Splashing Lava

I am a planner.
I am all about some plans.
And plans give organization.
I like organization.
Oh, sure, I can manage chaos with the best of them and my rapid fire planning makes me great in emergencies. I recall the day my car caught fire and when it was time to start planning, I put my emotional breakdown on hold to formulate a plan.

We're about to leave to go to ... somewhere.... hopefully.... October-ish.
And to that end I've already started lists and packing and weighing of cargo.
(With two kids, we can't put all the hours that go into such a feat consecutively)

Our cargo for trip #2 in August was gathered and ready within a week after we got into country in May.

And yet for all my planning, my life is still chaos. And it's not the kind of chaos that invigorates but the kind of chaos that pushes and pushes and pushes until you explode like a volcano.

Handwashing dishes is a thankless task that never ends. And with nearly every meal cooked from scratch, there are a lot of dishes. We wash at least a load of laundry a day. We're thankful for the washing machine we have access to in town, but still, it's 3 cycles for the diapers (5 hrs total) and the time to hang all the clothes on the line and bring them in and fold the laundry. And there is no catching up.
There are the babies, a toddler who has emotional needs or whatever, and a baby with biological needs or whatever. And to ignore either would be a detriment. And so all day every day is a crazy fight to keep up with the mundane workings of the household.

But that's not what we're here for.

And when amidst all this chaos, we forgot to grab the laptops on the guaranteed 15 minute endeavor to get everyone dressed, shoes, bilum, hat, diaper bag, past the dog, down the stairs, in the car. Or we forget that the diaper bag is out of Marissa's diapers. And it's these little things, these tiny lags in good planning, these tiny failings that push and push and push.

And so we explode.

By the power of the Spirit in our lives, the explosion is short and followed by apologies because it's nearly inevitable to avoid splashing hot lava on one's spouse when one explodes (but it's not very polite). And a blanket is set on the beach, and while James throws stones and broken coral a solid 3 inches (he hasn't mastered throwing yet), we sit and talk about the heart of our explosion.

We had heard it all before but there's no fixing the unfixable. Laundry won't stop accumulating. Babies won't stop nursing.

This isn't what we're here for! We're supposed to be in the village, learning language, working on bible translation and literacy work, working to see transformed lives through the Scriptures. And instead Jacob is doing more dishes while I nurse Marissa again.

But it's been a reoccurring lesson in our lives that God's timing is better than ours. And there's a reason for why our days are spent planning for abstract plans and mostly housework. The reason eludes me, but the faith in my Lord does not. Instead I pray. I pray to appreciate what I have in the manner that what I have warrants to be appreciated.


Longevity, perseverance is in taking the time to stop. Taking the time to break the normal day and take a deep breath by the sea. And sharing those burdens with one another again.
And now that the pressure has all escaped in an awful explosion, we can start again. And it's not so bad anymore. Because we have a spouse with whom we can explode together, and apologize together, and breath together, and begin again together. It's a precious gift.
And a gift we have because the Lord dismissed our timeline in favor of His own.
So we wait.
To see what joy awaits us this time.

Move: An Open Letter to My Beloved Intern

My beloved intern,

Per PBT policy, I’m letting you know straight up in the introduction here that other people are reading this letter to you (because I’m nothing if not a rule follower (HAHAHAHAHA! …when it suits me) ). I’m writing you an open letter because, as preposterous as it may sound, I don’t believe that your situation is unique.  

You have a heart for missions but don’t know what you should actually do.

It is my advice that you should do something.

My husband was in a predicament much the same as yours when he was but a young single lad. He said that it was the only time he ever heard the Lord speak. Not audibly, but distinctly.

“Choose.”

The issue wasn’t that there was any one thing that he should be doing but rather anything that would advance the Kingdom would be a route pleasing to the Lord. ESL, a pizza flipper, a waiter, a literacy specialist, the job title isn’t as important as what you do in that role. And he did them all. And in all of them, he shared his love of the Lord. (Though he wasn’t particularly talented at being a pizza flipper…)

(Though I will say that if your heart is for missions, then what you do should be missions; although, you may find yourself flipping burgers to pay through grad school and I think you can honor the Lord in that position, too.)

Not everyone has a calling, my love, but not everyone needs one.

