transition

Faith(fulness)

Faith(fulness)
Photo by Ben White on Unsplash

 

I once did a word study in Ephesians 6. In the phrase “shield of faith,” the word faith was most often translated “faithfulness.”

In other words,it is God’s faithfulness that covers and protects me, not my faith. Click To Tweet

That was a relief to me because faith is not my strong suit. It’s not my faith or lack of it that carries me, it’s His faithfulness. When I think about the transitions we’ve gone through as a family, I can see how true this is.

God’s Faithfulness through Transition

When we moved overseas, God showed us His sovereignty and goodness, when we questioned whether having a baby, leading a team, and learning new language and culture all at the same time was really the best idea. It was, for His purposes.

In becoming a mom, He showed me that He is El Roi – the God who sees us, even when the world might not.

When we moved to Singapore, and He knew how hard it was for us to leave, He showed us His tenderness and compassion through working out all the details in perfect timing.

When we moved back into East Asia 5 years later, things didn’t go quite so smoothly. I remember saying to God, “But last time you worked all these things out so well! Why not now?” And He said, “Because that’s not what you need now.” What we needed was to be refreshed and renewed, and He showed His delight in doing that for us.

When we moved back to the U.S., I wondered, “How will God reveal Himself to us this time?”

God’s Recent Faithfulness

There were huge decisions to make. We had to buy a house – here we were at 40 years old but we’d never bought a house before! We had to decide what part of Orlando to live in, and we discovered that our friends could be very evangelistic about what part of Orlando is best. It was confusing; They all sounded good! We had to decide where to send our kids to school – we’d not had a lot of options before. It was overwhelming, and the best pro/con list in the world wasn’t going to help us. The house we bought had the most pros, but it also had the most cons, by far.

What we needed was His wisdom. If you ask me today why we chose this area, this house, this school, I will say that it was simply because God told us to. With each decision there came a day when He clearly said, “This one. This place.” He has been our wisdom and our guide.

When I look back, God has been faithful to show up. So this becomes another stone of remembrance for me that strengthens my faith, that I can carry into the next transition. We don’t know how God will work, but we know that He will. It is his faithfulness that shields us. Click To Tweet

 

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Why God Won’t Just Make It Easier

Why God Won't Just Make It Easier
Photo by Francisco Gonzalez on Unsplash


The last two years we lived in Singapore were, in a word, hard.

The summer prior we’d said goodbye to several families and had to move 2 miles from where we’d been living a glorious communal existence with them.

Within months of living in our new apartment, my allergies kicked in like they’d been making up for lost time. I burned through every over the counter allergy drug Mustafa Centre had to offer within about 2 months.

When I finally broke down and saw an allergist, he put me on an experimental drug that was supposed to eradicate ALL my allergies. Most people saw dramatic results within 4-6 months. I quit after nine because I’d seen no change. He was baffled.

I was just plain tired of it.

In the meantime, he’d put me on a prescription allergy drug as well, which I had to take immediately upon waking.

If I didn’t, forget about it. By 10 am I’d be scratching my face off and unable to see straight through a fog of sneezing. I’d pop some Benadryl, point the kids toward the TV, request that they not kill each other before daddy came home, and let the Benadryl slam me into symptomless sleep.

Homeschool? Barely. Getting out of the house to do fun stuff with the kids? Not much. Meals? Housework? Nope.

On top of that, Erik’s job had become more demanding, and the kids were lonely without the constant presence of friends which had been their previous existence. Yep, it was just. plain. hard.

So often during that time I would cry out to God and ask Him to change it.

I raged. Questioned God. Doubted His love. I pleaded with Him to just make it easier. One day, He responded by gently pointing out that what I was really asking was not to have to need Him quite so much.

We Just Want It to Be Easier

Nobody signs up for “hard.”

It’s not a popular class. We treat it like an elective, but it’s a core course. It’s where we learn to come to the end of ourselves and to trust in His abundant resources.

We say we want to grow in Christlikeness, in character, in faith, but when it comes to the reality of what it takes to get there? I know I for one am often inclined to say, “Um . . . no thanks.”

When trials come, I’m always tempted to say, “God, just make it easier.” I want to jump to the end where I’ve learned the lessons and grown and are all mature and glowing. (that’s what happens, right? Tell me that’s what happens)

But I think back on those two years in Singapore. Yes, they were hard. But were they worth it? You bet.

I can’t tell you how much God met us, and how He used that situation for good (not the least of which was to take us back to China, which was our dream), how He shaped me in that brokenness.

