Feeling off-balance, but okay

I started this week with some trepidation. We knew that on each of the first three days (Monday to Wednesday) we would hear news that was out of our control and each had the potential to change the plans we'd carefully made for the coming month. Of course, we try to hold our plans lightly, knowing we're not really in control, but it's still hard.

The three things were:

Car repair

Our car was in a minor accident when our middle son, practising for his driving test, was hit from behind on the approach to a roundabout. Not his fault and the offender didn't stop. On Monday the car was scheduled to go to the panel beater and be assessed for our insurance claim at to be fixed. Our main concern was: when would we get it back? With an already complex month, this was an unwanted extra complication. Thankfully the assessor thought we'd get our car back on the day that we start to move out of our house. No day was ideal, but that's not the worst it could be! Thankfully we'd bought a second car a few weeks ago, with the intention that it would become our middle son's car after he got his licence. So, we still have a car to get around in!

Driving test

For my non-Aussie readers,
this is the sign that you
get to put on your car in the
first year after you have your
driver's licence (then you
change to a green P for two
years). When learning you
have an L sign.

Our middle son had his second attempt at a driving test on Tuesday. Again, out of our control, though we'd done all we could to prepare him, including recruiting a number of prayer warriors to pray on Tuesday afternoon at 2.50! I vacuumed the house while waiting for news about how the test had gone: shouting out my prayers and frustration to God. It must have been a sight for any flies on the wall. (It's been a 2 ½ year journey from when he first got his Japanese learners, then was diagnosed with epilepsy and had to jump through medical and government hoops here to get his Australian learners, get his required hours, get credit for the hours he did in Japan, and then get a test date, fail, and get another test date.)

We're incredibly thankful and relieved that this time he passed. God has been so gracious to us this year in helping us achieve so many of the goals we set out to nail.

Ongoing medical saga of my jaw

The ongoing saga of the discomfort I've been experiencing on the left side of my jaw came to a head (this started in Canberra during our long service journey in mid March). By late-May I was unwilling to accept the GPs assurance that all was fine. So I went to a physio (thinking it might be muscular-skeletal). He suggested another go at a dentist, who took an x-ray and referred me to an oral pathologist, who referred me to an Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeon who sent me for more scans, including an MRI. Amazingly, all that was achieved during June! 

It's been a ridiculous journey that I wanted to end asap, preferably before we went back to Japan, where accessing medical and dental services just becomes more complex for a non-fluent Japanese speaker. 

I had my post-scan appointment on Wednesday and the final assessment is that this is an abscess under a molar. The tooth needs extraction under General Anaesthesia. This is now planned for next Tuesday. Phew! And amazingly, I'm not in much pain, certainly nothing like I experienced at Easter time.

No one knows how this has escaped the attention of so many professionals (in three months I've had four dental x-rays, two ultrasounds, two CT scans, as well as an MRI). But perhaps it was just God keeping me off-balance, and part of his growth plan for me to trust him?

What now?

Well now that most of that is decided, we forge onwards. It's only 15 days until we hop on our first plane. Things are steadily getting done. Today so far I've made an enquiry about getting our carpets cleaned, I've finished our last prayer letter for this home assignment, written this blog post, and done (all?) the paperwork for my day surgery next week. Next on the agenda is a coffee and some more sorting of boxes of stuff that are lying around (much is memorabilia and correspondence from many years ago that has thus far been stored here).

On Saturday we are doing something new: holding an open day here at our house. So between 9 and 4.30 we could have a lot of people visiting (or maybe hardly any at all?). It's a chance for local people who may not have seen us to briefly do so.

Yep, I'm still feeling off-balance. I think that's where God likes me!

International is normal

These last two days I've had quite different lunches to what I usually do. Let me give you a taste.

Monday
On Monday I joined with a group of five other mums who have children in grade nine at CAJ. We ate lunch at one of their houses. This was not an ordinary lunch, and that's due to the ladies who were present.

Yummy Asian lunch!

I was the only 100% Caucasian lady there. The other ladies were various combinations of Korean, US, Japanese, and Chinese. And by various combinations, I mean that my background was one of the least complicated (I've only lived in two countries and I'm the same nationality as my husband and both my parents and the country I grew up in). Two or three of them are raising multiple nationality kids too (husbands with a different nationality than the wife). Conversation ranged between English, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, so I'm not sure that anyone got 100% of what was said, least of all me, probably the least multilingual person there.

The food reflected the ladies present: a lot of Korean, plus some Japanese and possibly more (what's honey mustard chicken?). It was super tasty.

I'm accustomed to conversation about different Englishes, but these multilingual ladies were doing the same with Korean/Japanese/Chinese. If I knew more of these languages it would have been even more fascinating and there are many links between these three languages.

