Being in the valley

For some reason, for the past three weeks, Andrew and I have been in a bit of a valley. We've analyzed it, talked it over and tried to figure it out. I don't think we've reached any conclusions as to why, and thus that makes it harder to address or try to "fix."

I've had valleys in every part of my career, at every place I've worked. So I know that what we're feeling is not just because we're missionaries. Everybody has down days, tough weeks, long and melancholy months. That's just life.

I can generally point to my current feelings of being in a spiritual or emotional valley to frustration with myself for not being as productive in my missionary work as I think I should be. I've had trouble achieving measurable results, projects haven't turned out how I wanted and in my frustration I've struggled harder to focus, to stay on task and to be as creative and motivated as I normally am, which leads me to feel disappointed in myself, and thus melancholy.

Where my melancholy is exacerbated is the various additional feelings that get layered over the melancholy and complicate things.

1. Failure. Because when you only hear the good stories of victory and achievement from missionaries, you tend to think that if you're having a less productive week or month where for every accomplishment are several failures or setbacks, you feel like a failure, that you're not "doing a good job." It seems like we missionaries are constantly reporting these series of successes or results of our hard work. When you don't have anything positive to report, you feel less valuable as a missionary because you are less productive.

2. Guilt. As a missionary, knowing that your salary and support is coming through sacrificial donations from generous but not necessarily well-off people around the world puts extra pressure on you to achieve and produce consistently, all the time. You don't want to waste the precious donations of so many loving and supportive people by failing to produce massive amounts of quality work each week or month.

3. Spiritual questioning. You ask yourself: Is my feeling of melancholy, my lack of focus and concentration, my emotional exhaustion the result of some kind of spiritual failure on my part? Do I need to pray harder, trust more, read the Bible more, basically work a lot harder on my spiritual life?

When you're already emotionally and physically worn out from the work you've been doing, feeling like you need to push harder in your spiritual life just adds to the feelings of tiredness you're already battling.

I think the hardest part of being a missionary for me are these times when you spiritualize your work. In all honesty, I find it tempting to have a job "just for the money." There are fewer layers of complicating emotions that come with a job where you're simply in it for the paycheck, and don't have the conscious pressure all the time that your work is tied up in the eternal destination of millions of people around the world, as well as in reviving and upholding and inspiring the Church. For me, that's just a lot of pressure when I go to work that I haven't had at secular jobs. Yes, knowing my work has eternal significance (I actually think all work has eternal value, but you know what I mean) gives meaning to my workday, but it also adds a lot of pressure.

Anyway, a couple of things spoke to me this week in regards to these feelings. First, one day, while I was trying to force myself to put in a few more hours work to make up for the hours where my efforts hadn't produced anything, I heard the words in my head "man is not a machine." I reflected on what that phrase meant, and I concluded that I am an organic, living human being who gets tired. I am not a machine where I can turn myself on when I walk in the office door, work like a robot all day, and then turn myself off when I go home at night. I have feelings that can drain my energy, such as disappointment, loneliness, isolation, frustration, resentment and self-criticism. I think when I heard the words in my head "man is not a machine," that was God speaking to me and reminding me that there are times when I just can't work as hard or that my efforts will be less productive than other times because of the emotions I am experiencing, and this is OK.

Second, Andrew preached a sermon in church last Sunday about Sabbath. While it was mainly focused on our need to rest in God regularly, and this is generally associated with a certain day per week, it helped me realize that God recognizes our need for rest, for pulling back and recovering from our work. So when I feel how I've felt the past few weeks, it may be a signal that it's time to give myself a break and a little room to be less productive until I recover my strength in God and can push it hard again.

Third, this article that I ran in Engage by Howard Culbertson talks about how being a missionary isn't about the measurable results you can see, but in simply being obedient and dedicated to the Lord of your life. I think this can apply to anyone, whether you are a missionary living in another culture or not. I encourage you to read it. http://engagemagazine.com/content/doing-mission-well-dedication

No matter what job you have or what demands and pressures are on you, whether you are called a missionary or simply a Christian who lives a missional life in your own community, we all have these times when we need to give ourselves a bit of a break and realize that we are not machines, that we need to rest, allow ourselves to fail, and know that sometimes our efforts won't achieve measurable results to our own expectations, and this is OK. Sometimes, I think we can be harder on ourselves than God is on us.

And we need to know that, even though we are products of cultures that place greater value on humans who achieve great results, our value and worth is not tied up in our productivity and successes, but simply in our identity as the beloved children of God.

