Outside it’s dark and late but the never-ending Saturday night is much upon us in Nyahuka. Speakers blare, music pounds and the cries of revelers echo. This is the weekend in a small African town.

On our wooden couch the Prime Minister is sprawled out with arms above his head sleeping just as babies do, relaxed and unconscious. This of course is Christ School’s Prime Minister, not the British one. K is quiet, thoughtful, intensely curious, sweet and artistic. He is spending the weekend with us before trekking home to his village area post-school.

Today I got another chance to be a servant as I worked as a “driver” for a local wedding of a person close to many of our staff members. I had never before met the bride and groom but I sure got to see them up close and personal in all their glitter and relational gore as I ferried them over dirt roads, through deep mud and between twelve feet tall columns of spear grass from one home to the church from the church to the reception. It was about eight hours of driving, waiting, loading, driving, waiting, unloading, and sitting through what turned out to be one of the better wedding services I’ve attended here.

As I stood beside my freshly washed and decorated vehicle, shaking out car mats and brushing off seats I got to be more than the all-important white person. I was simply a helper in the drama of wedding. Their thanks was simple, kind but not overdone. I was blessed with good conversations on each leg of the journey, with smiles and laughter at the events of the day, with a free floating sense of being carried along on something so much bigger than myself. Something so much bigger than the day’s events. I did it with Him.

After a night and day of vomiting, naomi is mending. David managed to plow through thirty-some teacher contracts all while tending our children and greeting our twenty to thirty visitors while I was away on my errand of mercy. Now I relax with my husband and thank God for all this wedding has reminded me that we have: for each other, for a shared intimacy unmarred by previous relational baggage, for memories of 11 great years together, for the promise of new duo adventures up ahead. For the shared accomplishment of creating two amazing children and the deep faith that two more we will parent are soon to come to us. Meanwhile the Prime Minister sleeps on, arms askew, safe in this small haven of family for a day or two.

Being a missionary takes all of who we are and often none of who we think we should, could or would be. It’s baking a cake, chasing a chicken, driving a four wheel drive with a grin and a subservient ” yes, sir!”. It’s hugging my child and paying my neighbor’s child to wash my car. It’s being generous to some workers and scolding others. It’s sorting and packing and giving and organizing over and over and over again. It’s accepting that what you expected never happened but all kinds of cool amazing things you never realized would, did. And this too is success.