I think of the parable of the talents. To some people, the Lord has given a heart for missions and a calling. Those that follow that path find themselves being greeted as a good and faithful servant. To some people, the Lord gives only a heart for missions. I think doing nothing with that is what the servant given one talent shows us.
Instead of doing anything at all, even dropping it in the bank to gather basic interest. The man buries his talent and does nothing. How is this man greeted on his master’s return? Not warmly.

You, with your heart for missions, how much better is it if you go home and angst and worry over what you should be doing with your life and end up doing nothing?

Let me give you a little tok save, my love: you’re a millennial and millennials are notorious for not doing anything “for life”. Rock it! Stop worrying about what God is calling you to do with the rest of your life! Maybe that’s none of your business! Maybe you’re called to walk in faith!

Start thinking about what you’re going to do next.

I’ve heard it said that sometimes God tells you to do something, not because He wants you to do that thing, but because He wants you to walk down that road to get to your next turn.

Have you ever tried to turn a stopped car’s wheels to make a sharp turn? It’s not easy changing course when you’re not even moving. Maybe God needs you to just start moving so he can direct you.

I implore you, my beloved little intern, don’t go home and forget.

MOVE!

Here’s a suggestion: You’re already qualified for survey. Come back here and do that. We need that work done soon. Not necessarily forever. This isn’t a commitment you’re making for the REST OF YOUR LIFE. It’s just something you can do for a season.

You wouldn’t be the first person to change careers on the field.

You wouldn’t be the first person to change fields mid-career.

And, honey, you wouldn’t even be the first person to go stateside and do something entirely different.

Feel the freedom in my words to you. Don’t trap yourself under your own expectations to have your whole life sorted out. You are but a mist, my love. Tomorrow isn’t even guaranteed for you. But Papa God has a plan for you (even if he’s playing his cards close to his chest) and it is a good one.

You only need to move.

OK! Well, now that I finished spewing that wisdom all over the place, imma go to bed. I should’ve gone down with the baby but I knew that if I tried with ALL THIS on my heart to tell you, I would only stare at the ceiling for hours composing it. And momma needs to sleep.  

Note: Apparently, my husband informs me, he heard one other word from the Great Almighty:

“Has Santa ever spoken to you?”

Staying Plugged In

It's our job, and moreover our dream, to move out of town and into the village. We'll pick a language group we want to work with full-time and move into where the people live.

Where they speak.

We'll learn their language. 

But we'll learn who they are as people. 

What their needs are.

What their wants are.  

What their fears are. 

What they long for. 

And then we'll translate the Scripture with the hopes that their true need becomes apparent to them as they read its pages. 

But as beautiful as this sounds. There are some problems. 

Namely, we aren't used to living in the jungle. 

We've done it before but it's not really how we live our day-to-day in and out. 

Without the modern conveniences we're used to, life's a lot harder. 

Where's your laundry room? How caught up on laundry are you right now?

What if you had to haul all your laundry 10 minutes down a muddy incline to a river and hand wash them and then haul wet laundry 10 minutes up a muddy incline? And then hang it? And then pull it off the line if it starts to rain? 

How are the state of dishes in your home? What if you had to hand-wash them?

What if you had to hand wash them down at that river I mentioned before?

How's the water coming out of your tap? What if you had no tap? 

What if you had to walk to that same river to get everything you need for drinking and cooking and then filter said water?

How's the fridge doing? Keeping things cold? Can you store leftovers? Does a loaf of bread last more than a couple days before going moldy?

Everything has to be cooked from scratch in the jungle because those staple ingredients won't go bad. Salt, sugar, flour, eggs, oil? Practically immortal. And woe to you if you need to use flour because you've just tacked a good 10 minutes on prep time as you sift out the weevils. 

Now add all the normal components of your life sans modern conveniences. 

So after doing the laundry and the dishes at the river and hauling water back, you also have babies who's diapers need to be changed and need to nurse or have food made for them (more dishes!), you have a spouse who deserves a little attention at least throughout the day, and you have a full-time job. 

Speaking of that full-time job, how do you do Bible Translation and Literacy Work without electricity?

How can I manage my language learning data?

How can I access my translation helps?

How can we format books and stories for printing?

How can we even type a draft up?

There's the old school method: analog.

