Support staff in missions aren't wasted resources

Twice within a couple of days this last week I've seen articles come to the defence of support workers. I can't let this go, as support work in mission is what my husband and I are called to and are passionate about.

Both articles talked about the concept that support workers are not considered real missionaries by some (or many?) churches and that churches and individuals often don't like to be a part of sending those doing support work.

http://www.alifeoverseas.com/in-defense-of-second-class-missionaries/

says this:

When Christians stand up and say, "I’m called to missionary care! I’m called to teach MK’s! I’m called to missions administration!" the churches say, "Well, sorry, you don’t fit in our strategy. We’d rather get behind the exciting church planters and the pastoral trainers and the child-trafficking rescuers. Except, we expect them to do it without all the other people they need to be successful."

The following paragraph in that article gives examples of how missionaries on the "front-line" who don't have support workers get bogged down in things like obtaining visas, getting local taxes done, educating their children at home, burnt out because they have no member care assistance available etc.

https://omf.org/nz/2016/05/25/blind-spot-4-support-workers-are-not-real-missionaries/

says:

Support people are vital to the outworking of God’s mission. Let’s continue to work together, each doing whatever He has given us to do, wherever He has called us to do it, so that as we work together He would be glorified!

There are many analogies of how support work is vital in many areas of life: for example, in a company a CEO needs his office managers, an athlete needs his coach, an army need their communication specialists and mechanics. Why are missionaries who are in support ministries are considered a "lower class" and less worthy of support?

The current situation in our mission in Japan, with our field director in the process of being called to heaven and his wife (our Personnel Director) obviously not being able to do her job either, is a case in point. Yes, individual missionaries can continue to do their work in their local area, but the leadership, vision, and services that these leaders provide us bind us together and help us to be a greater service in this country than we could each on our own.

The Bible talks about working together and different gifts (see 1 Corinthians 12). But one that particularly comes to mind is from Ecclesiastes:

9 Two are better than one,
    because they have a good return for their labor:
10 If either of them falls down,
    one can help the other up.
But pity anyone who falls
    and has no one to help them up.
11 Also, if two lie down together, they will keep warm.
    But how can one keep warm alone?
12 Though one may be overpowered,
    two can defend themselves.
A cord of three strands is not quickly broken.

Support staff are not wasted resources, money given to them is not wasted either (if missions are wise in their planning). Let's help our evangelists and church planters be even more effective by providing all the support staff that they need.

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.

Shopping for eye drops wasn't that simple

I still struggle to buy things in a Japanese shop that I don't buy regularly and aren't obvious. For example, eye drops. They aren't something I buy often, but I needed to this week. My eyes tend towards dryness, I'm not sure that it is an allergy thing, but I've been struggling with gritty eyes recently (not helped by a teary prayer meeting for our field director and his family each morning).

Isn't the bottle curious!

I used to have two bottles of eye drops in various places, but could find neither, so decided to try buying some more. Those bottles were bought in Australia and with help in Japan, so doing it on my own here was new. I "swanned"* around in a drug store for a while looking for the eye drop section, primarily using pictures as my guide. My method in an unfamiliar store or looking for an unfamiliar product is to generally scan to find the right "section" and then zoom in with what reading skills I can muster (aided by my trusty phone).

Eventually after no success I thought to look up and found a sectional sign with the character for eye on it:　目　(should have thought of that before). Then I looked in more detail. As I suspected there were a lot of choices, but not a lot to help me choose between them. I ended up looking more closely at something that wasn't too expensive. I googled the brand-name and learnt a bit about the company's American products (which didn't correspond that well to what I could see in front of me). The English words on the product, testimonies, didn't seem too bad:

"Wow, what a feeling!" "Strong yet soft, the indescribable sensation is truly long lasting." "The sensation spreads through my brain – I feel wide awake. My eyes are purified and refreshed." It's "ROHTO Z!". Feel it!

So I bought it. When I tried it later at home I was completely unprepared for the product being more than just saline, it had stuff in it that made it impossible to open my eyes for what felt like about a minute. After a while, though, I can say that my eyes did feel somewhat refreshed. Not sure if my brain was awakened, though.