So I have hope. God meets us in the hard, not to make it easier, but to show us that He is strong enough for it if we will just own our deep need for Him and trust Him.

 

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Sinking In

It wasn’t until three months into our life overseas that I realized I lived there.

Up until then, we had lived in one room in a foreign student dormitory, our two twin beds shoved together, the five suitcases we brought stacked up to the ceiling. We washed dishes in the bathtub. We turned away the maids who came to “clean” everyday (which consisted of sweeping the floor and then hosing down the entire bathroom). It felt like a long vacation in a cheap hotel.

But once it was legal for students to live off campus, we found an apartment and moved in. The first night I tried to collapse into bed (which is difficult to do on a traditional Asian bed because they have the give of a sidewalk) and I thought, “What have we done? We live in Asia.”

I had the same realization when we picked up my brother from the airport that Christmas. As I oriented him on our drive home, I was aware that I hadn’t been lying to my family all that time when I told them I’d moved overseas. Here was proof!

It’s surprising what brings those realizations to light. Getting the Florida driver’s license. Seeing hurricane alternative plans on our kids’ school schedules. Writing our address. It happened again for me yesterday as we sat next to the intracoastal waterway, looking at palm trees and boats, and I said, “Erik? We live in Orlando.”

Ethan’s been struggling with this fact slowly sinking in. Going back to school, getting involved in activities – each thing cements the truth that we live here and not there anymore. It’s an interesting part of transition, this forming of a new home, defining our new lives. It feels like each realization makes a deeper impression in the ground, marks our territory, while forcing us to let go of part of what was true before. We’re here now.

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The Eye of the Storm

We haven’t yet had the full force of hurricane season here, but I anticipate that it will be interesting. In our kids’ school binders, several of the teachers have typed in a “hurricane alternative” curriculum for the days we’re stuck at home. Like a snow day I guess! I’m sure we’ll get to know the weather reporters on the local news well.

I feel like a weather reporter myself sometimes when it comes to updates about our transition, “The subtropical storm depression Gina from last week has temporarily subsized, but from the north side of the house we are detecting a storm surge from potential tropical storm Ethan. Parents, be advised.”

Yes, if it’s not one of us, it’s another. As I lay awake the other night praying about this, God reminded me that He has seen thousands, hundreds of thousands, nay probably millions of people, through transitions. He walked through those with them; He will walk with us.  He controls the wind, the rain. He is my eye of the storm, the shelter.

“Seek the Lord and his strength. Seek his presence continually!” Psalm 105:4

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Mountain Climbing

You know those guys who lead mountain climbing expeditions up Mt. Everest? The ones who seem unstoppable, who go without oxygen and on whom you can trust your life? My husband could be one of those guys. That’s how he lives, like he’s got 6 extra hours in every day and nothing phases him. You think I do a lot? He can run circles around me (actually, back when we first tried running together, he literally would run circles around me. Not great for my self-esteem. Hence, we do not run together).

If I were on an expedition to Everest . . . well, I just probably would never do it. It sounds hard and cold and life-threatening, and I tend to avoid those three, certainly any combination of them. This is why I have my husband – he helps me keep climbing.

In coming back to Orlando after a wonderful summer in Minnesota and Colorado, I feel like I’m coming back to a mountain climbing expedition in the form of continued transition. Over the summer we had a glorious break from trying to figure out how to do life. Within 24 hours of getting here, I had this vague, overwhelmed, tired feeling and I realized, “Oh right, I was climbing this mountain.”

There’s no way around it. It’s the steep learning curve of finding our bearings. Transition can feel like that – you’re striving toward that place where it’s easy, where relationships are already formed, where routines are established, where you’ve got this, but you’re not there yet. You won’t get there if you just give up and stop climbing.

We’ve made a lot of progress in the right direction and I’m thankful. Still, even though we’ve been in the States for almost a year, this is our first fall in Orlando and it brings lots of new experiences to be conquered. We’re getting higher but we’re not done.

So I have to daily ask God for help to keep climbing, to put forth the effort to initiate, to seek out what we need, to face the areas where I still feel unsure, to keep engaging with our hearts. I know eventually we’ll get to a place where the terrain evens out a little and we can just enjoy the view for a little while. Until then, deep breath, one step at a time.

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Waves

We’re not accustomed to this new normal, when leaving this house doesn’t mean enduring 24 hours of traveling hurtling through the air in a pressurized metal tube and landing on the other side of the ocean. Now it means enduring 24 hours in a car and ending up at “home.”