-- Gina

Teaching live webinars

For the past five weeks, I have been teaching a live webinar series on "Powerful Storytelling" to as many as 100 participants who live and work in Asia, Africa and Europe. I have been doing this each Monday in partnership with the Asia-Pacific Region's communication team, who are handling the tech side of the whole thing while I teach the lessons I've written on how to communicate a story in a compelling way.

It has been super exciting to me that the curriculum I wrote two years ago is getting out to even more Nazarene ministry personnel around the world beyond the Eurasia Region.

Since I began working with Engage in 2009, seeing the stories that people in ministry are developing for their own blogs and newsletters, or submitting to various Nazarene publications, I've realized that offering some basic writing training might be helpful to a lot of people who are already doing the hard work of telling the stories of God's work in their parts of the world. So I've dreamed of this for a long time, and waited to see if my dream was something that God actually wanted me to do.

As the different training opportunities have come my way (a presentation to field strategy coordinators in April 2011, live classroom training India in 2012 and South Asia in 2013, a workshop at General Assembly 2013, and now online webinars for Asia-Pacific, Europe and Africa in 2014), I can see that this is a dream God has given me and has been making a reality. It's amazing to see everything materialize without my pushing down any doors, that they just open naturally.

For this webinar, the series of topics is a little different than what I taught in India and South Asia because it's a slightly different demographic of participants. Here's the schedule we've done:

1. Why we tell stories
2. What makes a story
3. Narrative Writing
4. Interviewing
5. Writing news stories and blogs
6. Ethics

We will have the last webinar in the series this coming Monday. We've been recording each session and uploading each session, along with lesson documents, exercises and sometimes bonus audiocasts to a resource website so that the many participants who can't join us live can download the materials and watch the lesson later.

A week or two ago, I shared about this training with a missionary in the Mesoamerica Region (Central America, Mexico and the Caribbean) and she felt that my coursework would fit perfectly into a seminary class they're going to be offering this fall to train regional missionaries on how to communicate about their work with the local church. I've been asked to write a syllabus for the storytelling part of the class and to give them all my materials, which they will then adapt and translate into Spanish. It's really exciting to see the dream and the teaching spread around the world like this.

I feel really humbled that I get to be part of this. I know there're are a lot more qualified and experienced people out there than myself, but for some reason I just can't fathom, I'm the one doing this.

All this to say, thanks a lot to everyone who has been praying for the webinars and for me. It's been a challenging project, and sometimes we've had technology problems or our participants have had trouble logging in to the sessions. Sometimes I stumble a bit as I teach. But overall, the feedback I've been getting from the participants has been really positive and helps to affirm that this has been a valuable use of my time.

Compassion programs in Bangladesh and Nepal

I know I sort of dropped off about blogging on my trip to South Asia last October, but there was one thing I wanted to be sure to tell you about.

I had the opportunity to visit a variety of compassionate ministry projects in action that are funded through your giving to Nazarene Compassionate Ministries (ncm.org). I'd read about a lot of these ministries but to see them on the ground and the real people who are positively affected was really cool.

For background, many of NCM's projects are run through local churches and volunteers or employees out of local churches. This means that the church is the center and the driver of any activity designed to lift people out of poverty. The church helps the people in its village and surrounding villages with no strings attached -- no one is forced to go to church and they don't have to be a Christian or convert. In fact, many of the people who are participants in the projects are adherents to other religions. At the same time, spiritual teaching may sometimes be offered in conjunction with a project, but it's not forced on anyone. These projects are conducted entirely on the motive of love for fellow man and a desire to improve their lives holistically -- relationally, physically, spiritually and emotionally.

First of all, there is something called a compost project. I saw several of these in rural villages in the south of Bangladesh. Local churches teach people how to dig a square-shaped hole in the ground and then fill the pits with the dung from the many cows that are present in the village. The material turns into compost that can be used as fertilizer to make their crops more abundant and healthy.

Here's a picture of a woman with her compost pit.

Another type of project is a fish pond. Since meat from cows and chickens is probably very expensive and limited, people in Bangladesh eat a lot of fish. NCM projects enable people to dig ponds and fill them with fish, which multiply and become plentiful. It's easy enough to cast nets or fish with a stick and string and hook to harvest the fish and sell them for a profit which enables the owners to buy things they need. They can also eat them for a source of inexpensive protein.

In one project, a family is growing mahogany trees, a very expensive type of tree because the wood is very precious around the world for building furniture and knick knacks. This is a long-term project because the trees will have to grow for many years before they can be harvested.

