fear, other feelings, and the rest of the story

Wow...so long since I have written, but so much I have wanted to say!!
There's been so much to do...packing, printing & mailing newsletters, writing LOTS of thank yous for jaw dropping generosity, filling out Kenya visa applications, making travel plans, shopping for Christmas, shopping for a move to Africa, celebrating an early Christmas with my family, celebrating Thanksgiving....just a lot!

The countdown to our financial clearance deadline last week was a nailbiter! It was the day when we found out of our target date to leave for Africa in January was going to happen or if we would have to wait until July. My feelings vacillated between fear and peace. The peace He provided, never fails me with calm when needed...and He knows when we needed it. Seemed like if I was stressed with details, worry, Jerry was a rock. If he was stressin', I was cool. We work so well. God knew that full well when he brought us together :) About the fear over the deadline...years ago fear ruled my life, but since my return to Him from my prodigal days, it's not been the debilitating frightening pain as before, just little meanders when I forget who's really in charge and got us all in His palm. And the dream helped to bring clarity to the situation....I dream vivid dreams all the time, often very strange, I think perhaps caused by depression meds, but most the time I just find them entertaining. Every now there's one so real that I wake shaken to the core. The last one of those was the dream in high school of being on death row and walking to the gallows under the glare of a poisonous crowd, save one friend that was the only one that wanted me to live. I was hung in my dream. Woke up choking. Yikes. This dream was worse. It was that I saw a snake had found it's way into our house and in the scuffle to try and get it out, Grace and Isaiah were bitten...and died. I literally felt the anguish and loss in my dream, and felt I lived through days of loss. And then I woke up to the "problem" before me, a mere money matter...no illness, no death, no loss of a precious child. Just another wacky dream or God's creative way of bringing things into perspective? :)

Given my own experiences with God, how I could've doubted Him is tragic...but really I didn't DOUBT, just wasn't sure His timing was aligned with ours. So I'm delighted to say God moved that mountain! He brought in $15,000 in donations and $3,000 in monthly pledges in 4 weeks!!! Only GOD can do that! Hallelujah! I am so excited to finally be going to Africa! We're at the culminating point of literally years of praying, planning and preparing and am just jumpin' out of my skin with joy!!!

The only dampening of this happpiness is for my precious first daughter. Olivia is very anxious, nearly paralyzed with fear. She just doesn't know what this move will look like for her and is leaving the familiar. I cry out to God for peace for her that I feel. I KNOW God will certainly provided for her emotional needs as he does for the financial ones, but will appreciate your help in taking it to the Father. I am praying that she will quickly make good friends in Kenya, I believe that if that happens, she will be able to relax and everything else will fall into place for her.

Olivia and Jerry are in Minnesota now gathering the belongings we left stored there when we went for training in North Carolina. I think this is great timing for Olivia to see her good friends again and bid another farewell. They're staying at her best friend's house and Olivia was even recruited at the 11th hour to participate in our church's kids' Christmas play, which she will just love. I just wish I could be there to see it. It's so fun to watch her with her friends, like a flower that opens to the sun in the morning, -having friends that love her for who she is brings out the real wacky fun-loving, creative, good-natured loyal Olivia.

