Looking back at 2022

The last three years I've used some interesting and challenging questions to write this last post of the year, so I'm going to do it again.

1. What makes this year unforgettable?

The context of the year (coming after nearly two years of a global pandemic) makes it both forgettable and unforgettable. Looking back even at this short distance at the pandemic and it's hard to remember what happened when, because we don't have big hooks to hang them on. There was a lot of "not doing" during 2020, 2021, and early 2022. However this year life began to change, moving closer to "normal", though masks are still a real part of our daily lives in Japan. We started the year not knowing when the borders would open again to tourists in Japan and end the year with our eldest son in our house (without a visa).

We will remember this year as the year we went to Australia in the middle of the year and did lots of fun stuff, as well as some hard stuff. August was a difficult month for me: I farewelled David and our youngest son at the start of the month, contracted COVID within a couple of days, and had some challenging times on my own with our middle son while living in someone else's house.

It was the year that our last son started his last year of high school. And we entered our last year of living in this house we've raised our family in since 2010.

2. What did I enjoy doing this year?

A sunset on a Queensland beach midyear.

A definite highlight was a week's holiday in June/July with two of my best friends and their families at a beach in Australia. Hours and hours to just talk and be together was like being in paradise. I also got to stay with one of them for ten days at the end of August, which was also precious. Plus I got one-on-one time with two other close friends, which I treasured.

Walking after dinner with David is occasionally a chore, but more often than not it's a joy, even when the temperatures aren't really hospitable. I really missed the regular catchup with him when we were in Australia.

We've enjoyed watching cricket again on TV, finally they've begun to provide ways for fans in Japan to subscribe.

3. What/who is one thing/person I'm grateful for?

David. I rely on him a lot, but he also leans on me. We make a good team and don't function as well when we're apart. This year marked our 25th wedding anniversary. I'm so thankful.

4. What did I read/watch/listen to that made the most impact this year?

Again, I've really enjoyed listening to various episodes of the Undeceptions podcast.

I hit my target of 100 books read in 2022. But also discarded more than 20 books as "didn't finish", these were books that I'd invested time in (not just read a couple of pages). I'm getting more fussy about what I read, partly due to getting older, but also because I've got easy access to a whole library of ebooks. One of my loves is browsing in the library from the comfort of my own home (or, to be honest, bed...the place I do much of my reading).

Gentle and Lowly by Dane C. Orlund was a standout non-fiction book this year. I read it slowly over eight months (I usually read a couple of fiction books a week). I think I need to read it again. It's a balm to a weary soul. For example this sentence from Ch 4: "If you are in Christ, you have a Friend who, in your sorrow, will never lob down a pep talk from heaven. He cannot bear to hold himself at a distance."

Sacred Pathways by Gary L. Thomas was another really valuable book to read. I came across it through working on a magazine issue themed "Arts and Ministry". It showed me a few things about myself and my life experiences that I hadn't realised.

5. What did I worry about most and how did it turn out?

We had a prolonged passport/visa renewal situation that strung out over several months earlier in the year. In April we very nearly had an illegal immigrant in our household, but managed to dodge that by pleading with the embassy for an appointment. Flying to and from Australia is never fun, but it was pretty miserable this year. We had all our original flights to and from Australia cancelled by airlines. Our journey to Australia took 35 hours, which is more than three times the usual length. We also ended up paying more for peace of mind as we changed our return flights to ensure that we go there before our visas expired. Japan still required negative PCR tests and cancelled flights made that complicated. I worried a lot through all of this. I lost sleep, had headaches, reflux, and various bacterial, viral, and fungal infections, as well as asthma-complicated COVID.

I also worried about our eldest son's lack of employment. His savings ran very low this year before he finally found consistent work. This was very hard to watch. 

6. What is my biggest regret?

Hard question! The Merriam Webster dictionary gives two disparate definitions of regret. One is a verb: to be very sorry for (a mistake) and the other is a noun: sorrow aroused by circumstances beyond one's control or power to repair. 

There are things that happened that I regret, but I didn't have the power to change them. I regret that my family has sometimes caused pain for others, but much of that hasn't been within my power to change. I regret that others haven't understood us (sometimes because they don't have the life experience to help, or they have biases that mean they can't see the full picture), but again, while I may have tried to help others understand, their understanding is beyond my ability to change.

I regret some of the things I've said yes to and later ended up with too much on my plate, often because of things outside of my control or beyond my ability to anticipate what was coming in the future.