A seed project is when NCM provides a small scale farming family with seeds or seedlings which they can plant and nurture until they're ready to harvest. From the harvest the family will collect new seeds, as well as sell some of the vegetables for project and eat the rest of the harvest. This creates long-term sustainable living for a family, who may share the new seeds with neighbors who can then reproduce the project on their own land. Here's a property in Nepal where many of the crops are from such a seed project.

The last project, which may be my favorite because I am a big fan of entrepreneurism: Self-help groups. Groups of women and teenage girls band together to save small bits of cash that they have and pool their savings as a group until they have enough to pay out a loan to one of the group members. The one receiving the loan uses it to buy materials to start a small business. With the profits from the business, the woman pays back to the loan to the group, who are still saving, and in turn they give out more loans to group members. Together, they work toward raising themselves and their families out of poverty.

The woman in this picture used her loan to buy a sewing machine and materials to make clothes which she can then sell as her own small business.

The man in this picture started a small snack shop with the loan his wife took out from the group, and together they are building their small business through his wife's entrepreneurism. Although some of the men in the village were derisive of a woman getting into business, this man said he was really proud of his wife for her hard work and business-mind and how she was providing for their family. He defended her from some of the men's criticism, which I thought was really cool.

Another major initiative of NCM is to establish child development centers (CDC). These are small educational centers where village children can come to learn spiritual truth, but also basic hygiene, and to be educated if they cannot go to a regular school -- so they might learn math, reading, English, and other basic skills. They sing songs and also play together and maybe get a hot meal or snack. Some of these CDCs are supplemental to the education the children are already getting, so they might get up at 5:30 a.m. and go to the CDC from 6 to 7 before school, or they might go to the CDC after school. Many of the children are able to participate in CDCs because of people like you who sponsor them for about $25 a month. We visited several CDCs and got to see how happy and energetic the children were.

All in all, I was very impressed with meeting all the individuals who are participating in these NCM projects. The biggest thing I noticed was how full of hope they were. They believed that by doing their part in these projects, they could improve their lives and provide for their families in better ways. They could see a way up from their previous circumstances. I have always respected how NCM operates and the vision that it has, as well as the care it takes to do only good and not harm in the way it conducts its social enterprises. But my respect only deepened after seeing the projects and the people for myself.

I also really enjoyed the chance to just chat (through a translator) with the women in the self-help groups, who had loads of questions. We asked each other what we like to eat in our own cultures, what our husbands are like, and just normal things about daily life. They were simply charming and I was sorry that I couldn't spend a few days with them, instead of a few hours.

Hühnerleber

The other day I went to the store and on a whim decided to buy some chicken livers.

I know, I know. Hey, we both like breaded, deep fried chicken livers. Don't judge. It sounded good.

Trouble was, I hadn't looked up the word for "liver" before I went. I figured with a little pantomime it would be easy enough, though.

At the meat counter I said, "Haben Sie Hähnchen..." and then I pointed to my liver. The woman seemed confused. She guessed, in German, "chicken wings" and then "chicken breast" and I kept saying, "Nein" and pointing more emphatically at my lower right side (never mind that I'm not entirely sure which side the liver is on). Then she asked me if I wanted chicken stomach. NO, definitely not. She asked another lady behind the counter and I heard the word "English" meaning they were saying that this customer probably only speaks English. Both women agreed in German they didn't know what I wanted. I said "organs" in English but still we weren't communicating. Another customer walked up and joined the guessing game. Finally she said, "Leber?" and I knew that was it. "Ja, ja!" I said, happily. The butcher pointed to a frozen meat section and I went over and sure enough, there was a package of frozen Hühnerleber.

And so we had breaded, deep-fried chicken livers last night for dinner. Yum!

King's Day, or Epiphany

I like to think that the whole country of Germany took the day off for my birthday on January 6.

In actuality, it is a national holiday to celebrate Epiphany, a time to celebrate when the wise men found and worshiped the child Jesus.

I really enjoyed having the day off for my birthday. After a leisurely morning, I decided to take advantage of the rare brilliant sunlight to go for a coffee in our neighboring medieval village of Schaffhausen.

While there, I noticed the different bakeries had kiosks outside their shops selling Königkuchen, or King's cakes. I remembered that in some cultures, these cakes are served on January 6 to help commemorate the day, and a tiny plastic baby Jesus or sometimes a small king, is embedded in one of the pieces of cake, and one lucky person will find it by presumably biting down on it while eating the cake. (There's a reason we don't have these in the States. It is actually illegal to embed an non-edible item in a confection.)