I mentioned how my life experience with God has given me freedom from fear...let me elaborate a bit...I became pregnant with Olivia my freshman year in college, in the midst of a depressed, lonely, dark, rebellious period in my life as a prodigal, running from God and my family in trying to discern my true identity. Becoming pregnant as a single college student at the Christian college my parents' attended, and being the daughter of missionaries, I was devastated...but I now know she saved my life, probably...certainly saved me from more heart ache. Because when alone in that bathroom stall reading a positive pregnant test, I knew my choices would now effect another life beside my own only. Had it not been for Olivia, I might have fallen into drugs or had more bad boyfriends in my history, I probably would have run from God much, much longer. But pregnancy is the hardest indiscretion to hide :) I had to face head on the turmoil inside that was causing me to make my life an effective tornado of bad decisions. It was awful walking around campus being the one every one knew had messed up. It felt awful telling Mom and Dad over the phone long distance in Costa Rica what I had done. Bringing my parents to tears was like being stabbed. So thanks to God bringing Olivia into my life, I stopped smoking immediately, eventually cut loose the bad boyfriends bringing me down more than building me up, and eventually (after a LONG 9 agonizing months and 2 weeks after her birth) gave in to God because of the persistent prayers and presence of my Mom and her words I'll never forget, "You can always come home." They were a salve to my soul. So with a one month old Olivia, I went back home to Costa Rica with Mom and lived home again for a year while seeking healing and redemption from God and my parents and myself, all the while struggling to learn how to be a single mom. I was forgiven and clung to His incredible grace like a security blanket. I knew what depths I was capable of without Him and how undeserving of His great love I am! This is when the height of fear fought to take residence within me. I believe now it was the enemy seeking to keep God's plan, that we now see coming to fruition, from occurring. I could not sleep at night, when I tried to still my mind to sleep, thoughts of the depths I'd sunk to plagued me, movies slowly played of horrible scenes I had willingly participated in and hideous fears wrapped their icy fingers around my heart. Irrational fears that Olivia's biological father would somehow legally take her away from me forever (even though he had attempted NO contact, or to support her in any way). I was lonely and incredibly guilty since my choices meant she was growing up without a father, and that she would one day have to face the fact that he had chosen to not seek a relationship with her. I was sure I had destroyed both our lives and doomed us to a welfare existence. I SO dreaded going to bed because that's when that merciless frigid hand would squeeze harder and harder and make me feel smaller and smaller.

I don't remember a specific turning point. I just know it got better, the more I hungered for and sought God, the easier it was to sleep, to trust. It took years, but God took the fear and gave me joy, "His greater joy"!!! I can't help but shake my head in amazement that through His grace and that of my family, we made it through college -as a single mom & todder; and an amazing man, brought by God, somehow fell in love with this flawed and broken person and saw beauty and wanted to also become Olivia's true father by adopting her a year after our wedding in Costa Rica. Yes, I klnow that was a huge run-on, but breaking up the incredible miracle God has done in this life....just couldn't do it. So now, you know the story and can share our amazement that God has taken the life I shattered and arranged all those broken pieces, made a beautiful family and made our dream for family ministry, to serve his purposes in Africa through aviation, imminent. Wow!

My God is in the business of miracles. I praise You, Jesus!!

3rd Culture Kid

 Olivia would absolutely kill me if she knew I was putting this on the blog...but I just have to share. She won for craziest hair at the sleepover. She actually let me do all this to her hair and was good natured about it. I wanted to get some of that halloween hair color spray, but she would have none of that. She HATES to have her hair cut, or do anything "strange"  that I would do with mine, like allow my stylist to try as many color combinations as she'd like in my hair, or chop it all off in a whim. To me it is JUST HAIR and will grow back if I don't like. My hair is like a mood ring. I don't like it to be the same for too long at a time. Though I have pretty much decided long hair is not for me. The shortest and funkiest  I can get without looking retarded or blimp-like, I'm game. But that's me, NOT my daughter, Olivia. She hates my modern/abstract choices in decorating art, what have you. In Wichita, we had a beautiful floral couch that was given to us, I agree it was pretty, but it was just not my style. I had beige cover for it, that constantly had to be arranged to look nice. Olivia often would just take the cover off completely, and then I'd come back through and put it on again. She couldn't believe I painted our dining room red. She hates that I give her three- year-old brother a mohawk. When I come back from getting my hair cut and/or colored, I know better than to ask what she thinks...so  I say, "well wait 'til you have your own house to decorate, walls to paint, son's head to take care of. " So that's why she would kill me to know these photos are here. But that's just why I have to share!!!

I have come a long way in developing my own personality and tastes since I was her age. My gosh it makes me shake my head...she is JUST LIKE I WAS at this age!! I was a little adult, wanted to be all grown up, not seen as a child in the least. I had wise observations on the statements and actions of my little sister, as she does on her sibs. I wanted to be "proper", not too wild, not drawing too much attention to myself, being just unique enough to feel a bit adventurous. She is painfully, paralyzingly afraid of situations she didn't expect, couldn't see coming, couldn't prepare herself for. I would have been the same. I have slowly worked myself out of the painful shyness I had as a kid & teenager because of which I COULD NOT MAKE MYSELF say something to someone I didn't know, couldn't even think of anything to say, so afraid there would be knots in my stomach. So we're not surprised at her complaints of stomach and throat pain amidst all our moving and making new friends, visiting new churches for support, churches to attend while here for two months of training etc. Just one of the reasons the kids stayed with grandparents while Jerry and I were on the road all summer sharing about our ministry and developing ministry partnerships.

