Someone made a comment about the last blog – they had been wanting to print it out for an update for the church community, but it seemed to end in the middle.

They didn’t mean it as a compliment, but it seemed to me that if that was the feeling the reader was left with, I have accurately communicated some of where we are at right now.

The last few weeks have probably been the hardest of the entire last year.

We have no normal that we can continue with.  We don’t have a home that we can live in while we wait this out.  Our vocation requires that we be present with our hearts; that we be engaged and whole.  Getting paid for our work requires that we not only DO the work, but that we also communicate passionately and effectively about what we are doing.

I expected there to be setbacks.  I expected there to be hard days and weeks, but I expected that overall, we would be able to find a way.  I hoped that, eventually, the added strain of this continued nomadic life would come to an end.  And now, a year and a half after Beatrix’s death, I feel a bit like I have been clotheslined – knocked over just as we were back on our feet and gaining some momentum.

Now, I won’t leave you there this time…  At the moment, we’re not sure what our options will be month to  month.  I know my eye is getting better; I have another treatment in Lethbridge the first week of February, and probably more sometime after that.  (As long as it continues to improve, they won’t do surgery, although that hasn’t been ruled out yet.)  We have some ideas about what we might do (and where we might live) for March, but at this point it’s just ideas.  March is suddenly too far away to plan for.

We’re very thankful that a YWAM base we used to work with suggested they could use us this month.  And a good friend is going to come stay for a couple weeks – so we have somewhere to live, people to support us, and something useful to do for this month, and that’s about as far ahead as we know for sure right now.

Have you ever seen Demotivators?  They help me to smile a bit when things just get too ridiculous.

I’m trying to see our current situation like the picture above, but this Demotivator seems more appropriate at the moment:

I woke up a couple weeks ago, and my vision was a little blurry.  What with travel and holidays, it took a little bit to get in to see our doctor – he sent me on to the optometrist, who send me on to the ophthalmologist.  It turns out, I had a bleed (stroke!)  in my eye.

Apparently it is quite an anomaly, and they are testing for all sorts of possible underlying causes.  In the meantime,  he is optimistic that I will be able to recover full vision.  But… I have to return to the ophthalmologist once a month to get a needle in my eye until it is resolved (something like 2-6 months).

You may already be able to see the blip in this.  When I told the doctor that we were planning to leave the country at the end of the month, he said, “Absolutely not.”  He then proceeded to explain that he didn’t think it wise for us to leave the country for quite a while.

I’m totally floored.  I felt really good – a couple months closing up in Rwanda, and then moving on to our next project with YWAM Nanaimo (which is what this next blog was supposed to be about, but I’ll have to postpone that to another time).  It felt like we were able to close this season and begin a new one.

I am very thankful for the way everything has been streamlined – various professionals communicating effectively with each other and explaining well along the way.  AND!!  I don’t feel like I have to use Google to figure out what is really going on, because I am being cared for by a doctor who knows more than I do.  (Don’t get me wrong, I am thankful for all the help the internet has given me over the years, but…  I feel much more confident being in the hands of a competent professional.)  I am thankful to have a doctor who is trying to find out the underlying cause instead of just treating symptoms.  I am also thankful that this didn’t happen several months ago in the US, or while we were in Rwanda.

I have had a few days to pick myself up, remind myself of all the things in the previous paragraph, but I’m still having a trouble figuring out how to do some of the things we need to do.  It feels like, just as we were ready to move towards stability, we have been derailed.

Now that we have some long term vision, it’s time to start moving in that direction.  After a long drive back from Pennsylvania, it has been good to celebrate Christmas with family.  January will be spent communicating and preparing, and at the end of the month, we’ll get on a plane.

First, we’ll be heading to Rwanda.  We’ll be there for 6 weeks.  We’re really looking forward to seeing our people there again – it has been far too long.  We have a few goals to accomplish while there, but the overarching one is to close out our time there well.  When we were there last year, we were pretty sure that we were finished living and working there full time, but didn’t want to make any rash decisions.  We did our best to put things into a holding pattern.  As we have continued to talk over the year, we have decided that, while we may return, it is time to move on from that season.