I thought it would be fun to try out one of the cakes, since I've never had one before.

I bought the smallest one they had and excitedly
brought it home to try it out. It was an odd shaped round loaf of bread with bulges here and there, and with granulated sugar and sliced almonds on top and raisins inside. I cut a triangle out and ate it. I was surprised, but shouldn't have been, when I almost broke a tooth on something very hard. I pulled out a little white plastic figure of a magi.

I guess that means I get to wear the golden paper crown that came with it. :-)

I'm sorry to say the Swiss King cake was very disappointing. It was really just dry bread. I was expecting something more confectionary, or at least a good dense moist bread, since the Swiss do bread so well. Maybe it wasn't fresh anymore or I should have gone to a different bakery. Well, I wasn't impressed.

That evening, Andrew blindfolded me, took me on a long meandering drive and then carefully led me to the house of a fellow missionary family who hosted a surprise get together for my birthday. Friends from the village came by for delicious cupcakes, cookies and ice cream and decaf coffee. We gathered around the table playing games and laughing. It was a good time. And I received some beautiful roses!

All in all, it was a fun Epiphany, or birthday.

Closing 2013, starting 2014

With Christmas and New Year Day already behind us, we would like to wish you many blessings in 2014! We hope that you spent an Advent season full of love and loved ones, and that you anticipate many good things in the coming year.

Christmas this year was much different from last year. The only common denominator was that it was our second year in a row away from our home and family. Last year we spent the week exploring Croatia on our own, and while we enjoyed the unfamiliar and the adventure, it was a bit too lonely for our liking (except when some friends returned from their own trip and spent New Year's Eve with us). It was also a time of worry, as Andrew's dad was hospitalized due to a heart attack (which thankfully he has fully recovered from).

This year we decided to stay put in Busingen, where, if we were going to be alone, at least we would have the comfort of our own bed, our own kitchen and our own stuff.

It turns out that it was a very social Christmas after all. We hosted a Christmas Eve Day brunch at our flat with overnight blueberry cream cheese French toast, scrambled eggs, bacon and coffee, and much laughing and storytelling among some friends whom we knew were also away from their families at this time of year.

That evening we enjoyed a cultural Christmas experience that was very warm and special, at the home of our friends Thomas and Cornelia. They introduced us to a Swiss/German Christmas tradition of eating together, reading the Christmas story from the Bible, singing some Christmas songs and then sharing small gifts with one another. We felt privileged and blessed to share in this sacred family time, being counted as part of their family for the night.

About 2:30 a.m. on Christmas morning, we set the alarm so we could get up and Skype with Gina's family, who traditionally celebrate on Christmas Eve. It was 6:30 p.m. their time. We had fun laughing with them, watching them open gifts and seeing our niece Scarlett opening toys for the first time, since she is just 1 1/2 years old. 

On Christmas morning, I made Andrew's family's traditional pigs 'n a blanket, with hot dogs, cheese and canned crescent rolls. We opened a few gifts. Then we spent the lunchtime and afternoon with fellow missionaries and friends Martin and Cezi, who had family visiting from Albania. We also invited Gina's chiropractor, who kindly joined us for the delicious homemade Italian and Albanian food.

That evening we Skyped with Andrew's family who traditionally celebrate on Christmas morning. We again watched them open gifts, and then they passed around the computer so we could chat with different people.

We concluded the day with Gina's tradition of watching George C. Scott's Christmas Carol movie.

On Friday, Dec. 27, we drove to Chartres, France, to visit our missionary friends Dave and Betsy, at whose home we spent last Christmas in Croatia. They were borrowing the home of another missionary about an hour outside of Paris and had brought along two of their friends from Croatia, along with their two kids. We joined a bustling household of 6 to make a total of 8, and hung out around the house talking and eating, or exploring Chartres, or taking day trips into Paris to walk the streets and visit the Louvre for a few hours. It was a great time with good friends.

On New Year Day, we drove back from Chartres, and ran into some engine trouble along the way.

About two hours into the 8-hour drive, we began to hear a sudden, loud clanging noise in the engine. We pulled up at toilet/rest stop by the highway. We poked around the engine but couldn't see anything obvious. We saw some different mechanic shops listed nearby in our GPS but we knew they would all be closed for the holiday. So we called Nikolaj, our resident car expert in Busingen, who then called our automobile insurance company in Frankfurt. They told him to tell us to use one of those SOS phones that are placed intermittently along the highways throughout western Europe. There happened to be one at this rest stop. But it was situated directly beside the freeway and the noise of the passing cars was very loud. As a result, we couldn't understand the woman who answered, and who didn't speak English anyway. 