We ask most for prayers for Olivia

with our move to Kenya, because she doesn't know how to prepare herself for this. We've

 done all that we can. She has a pen pal in Kenya who's daddy is also an AIM-Air pilot. We've

 studied Africa extensively in our home schooling. We've studied Swahili. We've talked a lot about the orientation we'll got through for three weeks when we get there, the two weeks living in a Kenyan family's home after that. We've talked about jet lag, race, accents, not drinking the water, crowds, crime, how she'll likely have people pawing over her hair, different culture....absolutely everything we can think of to possibly prepare our precious daughter for what she will face. 

Yet we don't know just what she'll face. We don't know what we'll face. Because Jerry grew up in Papua New Guinea and I grew up in Costa Rica, we CAN assure here that IT WILL BE OKAY, but really,

 how much does that help coming from mom and dad??

We had fun at the mother/daughter sleep over and it was great to see her with friends being her silly, playful uninhibited self. I was SO glad to see her feeling at ease, not out of place, not unsure of what to make of everything as she has been with all the changes in the past couple years. We are at a mission center and all the kids here GET IT... They know what it's like to always be in limbo, never being "home"...but here she can say, "I just live here for two months, then we're at grandma & Grandpa's and then we fly across the world to a country I've never been and I am supposed to call it home and be happy about that and the fact I'm leaving friends behind. I am supposed to smile and be cordial to all the new people I meet, all the people I've known since I was 'this

 high', all the people who said they changed my diaper..." I get what it feels like for her to be comfortable with kids that just understand all that without saying a word.  I understand that she doesn't yet know that that is who she is now  -a child without a "home". From now on, she will always have to stop and think when people ask where she's from. 

By virtue of us deciding God has called our family overseas, we've made her an outsider in the country she was born in. Sure, she looks it and her passport says it, but from now on, she will belong to- not the second country we will live in and make home as best we can (Kenya)- but a third culture...the culture of those kids (like the ones at this center) who don't feel quite at home anymore in their "passport country",  yet when in their at home abroad country, clearly, the skin color, the accent doesn't match; so she is a member of the third culture, made up by smooshing (technical term) the cultures she knows together.

 It will be hard. She will cry for her best friend left behind in the states who will seem to forget her as her life goes on though Olivia's will take a while to "get going", and find "normal" in Kenya. She will cry when she can't see her grandparents her first birthday or Christmas abroad. Will we abort our plans for all the pain this move will cause? Not a chance. We know, having been MKs (Missionary Kids),  that though there is much pain, there is much happiness. Mention a continent now, we probably have a friend there. Listen to the world news, we've got a particular insight into what's going on because we've been there or seen a government do that, we know missionaries there and this is what their ministry is all about.... Our lives are much richer for the experiences we've had. Our spiritual lives are much more developed for the missionaries of great faith who we watched in action, for the nationals, new Christians with faiths that put ours to shame when we doubt that God will not heal or move this mountain or change that government policy. They pray for dinner and it shows up. They pray for healing and it happens. Their life was threatened and cursed and God protected them. 

These are the stories we want Olivia  to see and feel. I want her to cry like I did in despair at the mountainside slums with no running water where the children are dirty sick and starving. I want her to feel what God must when he sees it and hears their prayers daily. God has not only called Jerry & me to the mission field. He's not ignorant to the fact we have three children and there's a reason, probably lots of them he wants them there too. I can't wait to see what they will be. But in the meantime, please pray for my baby as she sees how hard it is to become an MK and third culture kid.

to be a blogger

Here's proof we did the zip line of the Costa Rican rain forest canopy as I mentioned at the end of this post :) This was after our wedding in Costa Rica in 2001. This was the first of two of these type of zip lines we did...this was more scary because you had to break yourself with your hand in a leather glove, though I found that hard to do because my hand was getting hot and beginning to hurt. The second place we ziplined, ear Arenal volcano, was a lot more professional and you had a mechanical brake, but mostly the guides took care of stopping you.

