Monday, September 27, 2010

Catching up: post 1 of 4 - Intro

Communication:  it is so critical to what we are doing and yet truly one of the hardest parts of being on the mission field.  If I work as hard as I think God wants me to work here (hard), then there is very little time to really sit down and write about what we are doing.  If I throw myself into all of the opportunities that I believe God is putting before us here in this place (many), then it becomes very hard to effectively communicate in the little bit of time that I do take to sit down and write. Lastly, the pace is so fast and the experiences are so new, so dramatic, and so confusing that it becomes triply hard to distill them into coherent sentences.  And yet, writing helps us to do three things in a way that almost nothing else does.  A) It communicates to our family, friends, and supporters how we are doing and what we are doing down here at Hospital Loma de Luz.  B) It serves to record the very dramatic and sometimes the mundane that happens to us.  I want to record these things for my family and for me to reflect on later – so that we can remember these times.  C) Maybe this one is the most important – it serves to clarify the experiences and shows me (and others) what God is doing in the midst of life that just seems so busy that I just can’t keep up.  Warren Buffett said that “there is nothing like writing to force you to think and to get your thoughts straight”.  Ultimately, when I’m not writing it is because I can’t get my thoughts straight.
My goal with this series of posts is to “catch up” on the last three to four months.  As I look at my blog, I see that I did an ok job of keeping up in May, writing four or five “posts”.  Since then, I’ve written a couple of stories of the big events – but really haven’t done a good job of keeping up.  I’ll try and break things down in the following three posts:  Family, Work, Mission and Ministry.  I’ll post the first one (family) tonight and hope to get the other two partially written ones posted in the next few days.  

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