Fresh Perspective

  I knew that their one room garage home was small. Oppressive. Dark. Full of outside persecution, unfriendliness, and distress. Inside was hardly a shelter. Yet, it was all they had for 3 awfully long years. 3 years of not enough room to even walk about. 3 years of inhumane living conditions. Could we call this a refugee?  Hardly. They called it a prison.  But aren’t refugees supposed to find refuge? Could hand outs from the UN create refuge? Or food baskets? Or food vouchers? Or random donations of clothes and various pieces of broken old furniture equal refuge? Certainly, all these things helped. However, at the end of the day safety in shelter is necessary to move beyond bare survival. Two months ago, the three ladies that lived in this “home” were brave enough to trust me to start making cards. At first, I think they just thought it was a fun craft, but when they began to understand that this could be a livelihood for them, their eagerness to sew matched...

  Ten Thanksgivings. Nine Christmases. That is a lot of holidays to spend without family. It spans a young child becoming a teen or a teen becoming a young adult. Ten Thanksgivings without grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins equals a decade of memories not made. Nine Christmas’s apart is not a frivolous moment in time, but instead it represents a depth of understanding and experience. This is what our lives of living overseas has cost. 8 of those in Indonesia, and the latter in Lebanon. Those holidays have stretched us, as they have a way of highlighting choices made, unimaginable distance, and our unavailability. Even. To. Our. Children. It is rather ironic that on this tenth Christmas holiday we are flying to the USA. One would think that with a national pandemic threatening to undo our fragile world, and clear advice to not gather that this would be the one holiday that we would dutifully stay. But no. Crazy as it feels, the need to be present in our 15- and 17-year old’s...

  When we were thinking about moving to Lebanon, the dream of working with the refugees began to take root in my heart. Honestly, I have only been able to fullfill this dream in scattered moments. Yet despite how small these encounters are they move me beyond words. My refugee friend's stories are filled with much more than running from a war and a displaced people. So much more. They include family members killed by ISIS, rape, beautiful homes taken away and I don't even begin to know the sum of the pain. Add to that the poverty, discrimination, and the lack of hope they find here. I am left to ask, how do you impower the poor among you? This is a question that has been grappled with by powerful vast organizations, world leaders, everything in-between, and by me. Perhaps by you also? It is one thing to hand out the fish.  It is another to provide the fishing gear and the know-how. Which would you rather have? Personally, I like being in control. The la...

  Last Sunday I kind of plummeted on the mental well-being scale.  I was restless and fussy, cranky, and dissatisfied, grumpy and in a need of a change of scenery.  I was able to voice my feelings to Darron and was able to express that I needed his attention.  I had fallen into the comparison game, mix that with a good case of mid-life who am I, where am I, and that equaled a woman in need of some focused listening. Fortunately, Darron cleared his schedule from some pressing things and took me into the mountains of Lebanon for a hike. There he listened to me process out loud all these jumbled up feelings and wires that were misfiring in rapid succession. He took me to a scenic Arabic diner and fed me some tasty Lebanese food, as we tried to dodge the shisha smoke that is freely permitted. We reaffirmed that the last 22 years of my life had indeed been focused right where we wanted it, on raising the 4 boys. That my said “accomplishments”, or lack thereof...

 I have a magnet that hangs on my fridge that states how I once felt about our family happenings.  It declares, “If it is not in a scrapbook then it didn’t happen”. Pre moving to Papua, Indonesia I was an avid scrapbooker. However, I did not take my papers, glues, pens, stickers, albums, and more (much more) with me, because I believed that the humidity would be to harsh on them. Instead I became a blogger. In many ways blogging has been much more fun because it has allowed YOU to come with me and I am so grateful you have. Your prayers, interest, words of encouragement, and readership have all been more inspiring than an album of photos that rarely gets opened. I am sure that some of the things I write about are humdrum to you…but something really important happened this summer and as the new saying should go, “If it is not in the blog, than maybe it didn’t happen.”  Well, we do not want that to be true, do we?  So, bear with me as I log a few beautiful facts a...

Tat-a-Tat-Tat was the sound last week that pierced the air at 6 p.m. in the evening. My friend and I looked at each other, as we were outside in our parking area loading the van with cleaning supplies. We tried to decipher what the noise was. Tat-a-Tat Tat-Tat-Tat. Liz, using her new English words, kept saying in Spanish what she thought the sound was. I was left guessing. After a minute I understood that she felt like it was fireworks.  They are easy to confuse. Especially if you have not grown up hearing machine guns. That would be both her and I. A few more rounds of Tat-a-tats and we changed our minds and felt quite sure that it was indeed machine guns being fired from the valley below us.  We were so disoriented. At last, we managed to shuffle our confused bodies inside. Liz decided she would scurry up the steep bank, in my backyard, to the safety of her husband. Our task at hand temporarily abandoned. The valley we can peer down into, and where the shots came from...

  The empty nest isn't too bad with this guy by my side, amazing Lebanese food, and friends. This week I had the enormous privilege to be on a zoom call with a group of local Iraqi refugees and ones that have recently been graced with placement to Australia. It was like a reunion (except bound and freed by Zoom, as wonderful and as limiting as it is)! Also, present was a psychologist from California who meets with the group once a month via the internet.  The group sessions with her are ALWAYS outstanding.  Each time, I marvel at the concepts she draws out of each of us and the points she sends home. I was quiet and observant as at least 10 ladies participated in the activity that the doctor was asking us to do. Then my turn came.  I admitted that I needed to allow space to process.  Tears leaked out of nowhere, with no warning and no ability for me to hold them back. Much to my embarrassment, I will admit.  I mean, who am I to cry compared to women ...

Kaboom. The plane wheels slammed into the cement. The plane jeered from side to side, as we abruptly landed into Beirut, Lebanon. It was far from smooth.  I will give the landing a 5 out of 10. It jarred me from my 24-hour traveling slumber and awakened me to the thought that I was “home”. Home changed while we were away. Experts reckon that the 2 nd largest urban explosion in history happened on August 4, 2020. We were retuning to a city that not only was struggling with a revolution, but also an economic collapse, Corona Virus on the rise, and now this explosion.  To further make sure we were awake and welcomed to Lebanon, we received the PCR test again as we cleared customs (we had to prove that we were negative to COVID, prior to boarding the plane in the States).  The test is an unpleasant nasal jarring sensation, that would awaken the deepest sleeper. Honestly, at our apartment one could pretend that nothing had happened. Other than a badly cracked bedroom...

With the cries of baby boy #1, 22 years ago, my world took on a blue boy hue.  From firetrucks and stick guns, to Lego’s and robotics, motorbikes, and surfboards our home leaked blue.  There was little femininity in the Boyd household, as boy #2, #3 and #4 wailed their way into our tribe in seven rapid years. In many respects it was easier to not upset the mix with a girl.  We knew boys.  We knew what to do with boys.  We had boys down.  We had the clothes, the shoes, the toys, and apparently the “boy only” mold. We would not have it any other way. Change block type or style Move Image block from position 3 left to position 2 Move Image block from position 3 right to position 4 Change ali I would strive to keep girly moments in my life. Whether it be a shopping trip (alone), a girl’s weekend away, flowers on the table, candles lit, or a tea party here and there. However, the reality is, with 5 guys in the house, I was clearly outnumbered a...