Was it worth it?

We've had a pretty calm, "normal" week and have started to have the head space to look back and process the last few months. It's easy to look back with regret. 

Home assignment is required by our mission, though how and when you do it is a negotiable thing. So we look at the last six months and start to think: "Did we do the right thing? Did we make the right choices?"

The fact is that there is no good way to do home assignment. It means a lot of disruption in the missionaries' lives. When those missionaries have children at school, that disruption is bigger. If they are teenagers, the disruption escalates to a high level. If those children are settled and the missionaries are established in good-fit ministries, then it seems so unnecessary to volunteer for this amount of disruption.

The other side, though, is that our mission relies on missionaries coming "home" to give a field-side perspective to their mobilisation efforts. People at churches we visit repeatedly say how good it is to see us face-to-face and that that makes a big difference for them.

So, at this point you ask: was it worth the effort? I can't answer that question, though I know we've paid a significant cost as a family to do this home assignment. I also know that there are a few benefits we gained. Here are some tangible ones:

• we went through a crisis in late November that made us, and various related parties, look carefully at our calling to Japan—the result of that was great confirmation that we are indeed in the right place doing the things God has called us to
• home assignment triggered us to get some help for one family member who had been struggling for some time
• we were able to see our extended family members face-to-face and get a feel for how things were going for them: the benefit of that on relationships with them is immeasurable, but definitely not negative
• we also reconnected more deeply with our home church and as a result see the start of changes there with regards to involvement in mission
• I was able to address a slow-burning issue with a psychologist and find remarkable answers that will help me stay this journey long-term
• we got to spend time with our eldest son and witness first hand that his transition to Australia has gone remarkably well (and got to help him on the way to a drivers licence)

There are a variety of benefits that are more difficult to discern, including how this will affect our younger two boys' abilities to transition to Australia after they graduate from high school.

But one, very tangible, result, was a realisation that we can do regular dates now. Many Fridays we dropped our son off to youth group and then went to a local restaurant (and played Scrabble). Our boys are quite old enough to manage a meal on their own (often left-overs). Last night we had our first date-for-no-special-occasion in Japan. I can't remember the last time we did such a thing, and it was great, especially being able to indulge in a spontaneity that has just not been possible for nearly 20 years! We have home assignment to thank for this. Possibly not something our mission leaders had in mind, but I'll take it.

A coffee-flavoured cake called an Opera Cake!

My decaf coffee (8pm at night) came with this dollhouse-sized jug of cream!

Awesome Weekend

Honey-Ginger Biscuits aka "Stamp" Biscuits here.

Today, is the first Saturday since August that no one has had anything scheduled. Well, we did have an overnight guest who left after breakfast, but since then we've just "chilled". (Oh, I did bake some biscuits and did some cross-stitch.) Awesome!

My guys are currently playing a new board game
they got at Thrift Shop. It claims
"No Luck" is involved, so they're
quite enthusiastic about it.

We'll probably get another one next Saturday (shhhh, don't tell anyone), and then no more until mid December! Oh, we do have a family camping trip at the end of the month, I guess that kind-of counts.

These down-times are precious.

Yesterday afternoon the Wrestling Season started. Well, the team began official practices. Meets start in about a month. Apparently there was a large turn out of guys wanting to join the team, so there's quite a buzz going. Our son, of course, is very happy. He was sad when the season finished in February. One sadness was that the only place he got to wrestle with people the same weight as him was at meets (our middle school team was so small that there was no one else his size). Now, with all the new additions to the team, plus our son's growth, it looks like he'll have a lot of people his size to wrestle with on a daily basis!

Last night we also managed to have a date night. Our friend and colleague who stayed overnight, volunteered to look after the boys while we went out. We let them go to McDonalds and we went exploring the new local shopping centre (Aeon Mall). We found a nice Chinese restaurant (a bit more upmarket than the Australian country-town Chinese restaurant) for mains and Italian gelato for dessert. It was a lovely slow-paced evening just enjoying being together. The biggest difficult was trying to figure out how to eat crab legs covered in breading and chilli sauce, but un-shelled. And with only chopsticks as our tools. It wasn't a pretty sight, but it was tasty. In the future, though, I think shelled would be preferable.