“On our way” back to Canada, we’re going to make a stop in the Philippines.  In YWAMese, we would call it a “pastoral visit.”  So I have been trying to figure out how to define that in a way that makes it make sense for us to go all the way to the Philippines for 2 weeks, for a visit.  We have some wonderful friends who have been working there for, I think, 7 or 8 years.  It is difficult to describe the slow, cumulative toll that is exacted by cross-cultural living, by repeatedly witnessing trauma, and by the constant weight of responsibility.  It sneaks up on us.  It is hard to pinpoint because it manifests as depression, an inability to stop and take a rest, irritability, severe criticism of a culture (either home culture or host culture), physical illness, or a hundred other things that don’t really seem related.  It is also difficult to describe because it is often perceived as complaint – when most of us joyfully undertake these difficulties…  it is just that they are difficult.

The good news is that one of the best aids in the difficulty is not being alone.  Having people enter in, listen, encourage, and occasionally bring a broader perspective has been our biggest support over our years in Rwanda.  As we have been discussing with our beloved friend, we realized we have the time to go – so at the end of March, we’ll make a side trip on our way back to Canada.

One of the things I have had to learn over the years is how to communicate information effectively to groups of people in various distracting circumstances (in a market, in an airport, during a meal).  Information people need (we’ll be eating supper at 6, we have to be ready to go to the airport by 4 am…), but that isn’t necessarily interesting.  Standing on a chair and yelling, “Everyone SHUT-UP!” is somewhat effective in stopping conversations, but it tends to create a hostile audience.  So my favourite way is to start the announcement song – about how boring announcements are – and usually by the end people have joined in and are prepared.

So – pretend I’m singing (or don’t, it’s painful to listen to), and that you are joining in… and…  I’ll do my best to make it interesting.

While in Pennsylvania, we were hoping to answer some questions:  Now, what do we do with the rest of our lives?  Where do we want to be in the next 5/10/20 years?  What steps can we take now to start to move it in that direction?

Our vision hasn’t changed.  We are still passionate about and feel called to work in a missions context, with a strong focus on discipleship.  But the ways in which we see ourselves pursuing it have changed.

Returning to North America after 5 years in Rwanda, we have seen our home culture with new eyes.  We have been evaluating the ways our normal modes of living contribute to injustice across the world, ecological destruction, and increasing experiences of anxiety and depression.

We can’t believe that this is a good way to live; we believe we follow a God who has some better ideas than this.  So: long-term, we want to experiment with some ways of living that are more just and ecologically sound.

We appreciate many things about the Discipleship Training School.  It is a model we are familiar with, and want to incorporate into what we are doing as a way of teaching what we have learned about God’s Kingdom, (in)justice, mental & emotional health, and missions.

Lest you think this is all ideas with no substance, we DO have some concrete ideas about how/where we will do this.  We are also planning our next steps with our current capabilities and long-term goals in mind.  You can look for more concrete “announcements” of this in our next few posts.

Hello!  I meant to write this blog post two months ago, with a heads up that I would probably be quieter for a while, but what with one thing and another, it’s November now.  One of the main problems was our camera.  At the end of August, I went for a walk in the rain.  I thought I had taken everything that couldn’t get wet out of the rain, but about 24 hours later, I found our camera inside the bag in a soaking wet case.  I put in in rice, and then when we got to Pennsylvania, I put the rice and camera in a cupboard and left it.  I’m doing much better than I was at dealing with stressful things, but I didn’t want to face up to the fact that I had probably wrecked our camera.  As long as it was in the rice, I could hold on to some hope.  Schrödinger’s camera.

Last week I finally felt like I could face up to it, and, surprise!  It still works!  So here are a few long-promised pictures from inside the tiny house we have been living for almost 3 months now:

It has been a great space for us!  It has been so good to be able to live alongside the family we are helping, but also have some space to ourselves.  It has also been really good for us to be able to be in the same place for a while.  (I’m actually not sure how to say these things strongly enough.)

It is true for all of us, every day of our lives, but this last year I have been faced each day, each moment, with a very clear choice:  grow or die.

The option to just take the despairing route almost always feels easier (and certainly justified) in the moment, just as reaching towards healing usually feels impossible.  It’s like facing the choice of climbing stairs or going down a slide.  The slide is easier and feels better at the moment.  Every moment on the slide makes it harder to stop or go back up.  And the stairs are work.  But… the stairs are the only way to the place I actually want to go.