Tuesday
On Tuesday I went across the city to our national headquarters for a couple of meetings, mostly related to me handing bits of my jobs over to others while we're away. In between meetings I got to work in a room called "The Island"! 

My meetings included my Scottish boss (who is pretty fluent in Japanese), another Aussie, a man from Britain who grew up in Japan, an American who is ethnically Japanese and grew up in Japan with an American family, and a lady from Hong Kong. International is our normal!

Our Japan OMF headquarters is aquatic-themed.
This room is called "The Island", upstairs are two meeting
rooms called "The Stream" and "The River". Down the
hall the finance team works in "The Oasis"!

Lunch was with the various people working at the office that day. Our little table had three British people, all who've been in Japan for longer than me, and a bilingual Japanese lady. Topics ranged considerably, from blue cheese, to the Royal Wedding, and ingrown toenails (really!). My semi-regular Facebook status of Wednesday Words came up too, and they had some suggestions! Braces vs retainers, braces vs suspenders, tute for tutorial, trousers vs pants. Such fun, talking about language.

Today
Meanwhile today, I'm back at my little desk in my dining room, trying to discipline myself to attend to little bits and pieces of followup from yesterday as well as other ongoing things that need doing. (But instead of powering through I'm writing a blog post...) 

It's weird to be divvying up my job to give to others and hard to stay motivated for the "now" or to get motivated for the "coming". I swerve between feeling scared about ditching work and feeling relieved! Maybe you don't understand the former feeling, but I have an underlying fear of boredom that sometimes (or maybe more than sometimes) drives me.

Ah, transition. Never easy, no matter how it looks. I know I'll eventually get around to embracing the freedom of handing over these jobs, but at the moment I feel a little like I'm balancing on a slab of ice in the middle of a lake.

Seeking balance in my daily life

Me and exercise
I'm sitting here in an after-exercise glow, something that's been too rare in recent years. I know that exercise is essential for me, it helps me with stress, with staying focused, and with my general energy levels. 

But I've struggled in these last three years to get a regular routine going. For several years I was a member of Curves and went two or three times a week. Then we went to Australia in 2014 and regular exercise came in the form of riding hilly territory to school with the boys each day (about seven ks).  I also learnt how to use a "real" gym. While our boys did wrestling twice a week, I worked out downstairs in the sport's centre's weights and bike/cross trainee machine rooms.

Then we returned to Japan where:
1. The boys walk 300m to school, without needing my supervision.
2. We weren't waiting 1 ½ hours for boys to finish wrestling training twice a week in a gym 30 minutes from our home.

So, what was I to do? And for various reasons I didn't want to go back to Curves.

A photos I took on one of my park rides.

I wrote about my big "revelation" in October 2014 here. I would ride to the big park 5km south of here. 

It's something that I've continued to do, but not as regularly as I really needed to (I managed it less than ten times in 2017). Part of that is that it took more time out of my day that I could often afford to take. Especially because I often added in other elements: photography (when I acquired a fancy camera in mid 2016), shopping, even a picnic, and or a coffee shop at times. That park is just a 30 min ride away, but usually I'd be away three or more hours. I did do some other rides: to another park more than twice as far a coupe of times and also rode a few times to a coffee shop a few suburbs over. So, it is still a good thing to do, but not really "regular" enough.

It is true that exercise is integrated into my week: I ride usually twice a week to get groceries. It isn't a long or hard ride, but still it is a ride. Walking and stair-climbing happens too, but rather irregularly if I'm going somewhere on the trains for work or to watch the boys compete.

I asked a friend to orientate me to the local public gym and I liked it there. It is pay-as-you-use, as opposed to being locked into a monthly payment. It's also a lot cheaper than either gym I'd previously used. Trouble was, again, I struggled to get there regularly.

Me and headaches During the year in Australia ('14/'15) I spent time seeing a physio for a couple of issues, one of which was seeking to get to the bottom of my ongoing struggle with headaches. I have to admit that I do hesitate to write about this, because every time I mention it to people, they've got lots of advice. Really, I have a few main triggers that I've discerned over the years, with muscle tension and low blood sugar being two major ones.

In the midst of the above I found that I was getting nasty headaches after I went to the gym—every time! Well that didn't help my motivation to go. So I tried various combinations of things around the gym times: hydration, regulating my breathing while lifting, being extra careful about my posture, eating. 

I even went several months of recording my headaches and possible triggers. One thing stood out, one time that I went to the gym and didn't get a headache: I met a friend for coffee straight after I went to the gym and I didn't get a headache that day at all. Aha: maybe caffeine is a key, I thought.

