Norman Rockwell Painting

Today, as we were finishing our last bites of lunch at our picnic table on our front porch, a guy stopped his car in the middle of the road to tell us that we looked like a Norman Rockwell painting and how lovely our family is. Last week someone told Joel our place looks quaint with two rope swings hanging from the large maple tree and our big garden.

Our live"Normal Rockwell" children

Texts

It's been a year since we left Mozambique and the thing I miss the most are the texts. In Moz it was cheaper to text than to call and anything received didn't go against our pre-paid credit. So texts were often the way we communicated with friends and colleagues. Often I would get a text from a friend that would start a conversation. Sometimes it was serious, sometimes not. Many times the texts were just little things that one of us saw that we wanted to share with someone. For a while I had an on-going conversation about how hot it was. We would write texts to the tune of "You know it's hot when...(you burn your hand on the wall, you tell your sister it's cool at 90F, the hairs on your toes stand up because they don't want to touch each other).

But the texts meant more than the silly conversations. They were a sign of friendship that cared. The friends that we got to know in Moz became family. We shared life together, faith, laughter and tears, tea and meals together. I miss getting together with friends. We haven't found friends with whom we really click like that and sometimes it just aches.

To my friends...

A different reality

For the past six months I've been working at a domestic violence shelter. I answer the hotline, work with the residents of the shelter to find housing, and various administrative tasks around the safe house. I really like it. It is a refreshing change from the vague job descriptions that I had in Mozambique. I like working with the women, feeling like a listening ear makes a difference as well as working for peace. My hours have fluctuated--first part-time then full time because several co-workers left and now they have returned to part time which is better for me and our family. I work three shifts a week--a day shift, an evening shift and an overnight shift. For someone who has always needed a lot of sleep, I can only say it is by God's grace that I am adjusting to the weird hours and not always taking my exhaustion out on my family. I am learning to be more assertive (something I've always struggled with).

I (thankfully) have never experienced domestic violence. I find myself incredulous of the energies people go into to control another person--taking off shower curtains, removing wheels from cars, isolating them from friends and family, restricting what one can wear and the physical and verbal violence. I initially thought that I have lived a fairy tale life. I am now wondering if the life I have lived, in actuality, is what God wants everyone's reality. To live a life surround by love, enveloped in positive encouragement, supported in grace through failure and heartache. My prayer is that Christ's light shines through me to those whom I encounter and gives them a bit of God's all-encompassing love and grace.