We’re in Palmer Lake this week, near Colorado Springs.  We’re enjoying snow and sunshine, vast blue skies and gusty winds, mountains and tumbleweed!  We’re also Debriefing and Renewing (DAR) with an organization called Mission Training International (MTI), known in the mission world for amazing missionary care.  We spent five weeks here for pre-field and language training five years ago.  Now we’re here again to talk about what being on the field was like, how we are hurting, how we feel blessed and what comes next.  This is DAR.

There are sixty three of us here this week for a huge “triple DAR” program, including twenty seven kids!  The kids have their own DAR program.  So far this week they have talked about being “green” (combining the “yellow” of their home culture with the “blue” of their host culture makes them neither blue nor yellow but “green” – a third culture kid), being transplanted (complete with a flower project to illustrate the point), and about the paradox (or pair a “ducks” they use!) of life as a missions kid.  It’s pretty amazing and our kids are in heaven and finally opening up and sharing pieces of their Ugandan stories with their new missions friends.  I guess it’s easier to be “green” when others are green around you.

We too are enjoying time with other missionary couples and singles, hearing their stories, sharing ours, crying together and waiting out the discomfort of processing.  We’re a very different bunch than the pre-field crowd; quieter and less demanding.  Slower to warm to each other.  We give each other space and time and ask softer, gentler questions.  We cry even quicker sometimes and struggle to cry at other times.

Debriefing and Renewal is a program that says even being in the center of God’s will we encounter an awful lot of pain and hardship.  Just look at Jesus in the Garden of Gesthemane.  So we remember what hurt.  We sort through the pain and we re-embrace the calling . . . . or walk away towards a new one.

All prayers appreciated.