Gina prayed that God would send someone to help us. The next car to pull over, we approached and asked if the driver spoke English. Turns out he was American who lives in Paris. He went over to the SOS phone and told the lady where we were and what we needed. 

Forty-five minutes later a mechanic with a tow truck pulled up, looked at the car and saw the timing belt was fraying. He cut off the frayed part and indicated we were good to go (he didn't speak English either). He wrote out a bill and we gave him both our debit and credit cards. But because we have American swipe cards and not chip cards (which most Europeans have now), his machine wouldn't take them. We only had half of the cash on hand. 

We tried to pantomime that he could drive us to an ATM but he kept waving his hands no. Then we used our cell phone to call some other missionaries in Paris for whom we happened to have a phone number, and asked them to talk to the mechanic in French for us. They convinced him to drive us to an ATM. To do that, he decided to put our car on the back of the tow truck and tow us 20 minutes back the way we had come to a rest stop that had an ATM. We pulled out the cash and gave it to him and he drove away. 

It was an annoying situation but we are grateful that's all that happened and that we weren't stranded on the highway in heavy rain, or at night, or that there wasn't something worse wrong with the car necessitating an overnight hotel stay or something.

We are a week into the new year now, and outside a trip to Spain for a leadership conference at the end of the month, 2014 is a relatively blank canvas for Gina, who doesn't have any plans she knows of other than her normal work routine. Andrew's year has a bit more structure and purpose. He will submit his research proposal to NTC in Manchester, UK, at the end of the month. If it is approved by their council, he will be accepted into their PhD program in the fall. He also plans to study Latin intensely during the next six months, and preach in our local church about once a month. He has also committed to teaching an EuNC course again in Bulgaria this fall.

We want to thank everyone again for your prayers, love, support and giving, which makes it possible for us to continue serving the Lord here in "Germitzerland," far away from home and family. We love you and wish for each of you a year in which you abide ever more closely with Jesus.

March of the ants

Dorli had told me stories about the amazing ants in Sri Lanka. She had lived in the district center for a year in 2009.

At that time, she had had some German chocolate in her apartment and a horde of ants found their way up to the fourth floor or wherever her apartment was and invaded the package of chocolate. She cleaned all of the ants from the chocolate, sealed it into a ziplock baggie and hung it from a clothesline in her bedroom.

The next day she came home to find that the ants had formed a line that crawled across the floor, up the wall, along the clothesline, ATE through the ziplock baggie and were swarming inside, devouring the chocolate. She said they had also gotten all through her zipped luggage and she had had to take everything out and then leave the empty suitcase open in the sun on the ground outside until all the ants wandered out.

With all the warnings about the incredible ants of Sri Lanka, I was not prepared for this to happen to me in Nepal. When Dorli and I went to the mountainous area in Nepal, after the training was done, we left our big suitcases at the hotel where we’d stayed that week for the training, and took only our backpacks with us. The people at the hotel left our suitcases sitting in the reception area, which was open to the outside.

When we returned from the mountains and opened our suitcases, they were full of very tiny red ants.
The interesting thing was where the ants congregated in my suitcase. I had a package of sugar candy — open — tucked among my clothes. There were only 2-3 ants on that. There were, however, hundreds of ants milling around in the laptop I’d brought from the office. They were all over the keyboard and down inside among the keys. I guess they were eating all the crumbs and bits of dead skin that had fallen below the keyboard. No matter how many ants I swiped off the top of the computer, more continued to emerge and crawl around the keyboard and screen for the next 4-5 days. Just when I’d think they were all gone, more popped out.

The other thing they got into was a Ziplock baggie of Wet Wipes. There were hundreds of ants inside the Ziplock bag. They somehow smelled the wet, soapy wipes, ate through the plastic and were eating the wipes. I threw the whole package away. In doing that, I removed most of the ants from my suitcase and found very few after that. I was glad they weren’t all through every item in my suitcase. They had congregated on the computer and in the Ziplock baggie.

Dorli had a bigger infestation because she had had food in her suitcase and they had gotten into most of that so she had to throw most of it away.

In spite of all the warnings about ants in Sri Lanka, I did not have a problem with them in the district center there in Colombo.