7. What's something that has changed about me?

I've begun to more strongly identify as a writer this year. When someone asks me what I do, I say "I'm a writer and an editor". That's an easy summary that doesn't overwhelm people. I haven't written a book, and don't (yet) have an ambition to, but that doesn't mean that I'm not a writer. Writing this post about life with mental illness was a bit of a turning point: https://mmuser.blogspot.com/2022/10/the-truth-about-journeying-with-illness.html

A close friend wrote this to me in early November: "Have been observing a really positive shift in you Wendy, from anxiety and feeling isolated to coming to peace with what is and inviting others into a space of being honest and vulnerable...which alleviates isolation for yourself and them also. Just thought you might like to hear from the outsider's perspective. God is good!! He's been at work and continues to be so." She connected a few dots I was too close to see, God has been good to me in giving me friends who will do that!

8. What surprised me most this year?

Some of the change we longed for during the depth of the pandemic was actually harder to adjust to than we would have imagined. I struggled to interact socially in a group at times this year, even in groups that I previously was fine with.

I was also pleasantly surprised by an opportunity to do an interview (for an article) with four Japanese people in the one afternoon, some of that was in English and some in Japanese.

9. What Bible truths impacted me this year?

A verse that has stuck with me arrived in my mail box in January last year (see here). It's Deuteronomy 31:8 "The Lord himself goes before you and will be with you; he will never leave you nor forsake you. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged." This was a great comfort, though I admit that in the midst of my worrying, I should have clung to it more tightly at times!

10. What meta-themes have I thought about this year? (in no particular order)

Life with non-physical illnesses and neurodiversity

Being a parent to adult children when they're struggling

Families as a microcosm of culture

Maintaining margin

My work always provides me with lots to ponder. I've thought about (and worked with) themes like honour–shame culture, rest, arts and ministry, mobilisation, prayer, women, fear of failure, missionary partnership development, nature, aging society, and Japanese festivals and traditions.

Highlights

• As I've already stated above: the week's holiday with friends.
• Being able to see our eldest son again and spend significant time with him. 
• We only got one camping trip in this year, and it was a cold one marred by debilitating pain for one of our friends. But still it was a highlight.
• Seeing gradual improvement and growth in our boys. But it's been slow, small steps.

Lowlights

• This year I've only written 39 blog posts, the fewest in it's 13 ½ year existence. So it's ironic that I'm thinking of myself more as a writer than ever before!
• Watching my kids struggle in various realms and wondering about their futures.
• Feeling tired as a parent.
• The start of the year I was stretched way beyond what was healthy, partly by work, partly by responsibilities to my family, and partly with what had happened in 2020 and 2021.

Other thoughts

For much of this year "it's complicated" would probably have been a good response to people's questions to how I was at the time. I've lived more than half my life doing things in ways that most people don't understand. A call to overseas missions leads to a loss of friends and a loss of potential friends, I learned this early on. It turns out that walking with mental illness and neurodiversity is similar and leads to much misunderstanding, even amongst those you thought would "get it". You'd think I was used to this already, but it turns out I wasn't, and probably never will be. I'm ever so thankful to those who do "get me" and have stuck by through all the challenges this year, even when they didn't understand us or our decisions.

My first post of this year was remarkable in the lack of concrete thoughts I could muster for the coming year (or at least that I was willing to commit to a blog post). I think my first post in 2023 will be quite different to that. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Life keeps me flexible

We're in the midst of wrestling again, after a hiatus of several years. Our last big year of wrestling was 2016-17. There have been bits and bobs of wrestling in the years since, but, for various reasons, neither of our younger two sons are as passionate about the sport as their big brother is. Plus there's been injury (and a pandemic!)—last season our youngest son only wrestled once before being sidelined by a concussion. This year he's a senior and has gone out for wrestling one last time. It's taken me a while to back into the roll of things. I've just looked back at some of the blog posts I wrote during our eldest son's high school wrestling career, and it was a very intense time. This doesn't feel as big, perhaps because wrestling isn't our youngest son's main sporting passion.

So tomorrow, for the first time in several years, I'm hopping on the team bus (before the sun comes up) and heading to a day-long wrestling meet at a US army base. The blog posts I read this morning reminded me of the friendships forged in the past at these meets, but sadly I don't think any of those people will be around tomorrow (at least none of the CAJ wrestling-parents from the past). We'll see what eventuates. At least David will be there!

Our son is the "heavy-weight" of the team, in the 215 lb (97 kg) weight class. He's been watching live wrestling since he was very young (he attended his first meet was when his big brother was in Grade 7 and he was in Grade 2). And he competed on and off since he was around 10, but never with such big guys! He's won twice this season already, so we'll see how he goes tomorrow, the last meet before Christmas.

Then on Sunday we've got a friend from my uni days coming to visit with her family. They are in church ministry in Australia, but they have a strong interest in mission. The weather is looking good, if a bit chilly, so, after church we're planning to head to my favourite big park (in our van) for a picnic. Monday is going to be a bear as we recover from all that! Tuesday and Wednesday next week are also big ones, with various meetings/responsibilities downtown.

