Welcome to 2016

This past August we marked one year of living in the tribe. We celebrated with a steak dinner and measuring the boys' growth on the post in our kitchen. I took lots of pictures with grand plans to blog about God's faithfulness this past year, but you have yet to see those pictures.

The second half of 2015 has been a tad busy.

In the last six months we had lots of visitors - a short term college team, 2 pastors from the States, Brant's parents, 2 language consultants, 3 church planting consultants and 2 missionaries from other organizations. That is a whole lot of spaghetti and curry dinners and washing extra sheets and towels.

Our partners had to go back to the States for an emergency, were med-evaced out of the tribe twice for serious medical emergencies and then went back on their regular furlough.

I sat up half of one night with a tribal woman who didn't deliver her placenta; spent an afternoon sitting with women wailing and mourning their dead daughter, and saw a woman whose face was smashed in by her angry husband.

I have taught little boys contractions, cursive, long division, and multiplying fractions. We have studied levers and pulleys and the Civil War. I have nursed my babies through asthma attacks and malaria. I have listened to language recordings and studied verbs and aspect and mode and tense until my head spins.

I have had malaria four times since August. As I type, there is a horrible metallic taste in my mouth from a "new" medicine that is supposed to hopefully kick it "this time." I haven't decided which is worse - the medicine or the malaria, but right now I'm thinking I should have stuck with the malaria.

So today, this last day of 2015, I am tired. Brant is in bed with a fever. The boys are on hour number 2 of iPad playing. We'll tear them off the iPad soon and make them watch movies the rest of the day. We missed the big feast in the village today.

We are limping into 2016, folks.

January marks three years since we were back in America, and we are feeling it. Normally, we'd be taking a furlough about now, but we've had to push it back a bit because of our visa situation. Six months' delay doesn't sound like much, but today, it feels like these next six months might kill us.

And yet.... there's always an "and yet" - this was God's plan to end our year. We rest in that. We begin 2016 with an acute awareness that we will get through each day of this next six months only by God's grace and strength. Every verb that we figure out, every day that we stay healthy, every moment with our boys, every language hour that we log.... only by God's strength. We feel it and we know it.

That's not a bad way to start a new year.