Category: Other Page 9 of 181

Hot Sweaty Christmas Nostalgia

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On January 13, 2019

In Other

It’s always hot in December, but this year, Dar es Salaam tried to kill us.

It’s not supposed to feel like this until February! I grumbled into the sauna-like air. The whole point of a sauna is how good you feel when you come out of it. But Dar es Salaam is like one of those nasty villains in a Marvel movie who throws you in and locks the door. Now, go bake some Christmas cookies in there! she shrieks in that high-pitched monster cackle. And see if that doesn’t turn you into the Grinch!  

Christmas is all about nostalgia, isn’t it? Fueled by Hallmark movies and Thomas Kinkade paintings and everyone’s perfect Instagram pictures. Crackling fires and children in sleeper pajamas and sparkling lights. You can say all you want that Christmas is about the Incarnation or the spirit of giving or blah blah blah, but actually, it doesn’t “feel” like Christmas unless you get the nostalgia part right. Which is why Christmas is usually the hardest time of the year for Americans living overseas.

But then this funny thing happens once enough time goes by. You do the same thing enough times, even if you hate it, and one day you find your own form of nostalgia. The plastic tree held together by zip ties, the bizarre shopping excursions that include haggling over used shoes in an open-air market, the cans of Root Beer that appear in Christmas stockings. Suddenly you can’t imagine Christmas without those things.

At our mission Christmas party this year, the theme of the gift exchange was food items that we usually wouldn’t buy because they are too expensive here. So we cheered and laughed and fought over packages filled with tortilla chips and nacho cheese, s’mores ingredients, and–the most popular–a homemade cheesecake. Our family walked away with the package of bacon, and it was awesome.

We made gingerbread houses and took our worker’s family to the water park; we made seven kinds of cookies that had to be kept in the freezer so they wouldn’t melt. We went to the movie theater and saw “The Grinch,” but my favorite part of the movie was the air conditioning. We had crepes and strawberries on Christmas morning, because strawberries are hard to come by. Gil gave me an orange-chocolate bar for Christmas, and I gave him a bag of Hershey’s caramel kisses that were on sale (since normally they would have been twelve dollars). But our main gift to each other was running the air conditioner in the living room for the week before Christmas, because air conditioning is the Superhero against that heat villain.

It’s never going to look like a Hallmark Christmas movie, but it’s nostalgic just the same.

13, 11, 9, 7

By

On January 9, 2019

In Other

Josiah calls me into his room and points out a mass of mutilated millipede in the corner.

“I killed it,” he says proudly.

“Um, great?” I say, as I watch millipede juice seep into the wood floor. “How did you kill it?”

“With the hammer,” he says matter-of-factly.

“With the hammer?” I sputter.

“Yeah, I went and got it from the storeroom. And don’t worry, Mom. I washed it off afterwards.”

This is the kid who used to scream as if a velociraptor was in the bathtub when he saw an ant floating around in there. So I guess this is a step in the right direction. Um, congratulations, Josiah, on your first kill. As Aslan told Peter after he took down the Wolf, Never forget to wipe your sword. No problem; Josiah’s already got that part covered.

Parenting is all about baby steps, People. Can I get an Amen? Baby steps.

I sure like these kids a whole lot. Here they are at ages 13, 11, 9, and 7.

Haven of Peace Academy, Term 1

By

On January 6, 2019

In Other

The kids were working hard over in Primary (elementary) school….

But meanwhile, their admin team was having way too much fun…..

This was Hollywood/Bollywood Day during Pamoja Week….our director was the red carpet!

Color Explosion Day…the staff get into it as much as the kids!

International Day: Celebrating our 40 Nationalities

HOPAC’s beloved French teachers. Grace started French this year (grade 7) and says that French is her favorite subject.

Grade 1 Visited the Tide Pools

Grade 5 Celebrated Ancient Rome

Christmas at HOPAC

Christmas Family Fun Day

our beloved music teacher…and Santa!

3rd grade and 5th grade

Presenting all the gifts we collected to Kituo Cha Baba Oreste


Primary Christmas Production of “Jingle Bell Beach!”

By the way….HOPAC is recruiting….Want to work at the best school in the world? 

We are looking for teachers in PE, English, Biology, Math, Economics, and Elementary School. We also need a Special Needs Coordinator, School Counselor, and a new Director.

*Thanks to Rebecca Laarman and her student photographers for most of these pictures!


A Chance to Die

By

On December 29, 2018

In Other

“Missionary life is simply a chance to die.” 

It certainly started out that way. There were a million chances every day to die to myself and my desires, my comfort, my convenience. When everything–literally everything–felt new and strange, when I had to re-learn how to drive, shop, cook, speak, sleep. When the power would go out for twelve hours a day and the ticks and cockroaches were battling to rule my kitchen, when I felt abandoned and alone, incompetent and exhausted.