In between all of that I've got some baking to do: fudge that people have ordered, snacks for Sunday and for the school's seniors (a once-a-month encouragement organised by the parents of the class), and a usual amount for our own family to snack on.

Holidays are coming up too: with some time in the mountains before Christmas, and then our eldest son is coming to visit for Christmas from Australia for the first time in 3 ½ years! I'm looking forward to the break, and have a few books lined up. I should probably pick up my cross-stitch again, I don't think I've touched it all year.

Meanwhile, I've got some editing to do before we go away, and some writing. I'm excited to have been asked to do a "small" writing project for our US office: a series of blog posts about preparing for home assignment. It's really helpful for me to have a background project like that to work on, one that doesn't have tight deadlines and multiple moving parts and people. Plus it's a project that engages my writing brain more than my editing brain—it's nice to be on the other side of the relationship sometimes, it keeps me limber.

Faulty thinking

Ah, how easily we fall into cause-and-effect thinking, you know, the kind of thinking that goes like: "If I do all the right things, it will turn out okay." It works for some things, but that kind of thinking gets to be very unhelpful when it overflows into things like illness, relationship breakdown, employment loss, and other aspects of our imperfect lives in this imperfect world. Of course you can cause breakdowns in these areas, but there is a surprising amount of stuff that you simply can't control by "being good". Yet we still act as though we can.

Getting some perspective

I've seen parents going out of their minds trying to do a perfect job of parenting. From prior to conception, potential parents are bombarded with "rules" as to how to be the perfect parent. I saw a reel the other day telling me that I should have played a special soothing song to my sons before they were born . . . that we would have had a better time with them as newborns! 

We're told that during the school years to make sure they have plenty of exercise, or to learn an instrument or a language, or to have lots of down time, or to read to them often. And it's implied that they should have perfect behaviour at school and excellent school results, that we need to make sure they've got all their homework done on time and ensure they have time with friends too, not to mention a perfect diet.

Parents are told to develop family traditions and give our kids the best examples. Christian families have a lot of expectations on them too, from family and personal devotions, to church and Youth Group attendance. And of course this isn't new.

Some of our motivation is most likely fuelled by the thought: I will be blessed if I do this. Such is the strength of the myth: "bad things don't happen to good people". And therefore I have to do all in my power to be the best person I can be. And when you're a parent, that puts an awful amount of pressure on you, especially if things go wrong. Sadly many Christian parenting books seem to champion this flawed thinking and seem to completely forget about God's grace. 

When bad things happen, the logical conclusion when you're thinking this way is that "it's my fault" or you start looking around for someone else to blame. But that isn't always the case. How often do we look at others struggling with their children in public and silently judge them, wondering what they did to deserve such misery. And how miserable people are when their kids go off in directions their parents don't want them to or don't take the "expected path". 

So many expectations and so much misery.

People in more prominent positions, like pastors and missionaries suffer too, and possibly more. The expectations seem higher when there are a lot of people watching you.

My husband and I are watching the fifth season of The Crown. It's a historical-fiction series about British royal family and they're currently covering the 1990s, when the family suffered a number of marriage breakdowns, as well as other hardships. The Queen actually publicly described 1992 as her "annus horribilis." We can barely imagine what it's like to live such a high profile life, but you can see the same pattern: perfection is aimed at, failed to be achieved, and people feel the need to blame. A cause-and-effect thought pattern that works well in some aspects of our world, but not so well in others.

Over the last few years we've personally been in a season of "walking beside" our older teens/young adults as they go through difficult times. It's been hard, and we've had to let go of our expectations (many we didn't realise we even had) and seek to find ways to love them unconditionally as well as encourage them.

Those of us who follow the God of the Bible need to be careful. We have a tendency to try to do deals with God: if I'm good, you have to bless me with a hardship-free life. Even if we don't think we think that way, it can so easily slip in. For example, thinking: if I pray hard about something God will have to do something good. If I get parenting right, then my kids will turn out right (turning Proverbs 22:6 into a promise instead of just wise advice: "Train up a child in the way they should go, and when they are old they will not depart from it.")

I was encouraged by a sermon I listened to the other day. The preacher, who has gone through plenty of hardship himself said: "The good news is that you cannot be bad enough to ensure God's condemnation of your family." And "the bad news is that you cannot be good enough to ensure God's blessing on your family . . . the future of your family, for good or ill, is in the hands of God." He finished by asking: What hope is there? Turn to the One who holds the future in his hands and ask him to honour himself through your family. God uses our messes: just look at Jesus' genealogy, it's full of broken families!

This is not an encouragement to be slack, but rather an encouragement to cut yourself some slack. Things will go wrong, when they do, it's not necessarily your fault. And the same for how you quietly think about those around you. 

I've struggled to get my thoughts down on this topic and press Publish. But I hope that it's as helpful to you as it's been to me to think about these things.