I'm having a lovely weekend so far. How's yours going?

Refreshing spontaneity

Continuing on in our unusual week, yesterday David and I did something we haven't done in years. We took a spontaneous after dinner walk on our own.

We walked past our local government sports centre and ogled
these new outdoor climbing walls they've built. I haven't seen
too many climbing walls, but I've never seen ones this high.

Our wrestler had gone off to a make-up training session at 6.30pm, leaving the two of us alone for the evening.

After a humid, windy day on the edge of a typhoon, it was just perfect to be out at that time. For a good part of an hour we strolled along the local "river" and talked. Parenting ties you down in many ways, one being in spontaneity. For us as a family to do something as out of the ordinary as an after dinner walk usually involves lots of explanation and persuasion! (Unless it is going out for food.) And often it just isn't worth it.

At 7 pm most evenings we're working towards getting boys to bed. It was delicious to have the freedom to choose to be out together. A taste of what's to come as these guys grow and need us just a bit less. 

We stopped for a Maccas soft serve and then rented a DVD for our teenager (he's got a friend coming over tonight), and one for us too. Then we came home and watched "ours", continuing our spontaneous date. 

It was just so refreshing. This unusual week has been busier than I'd anticipated, but not as weird as I thought. There's been other great things too, like breakfast "dates" before David went to work and our son got up. I love it!

Unexpected blessings today

Today David and I had an unusual mid-week middle-of the-day date. School "babysat" the kids while we went to get our passports renewed (David took the morning off school). It took an hour to get there by train, but only one change. Mind you we were squished like sardines for a portion of this journey, I felt my pelvis creak with the pressure, or was it someone else's? I can't remember—we were close.

The bit at the embassy only took a short while. It was such a small thing, less work than enrolling your child in a new school! So we're finished by 10.15 and able to make our leisurely way back to work via two coffee shops (one for a mid-morning snack and coffee, and the other for lunch).

It was a delightful, almost spontaneous date. Time to stop and breath in what currently feels like a life that is spent racing from one thing to the next with barely enough time to enjoy the sunshine.

It also gave me a shock to reflect that this marks 20 years since I started preparing to go overseas for the first time. During my time in university I went on a missions trip to Indonesia (so now you know approximately how old I'm turning this year). In fact that was the time that David and I really met (though we'd been a part of a large group of Christian students prior to this, we hadn't really known who each other was). Anyway, that's another story. However, we both got our passports in the same year, preparing for the same trip overseas, so that now, 20 years later, we can renew our passports at the same time! Plus we have a great shared history that goes back more than five years before we were married.

Lots of blessings that I'm thankful for today. Not to mention a wonderfully warm day (about 8) with sunshine and hardly any wind, so we could eat lunch outside the smoky coffee shop in comfort.

Makeup?

I've picked up the book, "Everybody's Normal Till You Get to Know Them" by John Ortberg. There are many good things in the book, including a call to authenticity amongst community, which is something that I find sadly lacking in the Australian church. But when I read the following, I wondered if, actually, we weren't as bad with authenticity as some other cultures: "One of the defining moments in any dating relationship is the first time the man sees the woman without makeup...You don't want to let a guy look at your actual, unadorned face." p76 My husband-to-be rarely saw me WITH makeup! I guess that should make me feel good about my actual, unadorned face. I personally would say that one of the defining moments in a dating relationship is when one becomes sick. Actually my husband and I went on a short-term mission trip to Indonesia a long time before we dated, so we both saw the other in less-than-perfect circumstances for several weeks. Certainly with unadorned faces. But once we were dating, I went to visit him while he was leading a beach mission and, during the night, came down with food poisoning. It wasn't anything either of us had cooked (although that happened during our dating time too). It was a situation, though, that put me on my back for a while and certainly didn't give my later-to-be-husband any illusions about what I looked like without my "presentable mask" on.