The rest of our Sydney adventure

We're 'home' again in Brisbane. Here are some reflections on the last couple of days. Sunday afternoon we relocated to someone's house and the rest of the afternoon-evening were spent resting from an intense weekend. On Monday a number of other OMF home assignees (missionaries like us who are on home assignment - once known as furlough) joined us in a meeting to share and encourage one another. Again intense, but enjoyable. I got to spend a significant amount of time with one lady around my age who works in the Philippines. The relationships that missionaries have with other missionaries are interesting. At 'home' we very often pass like ships in the night, barely able to interact with one another because of our crazy, irregular, public schedules. Usually people build friendships around a common interest that often take them to a certain common place. Like school, uni, work, church, a club or youth group. Imagine what it is like for people who have common experiences, yet are rarely in the same place at the same time. Challenging! And yet we need each other. There is a certain sense of having a 'public face' as we go around to various groups, however, with others who have similar experiences, we can more easily admit our challenges, failures and struggles. In spending time with this new friend on Monday, we went deeper, faster than you would usually with someone your talking one-on-one with for the first time. Each of us had seen the other give talks from the podium at various OMF events, but we'd not talked before, just the two of us. It was great, encouraging even. Afterward the day, though, exhaustion hit me. My personality is a challenge to manage sometimes. I am an extrovert with a strong introvert 'shadow'. Which means that talking with people does energise me, but afterwards I need to withdraw to re-energise. For I long time I thought that I was an introvert for this very reason, but no one who knew me thought so :) I guess they didn't see me when I withdrew. So, at conferences and social events my extrovert side drives me to interact. It is often a challenge to draw away from it all. I'm raving on here! Monday night two of my husband's former house-mates came to visit, one with his "new" wife whom we hadn't met before. One of the fun sides of home assignment is catching up with people you haven't seen for a long time. Tuesday morning exhaustion still clung to me and I slept in until 8.45! Amazing. I didn't hear the rest of the family who were up hours before me. We left the house at 10.15 and travelled back to the airport via trains. In sunny, warm Brisbane we stopped and had smoko (Aussie for afternoon tea or a snack) with the friends who'd minded our car for the five days. Their three kids are about the same age as ours, and one of the few friends our boys remember from Australia because we stayed there two years ago when we were here on holidays. So, much fun was had! We had to drag ourselves away to go home. Getting up to go to school this morning understandably wasn't on our boys list of 'fun things to do'. Unfortunately we had to go early to make a doctors appointment too. Our four y.o. copped three injections to get him up to speed for his immunisations. Another thing to cross off the list. Sorry for the long post. Well done if you've made it this far! Now I'd better go and fold those massive piles of washing that my husband did this morning.