Me and coffee
When I was at language school (and still drinking instant coffee) I discovered that not only do I need to eat regularly to avoid headaches, I need to "caffeinate" regularly, or more precisely, "on time". My reaction was to stop drinking coffee for breakfast, leaving the caffeine to later in the day. That seemed to work for a time. A few years later I decided to get off caffeinated coffee altogether. I became a "social drinker": only drinking caffeinated coffee when I was out. That also seemed to work for a time. But the trouble was, I got more "social" and ended up drinking caffeinated coffee more often than occasionally. Headaches continued.

It was frustrating. The physio in Australia suggested I have regular massages when I returned to Japan to help regulate my muscle tension and headaches and I have (I also hesitate to mention that, because it seems like such a luxury). But the headaches remained. The massages did get me some more built-in exercise, as I deliberately chose to go to one a bit further away that I could ride to.

Anyway, to cut a meandering story short (I learned today that there's a French word for this: "Bref" or "you get the idea")—I decided I would need to cut out coffee altogether, even for social occasions. But quite I've grown to love coffee and especially I love coffee shops atmosphere. I also love "meeting a friend for coffee". So, cutting it out altogether, especially in a land where they don't yet do decaf coffee very well (though it is much more available than it used to be), this wasn't an appealing option.

Instead, I decided to manipulate my caffeine intake the other way. Instead of trying not to have caffeine each day, I would plan on having at least one cup every morning (usually around 9.30). I've been doing this for a few weeks now and it does seem to be working. I'm not stressing if I have to have more coffee in a day and generally I think I've had less headaches. I'm happy with that outcome!

Back to my post-exercise glow today. It seems like it's all finally come together: regular exercise routine and headache modulation. These last couple of weeks I've done this twice a week:

• gone to the gym on the mornings that I grocery shop (the gym and the shop are in the  same direction from my house)
• had coffee before I went to the gym
• taken a small snack to eat after working out, but before I leave the gym
• eating an early lunch when I get home

This routine seems to work and I've had no headaches on those days. There are two big problems with it, though.

1. It only works if I have a morning free to do both the gym and groceries.

2. We're about to go to Australia for six months, where I won't be riding to the grocery store  twice a week.

I guess I'll have to keep plugging away at finding ways to keep myself active. But hopefully I'll be able to keep most of the headaches at bay!

Writing a website

Well, I'm not quite writing a website, but I'm helping get, write, and edit content for a new OMF Japan website. It's stretching my brain. Not just because I've never done that before, but because I'm jumping into something that my line manager has been doing but is no longer able to.

I mentioned on Sunday that our Field Director is very ill with cancer. He's running out of treatment options and we just don't know what will happen. My line manager is his wife and is understandably off-loading most of her responsibilities so that she can be with her family. I've taken this on, on top of my usual magazine editing load (the timing has worked out that I've also just received almost all the submissions for the summer issue of the magazine in the last week).

So I'm trying to make decisions quickly on things that I'm even less sure on than usual. I myself have no formal leadership role in OMF, so I feel like I'm stepping into territory where I don't really belong. We're behind on getting this new website launched, and it is a key part of our current mobilisation push (200 workers by 2020). We have a short-termer working on the technical side of the website and he needs content to work on, content I have to procure, edit, and in some cases, write.

I'd value your prayers. Actually for our whole field. When something like this happens with someone in a leadership position it is a particularly precarious situation. And OMF isn't like a commercial company where you just hire people you need to fill positions. There never seems to be enough workers and especially leadership.

Not to mention that this is a "fellowship" (OMF used to be called Overseas Missionary Fellowship). Relationships between missionaries are often more than just colleagues, we're talking about friends. We're looking at potentially losing a friend here.

Creative projects help

A few years ago I wrote about how I started cross stitching as a result of a psychologist "prescribing" something that would help me "stop a while".

I've been doing little cross-stitch projects recently, actually for many months, but they aren't as satisfying as a large project. In recent weeks I've begun a larger project and I'm so happy about it! It will probably take me many months, but I'm so happy to have this to look forward to in the evenings.

A long time ago a friend gave me a book called, "Affliction" by Edith Schaeffer. It is a book you should definitely not read while in the midst of affliction! I actually found it quite difficult to get through (she rambles around quite a bit), but there are some great gems in there that have helped form my own "theology of suffering". One of the more unusual pieces of advice she gives is having a creative project always on the go.