Write everything by hand and enter it in the computer later. Hope you don't lose anything between those times. Spend a ton of money on buying every single commentary you'll need and have it shipped over and flown in. 

This is a space, money, and time intensive method. And it means I'd be repeating work in town instead of helping other language groups with their projects. 

But there's an alternative. 

Solar power.
The initial set-up is a bit pricey but it's an investment that will pay off quickly in work efficiency. 

And I am overjoyed to say that The Rising Church has hooked. us. up!

A former translator in our branch worked with solar panel systems a lot and gave me a list of things I would need in order to get up and running and a website to buy it all from. 

The Rising told me to put everything I needed in the shopping cart and they would cover it!

Our solar panel system had been sitting at a JAARS export station in North Carolina and just departed for it's international journey (that the Rising is also covering) here!

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Isn't that awesome!?!?!


This is the thank you video we made for the Rising when they initially made the purchase earlier this year. 

Gotta Get That Highlands Kaikai

The food that grows down in Madang is what we call bush food.

Taro, kaukau, and other tubers that are all sweet tasting potatoes.

Not to be confused with sweet potatoes which they also grow.

Greens like pumpkin greens and aibica are … better than collards...

But tulip (pronounced two leap), not to be confused with tulip, which is a lovely flower, is GROSS.

Waxy leaves, growing two to a stem (hence the name. two leaf, tulip. Get it? Yeah!). Like most lowland's greens, they have to be boiled to death before consumption, but tulip never loses its waxy leafiness.

Imagine eating a big bowl of magnolia leaves.

Yuk.

Throw it together boil it in water. DON'T ADD SEASONING!

PNG kai.

We didn't come to PNG for the cuisine.

But the Highlands!

Oh the highlands!

The altitude gives them weather akin to ours, meaning they grow the food of the home land.

Broccoli

Avocados

Onions

Idaho Potatoes

Garlic

Tomatoes

Lettuce

These things often make it down to Madang from those who choose to sell their wares (instead of eat them themselves), but a little beaten and bruised from the journey.

But one thing that never makes it down?

BERRIES!

STRAWBERRIES

BLACKBERRIES

OTHER BERRIES?

I DON'T KNOW BUT I'M SO EXCITED!

photo credit: Tyler  Hewitt

Our main agenda is canning. We've found reason to hesitate on buying a pressure canner so we're focusing on things that can use the hot water bath. Salsa, jam, and pickling. We were accompanied by some friends with great canning experience to learn us in the ways of bush storage.

Without a refrigerator and the power to run it, all of our food options for the months we stay in the bush need a very long shelf life. From dehydrating to canning, we're trying to find ways to keep ourselves well-fed and not resentful (meals are powerful things and to have a good one after a long hard day is beautiful whereas to have a bad one is a gasket waiting to blow.)

Dang, man's looking good!

Ukarumpa was cool, the strawberries were sweet, and our traveling companions were pleasurable. It was a good trip, but with all the canning and dehydrating and freezing (which is preservation for in town not the bush), despite the insistence by our co-workers, it was by no means a vacation!

But it was delicious!

Good Regina!

Regina only makes us more anxious to allocate in the bush soon.

She is clearly an inside dog. But PBT policy is strict. No dogs in the house. But they have no such restrictions on the houses in the bush.
She wants to lie down at our feet. She wants to be near us all the time. She wants to cuddle. But instead, she's set outside and most of the times we come out, we're laden with laundry or headed out to the car. (Yeah! You thought your washer was in an inconvenient location! We have to go outside and down the stairs and woe is us if it's raining! (we call it the presoak cycle).)
The result? SHE IS SO HAPPY TO SEE US!
But Jacob doesn't appreciate being jumped on while taking out stinky trash that has developed a drip. Or the compost with writhing little maggots inside. That could be disastrous.
And James doesn't appreciate being jumped on ever. And he doesn't understand as of yet that if he would just start petting her she would immediately stop shoving her body and nose into him. SHE JUST WANTS THE LOVE!
I think if they had more time to be mellow together they would get along great, but for that we must allocate.