I got my husband, with his superior-to-me reading skills, to check over the instruction page and he wasn't able to add much to what I already knew (that there was more than just saline in this and that it was supposed to awaken your eyes).

A bit more searching since tells me that it has a tiny amount of weak antihistamine, vitamin B6, something that looks like an amino acid, tetrahydrozoline which relieves redness, and zinc sulfate.

Life in this country means you have to let a lot of things slide—not understanding everything going on around you is normal, but you learn to make do and not be so bothered by all the details.

*This word is in my Australian dictionary, but not in dictionary.com, so I suspect it isn't an American usage. I use it to mean to move about in a casual way.

A delivered dinner

We had Chinese food delivered for my birthday dinner. That is a very unusual thing to do for us. In fact in nearly 20 years of marriage I can barely think of a time when we've had a meal delivered, except, perhaps, pizza at a friend's house in Australia. I cook the vast majority of our evening meals (David does breakfast and lunch usually). Neither of us grew up in households that ever had delivery meals either.

My only "rule" about my birthday is that I don't cook dinner. I guess someone else could, but no one's ever volunteered. In recent years we would go out. But last night, the first day back at school, I felt it was important to stay home. As it was, the younger two didn't get home till after 5.30 from athletics training. It took our youngest till 9pm to get through everything including homework, a shower, stripping his bed and putting new sheets on (a fortnightly job), before he could hop in bed. And no, he wasn't efficient in his use of time. 

Having a delivery meal in Japan was an interesting experience. I don't have much to compare it to, but I can't imagine Australian delivery including dishes that needed to be collected by the restaurant after use. For that matter, I can't imagine a restaurant coming back to pick up said dishes! 

First we had to interpret the photo of a handwritten menu that a friend gave me (it's a small restaurant). Then look up a word or three on my Japanese-English app, including "delivery"—not having done this before it's not in our active vocab. Then David called them. In the middle of his conversation a long thunderclap rolled and the heavens opened in a rare April thunderstorm. Within half an hour a man pulled up in a raincoat  on his scooter with our food in a metal case which he unloaded in our entry. It was all in ceramic dishes with cling wrap over each dish. They also provided disposable chopsticks. I cooked the rice. 

We ate, and enjoyed (with complaints from one fussy boy who ended up completing his meal voluntarily with a PB sandwich, another boy said it was okay but not as good as food I cook :D). David washed up the restaurant's dishes and then this morning he put them in this bag outside our front door.

A friend from Australia called me for my birthday yesterday afternoon and was surprised to hear we were having a Chinese for dinner. It hasn't occurred to me that it was odd, no more odd than having Chinese food in Australia. But I can see her perspective. Tokyo really has quite an array of cuisine choices. We've eaten Korean, Indian, Mexican, Italian, Egyptian, and, of course American (McDonald's, for example) here. And that is a family that doesn't eat out very much, although I think we eat out a lot more often here than in Australia. 

There are always new things to experience and learn when you're living in another culture. Certainly it's hard to get bored. Sometimes the idea of being able to relax and risk boredom is attractive. But most of the time I love the life I live, especially as someone who plots constantly to stave off boredom.

Today's joys

One of the few trees in the park today that was fully in bloom. Most were only
partly blooming. The effect when it's all pink and no leaves is spectacular.

First I want to clarify something from yesterday's post, because I've had a couple of people worried. The final point in the list was vague and could have been interpreted any number of ways. I was only referring to the fact that we're fast approaching a new stage in our family: children becoming adults and not living at home anymore. It's a big change after nearly 18 years of parenting. Sorry if I had any of you worried!

Today is my birthday and I planned a couple of special things:

I'm always captivated by these crazy bushes at this time of year. Very ordinary
the majority of the year, when they're allowed to, they have these crazy
loopy branches covered in flowers (often they're pruned back along paths
and roads).

1. I arranged to meet a new friend for coffee (she was so sweet—though I'd initiated the meeting, she paid for my coffee and a snack). It was a delightful time of getting to know one another (though I feel like I talked too much).

The park wasn't peaceful. There were hundreds of
 people and bikes and dogs.

This tree is just down the road at "our" river. I've
been watching it gradually break out into delicate,
vibrant green for a few weeks now.

