Fresh Perspective

  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...