One of the things I have had to do, in order to heal, is close myself off from so much other pain – the pain of my friends, the pain of people I meet, and the pain of different injustices in the world.  I don’t have the emotional resources to empathize.

I was considering this more carefully as I was thinking briefly about the border situation in the US: parents trying to move towards a better life, and having their children taken away from them.  I had to stop myself, before I even got to the question, “What is really going on here?”  Because I can’t take it right now, the extra pain of considering that will undo me.

But I do NOT want to be a person who refuses to empathize, who will not look at the world around her for fear of seeing the pain.  I don’t want to be someone who denies reality because I prefer to believe a comfortable fiction.

I love the Jewish concept of tikkun olam (literally, “repair of the world”, alternatively, “construction for eternity” according to Wikipedia).  That work is something I want to be a part of.  Somewhere in my soul is a deep conviction that I am here to make change in the world; to make this world a better place.  I know this.  (I believe this about you, too, by the way.)  Over the course of this last year I have received so many encouragements and affirmations in this area.  Some have been intentional, and some have just been offhand comments, but I have grabbed them and held on to them with all of my might, so that I am feeding the hope that climbing these stairs will be worth it.  I have a small glimpse of how broken the world is – and a small glimpse of how glorious it could be.  I want to work with individuals to help them become more whole in every area of their lives.  I want to face systems of injustice and come up with new, creative ways of living.  Each encounter with brokenness makes me all the more determined to be whole – to chase and pursue healing with all that I have – so that I can do the most I possibly can to share that healing with the world.

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As I write about the things that have helped this year, it could arguably all be classed under self care.  Over the years, I’ve watched people work themselves until their bodies quit under the emotional strain.  I recognize these tendencies in myself, and know how easy it can be to do when your work is something you are passionate about.  So I have resolved to learn about and practice good self-care over the last few years.  I’ll be no good to myself or anyone else if I work myself to death.

I couldn’t eat the day Beatrix died.  I didn’t feel like I could eat the next day, either…  but I knew that for my heart and brain to deal with reality, I would need fuel.  So I made myself eat something – I managed to get down some rye toast.  And since then it has been a daily fight to put nourishing food in my body.  To come up with the energy to prepare it…  when I would much rather just consume a bag of chips.

I’ve went for massages occasionally.  This is a ridiculous extravagance to me.  But when there is nothing I can do to alleviate the emotional pain – at least I can get relief for some of the ways this pain is showing up in my muscles.

Self-care has meant going outside, and moving my body.  I go for lots of walks.  This usually has the dual benefit of getting me some exercise and having some time in nature.  My friend Dave says that after just 15 seconds among trees, your brain chemistry (and emotional state) is changed for the better.  (And he has a masters degree that has to do with our interaction with the natural world, so I believe him…  In this area, anyway. 😉 )

Sleep has been a struggle for me for as long as I can remember.  And I know that getting a good sleep can be a major factor in mental health – so again, I have worked hard over the years to have good “sleep hygiene” (basically, a regular going-to-bed routine that doesn’t include screens, I don’t work in the place where I sleep, and a regular bedtime).  Going to bed early and not being tempted to stay up doing nothing is the hardest part… but so important this year, because I just stay up late and get melancholy, miserable, weepy, and because I’m tired I just sink and sink.

And grace:  recognizing that there are days when I. just. can’t.  Not beating myself up when I’m too tired to make the initial effort, to do the thing that will make me feel better.  To receive forgiveness, pick myself up and try again on the days when I use maladaptive coping methods.

These things are all difficult because they have little or no immediate benefit or results.  And it has been so much harder because of our nomadic lifestyle this year.  But little by little by little, I have been able to see the way that working to take care of myself in these very basic ways has paid off.

In addition to strong boundaries, I have come up with some strategies to help protect myself in social gatherings.

You know the kind – where there aren’t enough people for you to just be unknown, but more than the 1 or 2 that would be easy to hang out with.  Office parties, weddings, funerals, church,…   (Sidenote:  I think this is a big reason why church is so hard for people who are going through something hard.)

