This week Quinn has been having nightmares about bacteria (do we really talk about it that much?!) and Naomi asked us yesterday to please “not talk about money while I’m on vacation, it’s so stressful!” Meanwhile, I am doing the classic missionary questioning of our calling: “did I really sign on for this? Why? Did God trick me?”

Taking on Christ School has been the acquisition of a surprisingly endless vacuum of need. Not only money but people and facilities and animals and crops and furniture and a small school clinic and feeding, etc! Over the last few months we have fallen deeper into the hole of meeting those needs. In response; we love our work, we love our life here, but enough is enough is enough – and 24/7 months on end feels like enough.

I have been asking some hard questions of myself, God and a few others I trust. All callings require some death. Saying yes to one thing means saying no to others. In particular, the missionary life is synonymous with the giving up . . . . Giving up close access to family, to security, to the accoutrements of American life. But where do we draw the line? What is enough to give up? How do we make choices to balance our needs and wants for more children or more education or more time together with the needs of the ministry God has called us to? How do we stay healthy enough to live here well; truly able to help people and not just barely surviving? How do we know what we are called to, specifically, and which things we choose to say no to because of our already full load?

It’s easy to get caught up in the vicious cycle of hopeless busyness. We signed on for this, we are called to this, so we must live like this.
But I am reminded that hope is a verb; something we actively live out. We choose to live with hope. We decide to make life choices that will respect and honor not only our ministries and the people we are called to serve but also ourselves and our families. We choose to life full and whole lives, not lives on the margin, lives of desperation and chaos and fear. Proverbs says, hope deferred makes the heart sick. Waiting for the someday when life will become calmer, when the school will feel more under control can be prudent but it can also be a deferring of the hope I choose to live with today.

How does all this fit together? What does it mean? I don’t have a lot of answers yet but I am thankful for David and I together, discussing these things. I am thankful that we are in the same place with our concerns and our dreams for the future. That we both love this ministry and our family and are unwilling to sacrifice either. God has good plans for us and for our students and staff. We trust that as we prayerfully look for his leading, He is going to show us the way forward. Hope is a verb; He is the one who will complete this work in and through us.

But what does this look like? Ah, that is, as they say, the biggest question. It looks different for each of us, different for times and different for places. It means not memorializing or making sacred that which we have decided before. It means being willing to let fresh winds from the Holy Spirit blow through our lives. It means taking another hard look at the life of Jesus and asking Him how to incarnate God here in Bundibugyo with OUR lives.

We will move forward, day by day, choosing hope and freedom over resignation and fear. Asking God to show us what that looks like for each of the 400 in our care and for ourselves and our precious children. And we believe IN FAITH that He will provide a way of escape – a way not out, but through.