On the packing and shopping side, this is a relief, even if it means my “I can pack this suitcase to within 1-2 pounds of 50 without using a scale out of sheer practice” skills will go to waste. But last night, Ethan reminded me that it’s not just on the surface level that this requires some adjustment.

Right before bed, Ethan tends to evaluate how he’s feeling and give me an update (he is currently vying for “most emotionally cognizant and articulate teenage boy on the planet”). Generally, he finds he’s feeling some anxiety about the upcoming school year. This time he became aware that part of his anxiety stems from the fact that all this packing and preparing makes him feel like he really IS getting ready for that long haul to China, and it’s sad that we aren’t. I’m sad too.

Grief. It comes in waves, like you’re standing at the edge of the ocean and you don’t know when the water will come up and cover your toes, or when it will surprise you by washing up to your knees. You could stand there all day and not have it touch you, and then in a moment it soaks you.

But I feel like the tide is going out. The waves are smaller. We sometimes see them coming. They don’t knock us down anymore, just get us a little wet.

So that’s how we’re feeling as we prepare again to head back. I’m off to make one more trip to Walmart. Until we get to Florida, that is.

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Don’t blame location

Don't Blame Location
Photo by Sylwia Bartyzel on Unsplash

 

When Erik first told me we were moving to Singapore in 2004, I had to look it up on a map. I had an idea that it was near Fiji.

It is not near Fiji.

I quickly learned more about our new tropical island home than its location, just short of the equator and connected by bridges to Malaysia. I learned that it was the cleanest, safest, most efficient, most affluent, and most beautiful place I’ve ever been. What’s not to love about Singapore?

And yet, through our time there, I met plenty of women who hated Singapore. Couldn’t find a thing to like about it. Really? How is that possible? It’s a tropical island for Pete’s sake. You live where people dream of vacationing.

Don’t Blame Location

It wasn’t Singapore they hated. It was their circumstances. Singapore just happened to be the unlucky backdrop. These women generally were expat women in transition. Uprooted from all they loved, their homes, their families, they were dropped into a lifestyle quite unlike what they’d ever known.

They were lost, lonely, bored. They probably would have been lost, lonely, and bored in whatever country God dropped them, but they happened to be in Singapore and so it was at fault.

I learned two things from those women – first, that every place has its ups and downs, and you have to make a choice to focus on the ups.

Second, and more importantly (because truthfully, some places do have fewer ups) I have to separate how I’m doing internally from where I am or I will miss growth.

Learning Not to Blame This Location

People asked me early on how we liked living in Orlando. I had to remind myself to stop and take away the lens of transition that colored our first six months there. Though Orlando was the context for some tough moments, it was not the cause of them. When I did that, I could say that yes, we really did enjoy living there.

Blaming location misses the real issues. It’s easy to say “I just don’t like this place. Life would be better somewhere else” rather than to acknowledge and deal with what our circumstances are doing to our hearts. The great news is that sometimes we can’t change location, but we can always change how we look at them.

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Expectation Management

One of the best coping skills Erik and I learned in the early days of expat living was a simple phrase, “lower your standards!” When you read that, you have to imagine it with your best game show host voice, like you’re inviting someone to an exciting opportunity behind door #1.

It was all about expectations. If you expect that the bathroom you’ve been led to out the back door of a restaurant and down a dark alley will be a picture of cleanliness, you will be sorely disappointed. However, if you imagine that it will be a sufficient hole in the ground, you’ll be satisfied. You get the idea.

It’s called expectation management. The problem with expectations is that we are so often unaware of them. It doesn’t occur to me that I would appreciate a toilet that flushes until I look up and see that the wall mounted reservoir in the back alley bathroom is partially missing and the frozen water within is still holding its shape. I can flush in springtime.

I’ve been reminded lately how important it is to talk about our expectations.This is especially true with our kids. When we began summer vacation this year, they had an unspoken expectation that it would be like their three previous summers, when they spent all day, every day, outside with friends. Last summer I even had to call one mom and ask her if her kids could maybe not schedule the summer project involving my children quite as often because they weren’t able to spend time with other kids. We were beating off the playdates with sticks.

This wasn’t the case in Orlando. The kids they’ve met from school mostly live about an hour away, and others were preparing for long trips away. Within a few days we were all scratching hash marks on the walls. I finally realized we needed to have a talk about expectations with them, and we basically had to say, “lower your standards.” It required a little more mourning of what they used to have, but within a day their “I’m bored” statements had reduced significantly. It’s a process of looking at reality and making adjustments.