Now, I pretty much always have a plan.  (A couple weeks ago we were at my parents’ house, and I suggested we all do the short hike up Star Creek.  My mom eyed me warily and asked, “Why?”  I was a little taken aback… “Um, Vitamin N(ature), exercise, um… quality time?”  You know, all the things implied.  But she knows me.  She thought I might have a secret agenda.  HA!  No mom, I’m an adult now.  I don’t have to trick adults into buying me ice cream by asking to go for a bike ride.)

Going into social events, I usually have a few people I specifically want to see, or some conversations I want to have.  It doesn’t mean I don’t spend time with other people, or that I don’t have unexpected conversations, or that things always go according to plan, but I plan to have meaningful interaction.

In this last season, it has been important to make sure that I have an out if I get too tired, or if it gets too hard.  (There was a specific church service that I really wanted to go to in September, but it meant that as soon as they announced the greeting-shake-hands time, I went and hid in the bathroom until it was over.  I mean, is there any more awkward and anxiety-inducing social event than greeting time at church?  Is this just me?)

Also in September, there was a wedding I really wanted to go to.  I knew there would be a lot of people there that I know a bit, but am not close to (these have been the hardest people to be with), and a few things about the wedding that would be particularly painful.  When we got there, we were at a table with a couple who we have been getting to know over the last few years, and who we like a lot.  They are wise, sensitive, and safe people.  So we just hung out with them for most of the time we were there.

One thing I know:  if you are already engaged in a conversation, other people (who might say difficult things) are less likely to come and start talking to you.  So this became a strategy for engagements that I wanted to go to, but knew would be a stretch:  ahead of time, I identify one or two people who will be there, that will be easy for me to hang out with.  (And aren’t crucial to the event, like the bride or the family of the bride.)  I haven’t even always stayed with these people, but knowing ahead of time that there is someone who can be an oasis has given me the courage to rejoin the land of the living.

Beatrix would have turned 3 today.

Mike’s sister put this together for the funeral, but due to technical difficulties, it didn’t show during the service.  I wanted to put it up here, but it took awhile to figure out how to post it on the blog, and it just seemed like strange timing.

I thought today would be appropriate, so we can remember together.

I’m off to the lake.

I had a really incredible birthday.  Mike and I went for an all-day kayak trip, and it could not have been better – the distance we chose was challenging, the weather was nice but not too hot, and the wind was mostly at our backs on the return trip.  The next day I got to go see Walk off the Earth live.  With a friend.  For free.  I can’t say enough about what an incredible show they put on, and how awesome it was to see them live.  Watching their videos this year has made me laugh, renewed awe at what creativity can do, and given me some hope that I might be a person again someday.  And so, in the midst of fun songs, I found myself weeping with awe and gratitude to be 10 feet away from this live performance.  This celebration felt like a fitting way to mark the end of this season of intense grieving.

That said, we have some hard days coming up soon.  Next week is Beatrix’s birthday, and a few weeks later we will mark one year since her death.  We have been trying to figure out what we should do…  We know that we can’t just ignore these days; we can’t just pretend it is like any other day.  We have to get through the days, somehow.

I didn’t want to be on the move again until after her birthday.  There are such a variety of ways we could mark the day.  It felt weird to celebrate the day as a birthday – that would just be too sad.  I found a good, long kayak trip nearby that I am planning to do that day.  Mike is going to have lunch with a friend.  Then Mike suggested we get an ice cream cake (we LOVE ice cream cake).  And we have a dear friend nearby, whom we have a tradition of going for ice cream with, who is going to come help us eat it.

On the anniversary of her death, we are going to be on the move – in northern Ontario en route to Pennsylvania.  We have some friends there – who are due to have their own baby shortly after (their story is somewhat interwoven with ours; you can read more here).  Mike has played board games with him – both in real life and online.  He is a good friend: wise, kind, and sensitive.  We didn’t want to impose too much given that baby could come any day, and we wanted to be able to have our own space, so we splurged on a place nearby.  Its a really beautiful area, with lots of water.  So I’m going to (you guessed it) spend the day kayaking, and Mike is going to play games.  We’ll have something to do with our time, and be surrounded by beauty.

The next morning we’ll get up and move on – to be part of a DTS team debrief as they return from outreach.  And a few days after that, we’ll be arriving at our next temporary home in Pennsylvania.

I don’t know how we will feel when these days actually come – but we have tried, together, to figure out what it is we might need and make provisions for that.