Peter's Wife

helping women connect with their world

Supporting Supporters

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letter-writing600X400This month one of our readers, Paula Cowan, offered to share some great ideas she has written on raising and keeping support. I was delighted for the offer and have been blessed by the information she shared. I think you’ll find her ideas both affirming and helpful.

While living overseas, finding new supporters and keeping the ones we have can be a major source of stress. When we only have a few supporters, hearing that one of them must discontinue their support can be frightening, even to mighty women of faith like us! Seriously, though, in some cases it has made the difference between continuing to serve overseas and returning home.

Then there are the challenges of keeping up with our correspondence, no matter how many supporters we have. That can take a huge portion of our time, but as Paula points out, it is time invested, not time wasted.

It is good for us to remember that we are not just aiming at meeting our budget each month. Our higher goal is to make connections between supporters and the people we serve.

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Mom Overseas

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Diane and TomEvery mom wants the best for her children. And we do our best to provide all they need: unconditional love, training, and even correction.

But when we live and work overseas, we have additional concerns for our children. Normal maternal desires become multiplied and complicated by second home realities.

Some of you had to decide whether to give birth on your field or to return to your home country for delivery. Either choice causes concerns. If you remain on the field and you have a difficult delivery, will you get the medical care you need? If you return to your home country, there are additional travel costs and expenses both before and after the delivery there.

While your children reach pre-school age, other challenges pop up. If you are fully involved in work or ministry, you wonder whether child care is a safe option. Can you trust your little darling to someone else? If you are able to be at home with your child, you still may wonder about his playmates, what language he is learning, etc. When we lived in Africa, our youngest son complained to me that his playmate was stealing his toys. “Impossible,” I thought. But I talked to the boy’s mother anyway. In return, I got an angry scowl . . . and a big bag of my son’s missing toys.

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Friendship Revisited

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Friends chatFifteen years ago I wrote an article on friendship for PWs. (That link will take you back there.) But this seems like a good time to rethink the issues and take a fresh look at how we make and keep friends while living and working outside our home culture.

We might think that friendship is simple and automatic, but we soon find out that it’s more complex than we thought. Then add the pressures of our work and the quirks of our host culture. All of that makes friendship a challenge.

Many of us have watched the effect of social media on friendships. It is not uncommon to see a group of people sitting at a café table, all looking at their phones and clicking away. They seem totally unaware of their companions at the table.

On the other hand, there are others who would dearly love to have any kind of relationship with peers, but there are none within a 500 mile radius.

Kimberly Todd, writing for VelvetAshes.com, has some helpful insights about finding and developing friendships. Let’s look at a few of her ideas:

Anyone is a potential friend. When we first arrive on our host culture, we may look desperately for someone ‘like us’ to befriend. If we hold onto that measure of friendship, we will find ourselves very lonely indeed. But when we look at everyone as a potential friend, we will be surprised with the great variety of friends we can have. Not everyone will become a close personal friend, but each can fill some part of our need for friends. And, we help them stretch their friendship boundaries too.

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The Blank Stare

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Last week some wonderful friends visited us. They are long-time cross-cultural workers serving in a limited access country. We had some very interesting conversations. I’m sure you can imagine them, for you have had your own similar experiences. I’d like to share some insights from one of those conversations. Let’s call the topic, “The Blank Stare.”

We talked about how difficult it is to share our lives with our friends and family back home. See if this sounds familiar:  Someone asks a question about our overseas life. We start to reply, only to see their eyes glaze over. “Knock, Knock? Anybody home? Where did you go? You were in there a minute ago.” We know they are friends and want to talk to us, but they just cannot relate to what we say about our work overseas.

As we discussed the problem, we saw that the hardest questions to answer were the big general questions. What do you do in XYZ? What is XYZ like? Maybe you’ve had a conversation like this one:

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What Would Mary Say?

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For many years now we have heard the beautiful Christmas song, “Mary, Did You Know?” It is so poignant. Mark Lowry really stirred our imagination with those lyrics. It touches our hearts with the questions it asks, and causes us to stand in amazement at the power of our God. Of course Mary had no idea what her baby would do, but she trusted the word of God spoken to her by an angel. She willingly surrendered her all.

Recently, my husband spoke about some things Mary might like to tell us. Like Mark Lowry, he used his imagination, picturing Mary, after all she experienced, giving wise counsel to us. She is unique, but all who follow Christ can learn from her experience.

As cross cultural workers, we know a lot about surrender. We’ve surrendered a normal life in our home country. We’ve surrendered time with our loved ones at home. We may have left houses and land and parents and children. And like Jesus promised in Luke 10:30, we’ve received a hundredfold now and in eternity.

But everyone of us has passed through storms of opposition from outside ourselves, and doubts that arise from our own hearts. So think about what Mary might like to say to you this Christmas.

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