This is life

I keep starting a post, sitting on it and then deleting it and starting all over.  This is my 3rd draft in the past week.  Things have been different lately.  A good and bad kind of different.  See the problem is, we're missionaries.  And we're supposed to have it all together, or it seems that way at least.  Well, like many of the secrets I'll let you in on, we are far from perfect or having it all together.  Oh so very far.

In fact Bart and I have had some pretty knock down, drag out fights lately.  Not talking to each other, yelling, bickering kind of fights lately.  And the kids.  Well, when things are messy in our marriage, it just overflows right into how we treat the kids.  Sure, we try to mask it and do things they will like or whatnot.  But most of the time, we just end up yelling at them and taking things out on them.

So lots of apologies have ensued in the past few days.  Mostly from us, the adults, not the kids.  Though they have required a fair amount of apologies.  I think we were a little too optimistic about moving to Florida, like somehow it would be a fix-all and all of our woes would magically disappear.  Of course, we're not quite that crazy, but we were really hopeful that Florida would look different than it has.

But oddly enough our problems just came right along with us.  Jumped right in the car and followed us here.  How rude.  I'd like to think we were somehow escaping from the life we had left in Ohio.  Escaping the pain of all of the turmoil from Venezuela.  Escaping the bad habits we had formed not having housing.  Escaping the hard transitions.  Escaping the emotional upheaval that has become our lives.  Alas, that wasn't an option.  Shoot.

Now we're dealing with all of it.  Maybe in not so healthy ways.  Our kids have developed a love for Taco Bell, to which I say "FINALLY!"  There are lots of ways to try to avoid our problems.  Food, movies, being busy running errands or learning a new city.  But they just keep creeping on up on us.  Not nice.  But fair I suppose.

See we need to work through these things.  Bart and I were just having a conversation about forgiveness last night.  What does it look like?  How do you know when you've actually forgiven?  What if you see that person again?  And what about the triggers?  All of these things we need to continue to talk through and process.

This time here has felt oddly like a vacation.  How do you avoid that when you have a view of the pool from your place and have access to Disney?  We're trying to figure out how to have a schedule with the lack of any kind of schedule.  Ministry partner development is 100% our goal right now.  Yet it's challenging figuring out how to do that with no schedule, a vacation-like atmosphere and no people to physically meet with.  Phone calls.  Yuck.  That sounds terrible.  But it's the hand we've been dealt.  So we do the best that we can with what we have.  A lot of times that's what life is.  You put one foot in front of the other.  By faith.