There they are, the joys of my life! My husband the love of my life. Prince Charming & Mr. Right (okay, minus the nose hair he might be perfect, but he IS human) -the man that puts up with an amazing amount of ...everything from me. More on that later. And my three favorite kids in the world: Olivia 1o, Grace 5, and Isaiah 3 (aka Darth Vader, but not as scary giving me the double thumbs up!). 

 Alright,  that's the description on a good day. On a bad day, I want to sell them to the zoo (which I threaten regularly), pull my hair out, run screaming to the hills (or at least to the grocery store which is usually my retreat of choice, from a rough day,  once Jerry gets home) any moms, esp. home school moms can give an "amen" there? I love my kids, I love my man, but somedays, I need a little more personal space, a moment's peace (at least in the bathroom -is that too much to ask?!?)

I've been reflecting a lot on a lot of things. 

-Why we choose to homeschool, why I wouldn't change that (unless my kids really, really really wanted to give "real" school a try,  and it wasn't just because at the moment I was making them do spelling , math or an EDUCATIONAL computer game :), 

-Why I can't wait to get to Africa and see how I can be of use to the children of Africa, orphans of Africa, and Africa Inland Mission in the time I'm not home schooling; 

-and what it feels like to be in the shadow of the valley of depression.

-and how far I've come, no, -scratch that- how far GOD HAS BROUGHT ME since being the rebellious pregnant and unwed  freshman at the Christian college MY parents (both pastors and missionaries) went to,  to today -being a missionary myself, having been on staff at a church as Children's Ministry Director, and making it through college as a single mom to finally get my teaching degree and even, gasp, being successful at it enough to win an award as student teacher of the year. God is amazing...taking the broken pieces of my life that I shattered and making them into a beautiful mosaic. That's the business my God is in, miracles and amazing transformations.

Jerry & I have a blog that is mainly for the purpose of communicating about our ministry of reaching Africa through aviation with Africa Inland Mission. But I felt I needed a place to "journal" if you will, to purge my thoughts and feelings, and find out if there's anyone out there that feels the same. 

Maybe on some things you will think I'm off base, maybe you agree. Maybe you want to dialogue with me...since this cool technological tool of today, the blog, exists, I'm going to give it a shot instead of my traditional random notebook that would end up 

misplaced in a pile in a drawer somewhere, in favor of a cooler looking notebook with all fresh pages. 

So here it is, my inaugural blog post...along  with, of course, photos of my kids. :) I'm a visual learner, you see, so I MUST have photos to make my blog visually appealing.

I've got thoughts I want to share...on depression, on halloween, macs (vs. the pc, not mac 'n' cheese...maybe someday I'll long to post on that, how I wish they made a boxed whole wheat version, but I digress), hair dye, tattoos, other stuff....but it's time to make dinner for my fam and then go to a  mother/daughter sleepover with 

Olivia, So it will have to wait. 

Later, Breanna Friday, Oct. 10,2008

P.S. I mention in my very long sidebar (at right) that among my favorites are the preacher Erwin McManus; the tv show, The Office; and it's not listed as one of my favs, but kind of a given, I believe, since I am from there...Costa Rica. So it was with sheer joy, on listening to Erwin McManus' latest podcast, I shrieked with joy (internally, because I am lying on the couch with mostly flu-like syptoms) when Erwin's opening sermon illustration was about the last Office 

episode and his travels to Costa Rica, and how Toby, from the Office, fell from a zip line through the rainforest canopy and broke his neck. I've done that (the zip line part, not that the falling from the zip line part)!!! Jerry & I, in fact all of my family (the adults anyway) did that on our wedding trip in 2001. Wahoo!!!! Besides that, it was a very timely message and incredible. You should definitely check it out...you can find it at Mosaic.org/podcasts it's the message for 9/28/08, from the "Falling Forward" message series, entitled, "Fear"(the Erwin McManus' one, not Hank Fortener...Hank's I'm sure is great too, but haven't listened to that,  and can't imagine he would use the same illustrations as my main man, Erwin.)