Of Leaves and Leaving

Autumn is in the air. Or is it? For many of us, autumn is just a tricky spelling word we must teach our children, totally apart from any physical colors, sounds, or smells from our own childhoods.

Personally I miss that feeling of crunching through the leaves and the cooler air that smells of bonfires. Every year I reminisce, and then go back to life in perpetual springtime. We only have two seasons here: wet and dry. I love when the bougainvillea and jacaranda provide a bit of color, but it’s still not the same.

What do you do to celebrate the changing of a season that doesn’t exist? Do you drape your house with fake fall leaves like I do around Thanksgiving time? (This week for Canadians, next month for Americans) Do you put hot cider on the stove to make your house smell autumny? I would mention baking pumpkin bread, but I’ve learned that the very suggestion of canned pumpkin can make some women who can’t get it, weep.

The one thing we can do in the autumn is to look back and reminisce. I’ve spent the last week doing nothing more than to revamp my old blog full of personal stories, and to start up a new ministry blog. That has been an interesting project in itself.

Some of you may prefer to look ahead during the dreary days of fall. This brings up a question I have been mulling over for several weeks since it came up on the Sonlight international forum. My friend Kris wrote:

You know that old saying...

"Send Me, Send Me"...

we hear about it all the time, back home, everywhere.

Where's the saying "Go back, Go back"...

how come there is never any talk of that?

Is there such thing as a graceful exit strategy? Just curious.

Several readers wrote very insightful remarks, but I thought I would open it up to a wider audience. Having never done it, I’m not the one who can say. We just take it a day at a time, a year at a time, and trust God to speak clearly if He wants to redirect our steps. That sounds so overly simplistic.

I agree with one of my cyber-friends who said she wants to be as intentional about leaving as she was about going to the mission field in the first place. I don’t want to stay until one day I go berserk and miss the grandchildren (again with the imaginary grandchildren of the future), and just pack up and go home to be closer to them. Others have been forced to leave the mission field on short notice, and there was nothing graceful about their “exit” for sure.

Is there such a thing as a graceful exit strategy?

IRL* we know what clumsy looks like...how about graceful or even grace-filled?

When God Says...

Another helpful and fun book for your Amazon wish list is Diving Off the Pedestal, by one of my closest friends and coworkers, Lila Joy Quezada. She’s another down-to-earth, very genuine person you will appreciate. In her book, Lila tells the story of how her family came to join us nine years ago as a result of a timely (God-orchestrated) email from Jim and me.

The rest of the story (shortened blog version) is that we had been discussing with the president of our sending organization our desperate need for more workers on the field. Sadly, even if we recruited someone that very day, I told him, it would take at least a year and a half for anyone to go through interviews, orientation, support-raising, packing, language learning, and house-hunting before finally beginning to work with us. Surely God saw this crisis well ahead of time and had already prepared someone in advance. Right?

Within 24 hours of this discussion, we received their prayer letter, asking people to pray for direction for them. After 12 years of pastoring a Hispanic church in Oregon, they felt it was time to return to Latin America. Since we already knew them from our early days in Guatemala, of course we jumped at the possibilities, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Today is a different story.

Since, once upon a time, God provided a coworker for my husband, a dear friend for me, and many companions for all of my children among the now 8 Quezada kids, I was ever so hopeful that God would work a similar miracle and bring the “Hayes Zoo” (one of our faithful WOTH readers) and family to work with us. They, too, already spoke Spanish and were already working in Latin America. They also had children who were becoming good friends with my youngest two. It all seemed so perfect…until we got their email indicating it’s just not going to happen. After a few months of unsuccessfully trying to raise support, the door is closed tight. They are settling back in the U.S. instead.

Now we are back in the position of praying for a younger couple like the Hayes, who might catch the vision for reaching unreached non-literate people groups in southern Mexico. While personally disappointed, my heart really goes out to the Hayes family back in limbo, readjusting to life in America. Their question is “How do you respond when God says ‘No’ to something you think is just perfect?”

IRL*How would you answer them?