Peter's Wife

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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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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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When is it Time to Go Home?

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Is it time to go home?”

That question has come up frequently lately, both in personal conversations and in blogs and articles I’ve read. This is not just a question for those who have spent their whole adult life in His service to the nations. My family faced this question after two years of international service, and again after four years on the field.

We had pastored for 11 years before going to Africa. Though we loved the work in Africa, it was not the right fit for our family. We believed God was sending us to Asia, but needed approval from our board to make such a drastic move. Our board told us we could sell our belongings in Africa, but with the agreement we could buy them back, if we should return after meeting with them. We didn’t know if our time overseas would be over should we decide not to return to Africa. After meeting with us, they agreed to let us move to Asia, though it was a very unusual move. Who changes continents after only two years?

Then, after two years in Asia, we were scheduled for a furlough. We had only been able to stay in our Asian country by leaving every three months and getting a new visa upon return. That was very unsettling. So troubling in fact, that we wondered if we would return there after our home leave.

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Leap of Faith

This month we have a guest writer sharing her story. Shelly Miller tells about her biggest leap of faith and challenges us to take a good look at our lives and see if anything is keeping us from making a fresh leap of faith.

Diane

It must have been at least twenty minutes before my husband and I realized we’d been staring silently at strangers pulling carry-on luggage past us in the terminal. Seated against the wall, coats draped over our laps, we were waiting at the gate for an early morning departure from Dallas, trapped in a torrent of thoughts. While children were flitting through rows of seats to look at airplanes out a nearby wall of windows, we were making mental assessments, replaying the past 48 hours.

“What have we just done?” I said to him with a deadlock of focus on a piece of bubble gum stuck to a pillar.

He shook his head like awakening from a trance.

We were in Dallas at the invitation of my husband’s boss. He assumed we were coming to scout neighborhoods and schools for relocation, but we surprised him with some news after lunch.

We’ve sensed God is telling us this season of leadership in the church planting movement that we love is over. God is calling us to England.

Truthfully, that was the extent of our knowledge; we had no idea what that meant. For the first time in twenty-four years of marriage and ministry together, God was asking us to let go and take a leap of faith before knowing details and outcomes.
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