Her work as a guard dog is a curious thing to try to evaluate at this point. We have another dog in the yard who's been known to cry wolf (or LOOK THERE'S A DOG ON THE STREET!) and Regina barks significantly less than he does. But is she just more discerning? It's hard to say that she's able to identify threats when we haven't had any threats for her to identify. So we hope and pray that when the moment arises that you really want a guard dog on the property, Regina will rise to that occasion admirably.
And looking at her lineage, she should, but luckily we've had no reason to find out.
(We have heard her bark and she sounds three times her size and vicious. Good Regina!)

She had worms when we first got her. The breeder tried to get her some dewormer before he shipped her over but we live in PNG and not everything is readily available. So we got some albendazole in her when she arrived and she's putting on weight admirably. Her mother was 110lbs and while the breeder doesn't anticipate she'll be quite as big, she'll definitely be a big girl.

All in all, she's a sweet girl and we're thankful to have her. Jacob and I will go out and sit on the porch in the evening and she'll saddle up for some petting and finally crawl into Jacob's lap. She's been known to play fetch but only for my verbal praises, the hunt is of secondary importance.

Shes a good girl, a quick learner, and a solid investment!

The Dark Day

Matthew 27:45
At noon, darkness fell across the whole land until three o’clock.



I felt like the world going dark at all of a sudden was a little curious, mystical for sure, the kind of thing that fit right into the worldview of the Papua New Guineans. So I wanted to inquire about what this meant to them, what they thought the ramifications were when the sky went black.

"When the skies get dark we know a bikman (prestigious man in the village) is going to die. Jesus is a very bikman, so the sky goes all the way black before He dies."

While I was sitting in a group of men who had a great deal of exposure to the church, to a man in that culture who had never heard the Gospel, how powerful would this story be to him? Not just a story with foreign cultural practice after foreign cultural practice to piece together in a patchwork to discern what happened and it's implication, but this story speaks to his own culture.
When the skies go black, these men know:
This man who is to die is Lord of All.


Check out more stories from the back translation here.

Welcome Back to PNG

Well, we've been in town for about three weeks now and I don't know that anything has gone as planned, which is fairly normal here in the Land of the Unexpected.

We anticipated having our guard dog Regina with us by now, but through a series of typical events in Papua New Guinea, the delays snowballed. Hopefully we'll have her by the end of the week. Luckily, we chose to dog-sit for some co-workers who took a short trip stateside, so there has been a dog on the property, allaying my concern that every fallen coconut in the night is an intruder jumping the fence.

We anticipated having work. And we did. For a moment. The second language group that we're going to visit has a bit more of a literacy slant, putting Jacob at point. Well, the original suggestion involved sitting down and tagging an audio recording of Mark at every verse to sync it with the written text. Jacob listened very politely to all this being explained and then told me later that, in a nutshell, there's an app for that.  Apparently this app will read the text, analyze the audio recording, and sync the text to audio with modest accuracy. In 7 minutes for every hour of spoken text. So a months long project has been shortened to an afternoon.
I anticipated renewing my efforts on that side project for Lindy, but was told to stand down for reasons that haven't been revealed to me yet.

But honestly it was nice to have the time we did to unpack thoroughly. I have a couple more projects for the nursery until it's just like I want it. And I've been reupholstering the rocking chair because use has taught us that any prolonged sitting in it with a fussy baby caused great physical discomfort. I put sunscreens up over our front porch because it gets sun ALL DAY LONG and that's where we were planning on corralling the guard puppy to keep her from all the dangers on the ground level.

And day to day living is a bit more difficult. Both because we have two babies instead of one. And because we live in Papua New Guinea. Grocery shopping is a feat. Laundry has doubled as Marissa goes through more diapers at this age than James and a TON of burp clothes and swaddles. Even dishes are harder to do when there are two babies. James could be distracted or looked after by one parent but unless a baby is asleep… There's forever a need to stop scrubbing dishes and start a new episode of Dinosaur Train on the Kindle, get James water, get Mommy water, get Marissa a new burp rag, let Mommy take a shower, etc. etc.

But even as we get used to the new normal, both babies are steadily becoming more and more independent and the job gets easier.

In a couple days, our traveling companion for our second trip will return to country and we'll get to discuss this trip and how he would prefer to go about it and that may provide us with more work. If not, the Director of Language Affairs will be in country in a week or so and is normally bursting with ideas.
In the meantime, I'll finish up a couple of those forever loose ends from the first trip we went on. Including blogging about some of the highlights from the translation work there.