So often when I am frustrated with life it is because I expected it to be a certain way and it isn’t. Many of my expectations are residual, left over from what I was accustomed to having in my “previous” life. It’s helpful for me to take a hard look at the expectations I have and ask myself if they are realistic in this new season of life. Some of them might not be, and that’s where I need to tell myself to “lower my standards.” It doesn’t mean I’m giving up hope. It means I’m choosing contentment.

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The Real Me

It happened yesterday at the dentist. I was myself. I mean, really truly, like just how I would be if I were with someone I’d known forever. I was chatty. I made witty comments. They laughed. It felt comfortable, and normal, and I thought, “Hey, I’m being me! With people I just met!” This is progress.

You’d think I’d always be me – isn’t everyone? – but I’m still getting there. A friend of mine here reminded me lately that when someone has gone through a major transition, you should assume for the first year that you don’t really know the real them.

Ah, how true.

It was good to hear that again because I know that my traditional transition stress reaction is withdrawal. I usually don’t realize I’m doing it until people make comments like, “Gosh, I thought you were so reserved and quiet, but . . . ” (It’s ok, go ahead and finish that thought, “but you’re actually kind of goofy and don’t stop talking.”)

The first time I did it was when I got married, and everything in my world changed – new city, new job, new home, new roommate, new church, new friends. I met one of my good friends that year, and she thought I didn’t like her the whole year. Meanwhile I was saying to my husband, “I really like her! I hope she’ll be my friend!” Sigh. I had no idea.

Since then I’m at least aware of it (the first step is admitting you have a problem). I think I am doing better here, but I think it’s partly because there are people I am myself with because they already know me. Or people who are just so inviting they make me want to show up all at once. There are others though who still think I’m the quiet type. Just wait, I want to say. A person who has just gone through transition is a bit like a new house plant. You can give it the best environment, but it’s probably going to wilt a little at first. Give it time. It’ll perk up. Pretty soon the real Gina will show up and the “I just played Dizzy Lizzy* with my life and I can’t walk quite straight” Gina will fade away. I’m still just a little shell shocked and not so sure of myself here so I shut down the non-essentials and just focus on getting through. I’m triaging. But as we say in the middle kingdom, “yue lai yue” – it’s coming gradually.

Like at the dentist. The prospect of major dental work somehow drew me out. Who knew?

*Dizzy Lizzy, for the uninitiated, is a game in which you place your head on the top of a baseball bat, spin around several times while maintaining contact with the bat, and then attempt to walk toward a destination in the distance. It seems like it should be so easy but it is hard. Very, very hard. Like, “walk sideways until you fall down while your friends laugh hysterically” hard. But oh so fun.

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Making Room

I went to an elementary school where we had a great deal of freedom in our desk space. I don’t know if this was true in other places, but we regularly moved our desks around and formed little groups of 3-4. It was fun, but a bit of a social nightmare. I mean, what better way to shun someone than to not invite them to be part of the new configuration? I remember my friend Jenny and I moving our two desks off by ourselves once. We felt conspiratorial. I can’t imagine how hard it would have been for a new kid to walk into that classroom.

Moving to a new place feels a little bit like that, minus the intentional shunning (which is a huge bonus). Every time I’ve moved somewhere, even when I moved back to China from Singapore, to relationships with people I already knew, there was the question, “Is there room for me?”

Because I get it – people are busy, relational energy is limited, the space I used to fill has been filled with other things. It can be hard to make room for someone new, no matter how much you enjoy them.

There’s an energy in me that gets stirred up, maybe more than in other people, by situations like this. I want to be picked. I want to be worth someone shifting their desks around to make space for me. And once I get there, that energy will push me to prove to you that you made a good choice.

I know that to develop friendships here I will most likely need to take the initiative. I don’t mind much – I am an initiative taker in general. Also, being an introvert, I’m not looking for a lot of people. But at times initiating wars with that energy in me. I know I could ask to be in your desk cluster. But it feels SO much better to be asked.

Last Friday I came home from my morning group feeling a little raw – a good kind of raw, because I was able to share with them some of the recent transition grief I’ve been feeling (ladies, you know who you are and you ROCK). I started contemplating the weekend, the long 3 day weekend with two kids and no daddy buffer, and I thought, “Lord Almighty, if I have to initiate to be with people this weekend I think it might just do me in. I mean, no seriously, God, I do not think I can do it.”

And lo and behold, when I got home there was an email inviting us to join many others at the beach on Saturday. God loves me.

It may seem like a small thing, but for those of us who are new in town, it’s big. I know that over time, we will find our desk space. Thank you to those who are making room for us!

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