"(Write a) list for things that are not absolutely necessary to be done that day, but that are creative projects. . . Painting? Dressmaking? Knitting? Gardening? Writing? Exercising carefully for your back, or to get two inches off your waistline? Always have some projects in progress, even if you have to neglect them. It is quite a different thing to feel that you have neglected cutting out your new dress, or the leather animal you are designing or the wooden tray you are decorating with an electric needle, than to have nothing concrete to have 'neglected.' It is psychologically very different." p237-8

She says, of those who are too tired after the essentials of life are done,

"...energy also diminishes when there is not enough incentive, and beginning a creative work, some sort of project you can watch take shape, can often carry with it a fresh supply of energy. I have had a short two-month period of being hemmed in by two rooms, caring for Grandmother Schaeffer after her stroke . . . I didn't leave the two rooms except to run—and I do mean run—to the corner store and back. . . (she longed to be back with her husband and children at L'Abri) Then I suddenly realized that I was begin given time to do some of the things I could never do any other time without feeling guilty. So I set out to make doll clothes." p239

I agree with her. While I'm not currently in the midst of "affliction", this idea of having a project on the go is a sound one. It certainly helps me keep a good balance in my life. Other things that help me in this way are books and our more recent hobby of camping. Having these to look forward to really helps. I particularly noticed that back in 2011, after I had suffered some serious "affliction" in conflict on top of watching disasters in both Australia and Japan. Planning camping trips was therapeutic at that time.

When I wrote about this back in 2010, Ken added an interesting comment to my post:

"Everyone needs a hobby to balance out their life. It should be something which has no consequences attached to it. Except perhaps something decorative or useful at odd times. It should also be a hobby which is not co-optable. There is a great pressure today to force everything into some kind of useful cost/benefit mould.

I discovered making latchhook rugs after the kids left home and we were restoring order in the pantry. I wondered about the little tool and all the balls of thick yarn. I also had a book of Roman tile floor designs at the time. So I put the two together and began work on a rug using the leftover bits. Nothing to do with work, nothing to do with satisfying demands of other people, nothing to do with justifying my existence in the world. About 8 months later I had a large rug, which I then gave away. I mght start another one or I might not. Not many activities in our live today give us that kind of freedom."

Do you have a hobby that helps you get through those tough days? What do you look forward to?

A bad example

One of the things I'm a bit tired of is seeing leaders set bad examples for those of us who follow them.

We have to consider what we are passing on to
those who follow behind us.

Some leaders, and, let's face it many people, don't prioritise well. They take on too many things and then work is a higher priority than almost anything else in their lives — over family, over rest, even over doing the best job they can at the work they have to do.

Then, if it gets too bad, they start to make excuses to other people. Excuses about why they can't complete things on time, excuses about why you must accommodate them. Excuses that sound valid, but basically mean, "I've said yes to too many things, and now you have to excuse me because I haven't got enough time left to attend to what I promised to do."

I understand that leadership is a demanding role. And I understand the ever-pressing demand that comes from living in a land where 99% of the residents don't believe in Jesus. I know that God has given different people different amounts of energy, health, and different family situations. He's also give us each different levels of ability to cope with work.

And I understand that I can't compare my capacity to work with someone else, but these leaders (or even people who go before, who are further along on their journey in life) aren't helping those who follow or who come behind them.

What they are subtly saying with their actions is that this is the way you should work, this is the way you should live. Whether we realise it or not, people watch how we conduct ourselves and sometimes take that on as a model for how they live. When leaders set poor boundaries, I feel pressured not to set good boundaries. When they don't take time off to rest, I feel pressured to do the same. When they pile so much into their schedule that they have to produce a lower quality of work, I'm tempted to do the same.

I wrote the following back in this post about stress-factors in the missionary lifestyle:


Balance between family and ministry
This is a challenge any family in ministry faces. Not just that you have to set your own limits, then you have to refrain from criticising other people's decisions and from comparing yourself negatively with others.

Hmmm, so I need to try hard not to criticise others, but it is hard when it impacts on my work as well as makes it difficult to set clear boundaries for myself and my family. 

Probably the best thing I can do it pray for my leaders, and pray for myself, that I'll be able to discern where to draw boundaries, how God wants me to lead my life, and especially, what He wants me to say "yes" and "no" to. And pray that I'll be a good example to those who come after me, and not a stumbling block to them.

Off balance

I realised yesterday that I am feeling off balance. A number of factors to this, so I'll make a list :)

1. Let's start with the Women's retreat on Friday and Saturday - a significant change in routine that was great, but it takes a while to get back into routine afterwards.
2. A new computer last week. My husband and I have spent most of the last week fiddling, transferring and exploring our new computer. We're nearly up to speed. Changing from a PC to a Mac is even worse than changing cars. It takes a while to discover how to do what came almost subconsiously on the old computer.
3. Packing up. We've started some serious packing in the last week. Our walls are looking bare, and bookshelves naked. Again, things I used to know where to find have moved or been packed, not to be seen again for 15 months. I really relate to a missionary friend who wrote in her blog here about her bag and where it usually hangs.
4. Public holidays. This week CAJ took Monday and Tuesday off, which was great, but again a change in routine can put you off balance. Japan in general also took Wednesday off, so the gym was closed yesterday too. (I'm looking forward to going back tonight.)

Is that enough? I'm hoping that not too many other things come flying our way in the next few weeks, I'll be enough off balance without any extra help.