2. As the weather was shaping up to be pretty good and the cherry blossoms are almost in full bloom, I decided to take my new camera (an early birthday present) and ride to my favourite park, which happens to have a Sakura Festival. The photos in this post are from that ride.

These also are gorgeous, but a little more robust than sakura. Rapeseed plant.

3. I've also organised for dinner that I don't have to cook. It's home delivery from a small, local Chinese store. We've never done this before, so it will be interesting to see how it goes. They come highly recommended.

I just love tulips.

It's the good unexpecteds that always delight me on a birthday, but I know to make some special plans and keep my expectations low otherwise I'm likely to be disappointed. Looking back in "On the Day" in Facebook, I can see some unpleasant unexpecteds that happened early on in parenting (like a poo-accident I had to clean up). Thankfully those days are mostly over, but teens can still be remarkably unpleasant.

Today's pleasant unexpecteds so far:

I loved watching this little family trying so hard to get their
 daughter's first ever photo with sakura. 

• Two boys switching pre-school jobs to enable the one with a gash in his palm to skip his usual washing up. They were very diligent and responsible and the best thing is that I didn't have to intervene at all.
• A very busy friend messaged me and offered to take me to coffee later in the week.

The day isn't over yet, so we'll see what else turns up.

What's on my mind?

There are lots of things I'm thinking about just now. I don't want to write much on any of them, but here they are:

• It's been a good Spring Break. Camping, of course, was the highlight. It's been unusually grey and cold, though, and I'm longing for the warmer weather, but things are looking up in the week to come.
• Sakura are blooming. It is, as always, a beautiful sight.
• It's my birthday tomorrow. I've got a couple of low-key things planned. Hopefully it will be a pleasant day.
• One teenager has been particularly self-centered in recent weeks. I've felt quite picked-on and frustrated. I've even slammed a door or two. I'll be happy for him to go back to school tomorrow.
• Our beloved field director has been battling cancer for about a year now. After things were looking up in the last month or so, his condition has taken a turn for the worse. It's impossible to understand and hard to accept.
• His wife is our "line manager", so though she doesn't closely supervise us, it impacts us more than it might otherwise. Not to mention that they are friends and they are also a "boy" family (with four, not three). Our hearts are sad.
• Life grinds unceasingly forward. From here till mid-June life will be busy and potentially a little out of control. At the end of that we will, Lord willing, have a high school graduate in our house (and a middle school graduate too, might I add).
• My parents will visit during graduation season. Something I'm looking forward to, yet at the same time it will add to the craziness.
• On that same note, it feels like we're headed for a closed door, or a turn in the road. It will be a change, a big change, and we're not sure what lies after that point.

I was challenged by our sermon this morning about continuing to choose to live in a way that is controlled by the Holy Spirit. That means a willingness to accept where God takes us, where he asks us to go, and what situations he gives us. Even a desire to kick and scream about our friends with cancer or our difficult-to-like teenager aren't totally pleasing to God. He's big enough to deal with our screaming, but he also wants us to follow him no matter what.

"Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the sinful nature with its passions and desires. Since we live by the Spirit, let us keep in step with the Spirit." Galatians 5:24-25

Interesting English

As usual I'm on the look out for unusual sights and word-usage while I'm out and about. I found a few recently and snapped photos of them.

I'm wondering what version of English a "dust port" comes from. Otherwise known as a rubbish bin or trash can. In Japan usually known as a gomi bako, how did they get "Dust port"? 

This motorised scooter was parked next to my bike at my local supermarket. I'm wondering what the invitation is: "Let's4" seems an odd thing to put in that particular place, not to mention that I need a noun.

This is not a Japanese app, but the language seemed a little odd to me. "Ponding on the road" and "Breathing is very good in your area". How would they know the state of my lungs? I guess they're talking about pollution?

I spotted the next sight as I drove along a local road. Someone got all excited about putting up warning posters at their local rubbish-collection station. I think it is just English and Japanese.

To finish off, I was reading in an orthodontist's waiting room this morning and found this sentence: "Another hallway was perpendicular to the staircase." This gave me vertigo! Which angle of the staircase did the author mean? That the hallway angled upwards towards the ceiling? Because this is a Kindle book I can look up this word usage in the book and I'm not too surprised to find that this author uses this slightly unusual word three times in the book. She must like it!