christian writer.

Three years later, in 2010, I went to an OMF writing workshop in Hong Kong. There I realised that my heart’s desire was not to write a book, but to tell the stories of ordinary people who happen to be missionaries. Someone prayed at that time that God would bring people across my path whose stories I could tell. Forward twelve years to now, and I spend most of my time working on missionaries’ stories as an editor. As a magazine editor and OMF Japan’s social media manager I’ve helped get hundreds of stories out to thousands of people. I’m so thankful that God has led me to serve him in this unique way.