Emotions and conversations

We have reached an interesting point in our careers. A point where people saying, "Wow, 23 years is a long time to serve." But there are also younger people asking questions about their own direction in life, and asking about our own journey. Especially people who don't feel called to so called "front-line ministry", for example, church planting and evangelism, but called to the sorts of work we do: support ministry (behind the scenes helping missionaries to continue to do the work they've been called to do).

And a photo of a tree, because we all need
more trees!

I've written on this topic a few times over the years, one that stands out was about four years ago (here) and expressed a fair bit of frustration on how difficult it seemed to communicate to Australians about the importance of the work we do. That mission work involves a lot more than just church planting and evangelism. 

However, it feels like maybe we're making better progress this year. One way we're doing that is by using boxes, of all things! It's become a standard part of most of our up-front presentations. We get the audience involved and show them a little dramatically some of the other things missionaries have to do aside from their stated "ministry", and then show them how overwhelming that can be and how people like ourselves can work as a team to help carry the load. I explained this activity (with photos) towards the end of this blog post five years ago. This single presentation has produced more conversations than most of the stories we've told.

I've had coffee on two occasions in the last week with people who wanted to know more about my story: about working in communications and also about how missions do member care. Both of these conversations were so encouraging to me. I shouldn't be amazed that God's been working through the struggles I've had to help other people (he said he would 2 Corinthians 1:4). In fact neither of these conversations would have taken place if God hadn't given me the boldness to stand up in front of strangers and admit that something in my missionary career had been (or continues to be) hard.

. . . 

I now wish that I'd pressed "Publish" on Tuesday when I wrote this. But now it's Thursday and I've had another lengthy conversation that was quite different to the first two I mentioned. Today I'm feeling far more anxious than I had been recently. The conversation was one of those, "Please explain the situation of your kids, we wish we could provide them with accommodation but we can't, what can we do except pray?" kinds of conversations that we've had many of in the last several months.

I haven't written too much about the situation with our boys, partly to protect their privacy. What's been going on with them has been the unwritten part of the story in what I've written here recently (e.g., struggling to trusting God). My summary is: there's a housing crisis in Australia at present and finding places to rent is hard. Both our younger sons need to find somewhere to live apart from us in order for us to go back to Japan in July. One of our sons will be studying at the University of Queensland and the other hopefully will be working. The latter was the subject of this blog post last year about mental illness and neurodiversity. He's had a rough run, and as his parents we've also been doing it tough at times. Getting these guys settled somewhere else is a key focus of this home assignment, but it's a difficult one. And one that we don't know the end of yet, and it's hard to wait, wondering.

But this is a rather large diversion from how I started this: encouraged by conversations. But that's life, isn't it? One interaction can be an encouragement and another quite the opposite. We're no superheroes here! Please pray for us!