But time is a miracle-worker. We took control of the electricity and the bugs, the driving became routine, cooking became easy. I learned to communicate. This country gave me my babies, and they have grown and thrived here. After moving six times in our first eight years of marriage, we moved to a house that wasn’t falling down and have remarkably lived in it for nine years. We found our niche in ministries that are fulfillingand flourishing. And the friends….the friends are something akin to siblings who grow up together. Broad and deep and everlasting.

Sure, there are still moments of frustration, like on Christmas Eve when the air was sweltering and the power went on and off four times. But somehow those things don’t matter as much anymore because they’ve just become life, and the good things outweigh the hard.

One day I woke up and discovered that this life that started as a chance to die was now grasped tightly in my clenched hands. This is mine. I like this. Don’t take this away from me. 


The heart gravitates so quickly to familiarity and comfort, to knowing and being known. Amy Carmichael wrote, “Missionary life is simply a chance to die.” But even missionary life, with all of its perceived and real challenges, can become comfortable. 

Comfort isn’t wrong, but it can be dangerous. Like sinking into a beanbag chair with a good book and a crackling fire, comfort makes it hard to get moving. To look around. To consider other people, other possibilities, other needs. It feels so good that it’s easy to say “God wants me here” when maybe it’s really just me refusing to think otherwise.  

Of course, that doesn’t mean that I should intentionally go hopping around from one difficult circumstance to the next, like a self-flagellating monk. But it does mean that I need to be consciously aware of the sinister appeal of comfort to cloud my vision of where God may be leading me. It means I need to allow God to pry open that vice-like grip on what I want out of life, to say Thy will be done and actually believe it.

2019 is certain to be a year of upheaval in my life, with changes coming that will tear into that familiarity and comfort I have enjoyed for so long. May I look up. Open my hands. Die to myself. One thing I have learned–a chance to die is always a privilege. I don’t want to waste it.

I Really Just Want to Be Like God

By

On December 17, 2018

In Other

I was awake for hours last night, frustrated. I’m on Christmas break and shouldn’t be stressed or anxious.

But then it dawned on me–through the crazy busyness of this last school term, I hadn’t had time to process the other stress and anxiety in our lives right now. So now that school is done for a few weeks, my mind has a chance to go there.

I hate going there. It’s been easier to just focus on teacher observations and ACSI accreditation paperwork and our Christmas production and reports cards than think about the future. The uncertainty we’ve been facingfor the last six months has crystallized into an almost-certainty that our time in Tanzania is coming to an end. We’re pretty sure we can make it work for another year and a half, but that might be it.

A year and a half doesn’t feel very long at all when you’ve spent your entire adult life in a place–almost twenty years. If I allow myself to dwell on it, I am overwhelmed with grief at the thought of what we would be leaving. And when I think about what comes after that year and a half, all I see is a black hole. For someone who likes her life planned out at least five years in advance, that’s what keeps me awake at night.

If we have to leave Tanzania, what would be next? Would we go somewhere else in Africa or would we return to the States? And if so, where? We own no home anywhere; we have literally no possessions in America. The cities in California that feel most like home just happen to be some of the most expensive in the United States–not very promising for a family of six living on (likely) a ministry salary.

In a year and a half, we could be starting over completely from scratch. And that is so very daunting and scary. Especially considering that we’ll have one child starting high school and two others in middle school. Not exactly ideal ages for massive life upheaval.

Those kids. Oh, those kids. My kids who are Tanzanian by blood but raised by American parents in their homeland. We’ve already majorly messed with their identity; how would this transition affect them? How would we possibly decide what home, what school, what community would be best for them? Except, we probably won’t have the luxury of making decisions based on what is best for our kids. That is, if I even knew what would be best for them.

So at midnight last night, by the light of my Kindle, I read from Jen Wilkin’s None Like Him: 10 Ways God is Different from Us (And Why That’s a Good Thing). And I was reminded that the heart of my anxiety about my future is that I want to be like God. 



I want to be omniscient, to know everything. I want to know what’s coming. I want to know the very best possible choices I could make for my kids. I want the reassurance that everything for them will turn out okay.

I want to be self-sufficient, to be able to assure myself that we will be able to handle this next stage of life without being a burden on anyone.

I want to be sovereign. I want to have complete control over what happens next, where we live, what we do. Wilkin writes, “We want our rule. We want our kingdom, our power, our glory. We want the very throne of God.”

I can pray, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, but really I want my kingdom, my will.

I really just want to be like God.

So there it is: Just as that ancient Deceiver whispered in the ear of Eve, so he murmurs the same temptations in my ear. You need to know. You need control. You need self-sufficiency.

When really, I need no such things. I don’t need to be like God; I just need God. He is enough. Jen Wilkin writes, “Our limits teach us the fear of the Lord. They are reminders that keep us from falsely believing that we can be like God. When I reach the limit of my strength, I worship the One whose strength never flags. When I reach the limit of my reason, I worship the One whose reason is beyond searching out.”

This morning I opened to Isaiah 50:10:

Let him who walks in darkness

and has no light

trust in the name of the Lord

and rely on his God.

The future may be a black hole, but there is always Light.

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