helping women connect with their world
Happy New Year! Praise God for bringing us through 2001. It was a year with lots of challenges, but God was good! We look forward to what He has planned for us and trust His grace to meet the challenges of 2002.
Our topic this month is Preparing for Your Overseas Assignment. Five ladies contributed their advise on this topic.
Are you looking forward to furlough or dreading it? Probably it is a mixture of both those feelings. Since many PWs go on furlough during the summer, December seemed a good time to talk about furlough planning.
Your husband has probably already been emailing contacts to plan the itinerary. Email has made that process so much faster and easier.
Women everywhere struggle with their roles and responsibilities. Living and working in another culture complicates that struggle. Some of our roles are easier to see than others. Our role as wife is primary. God gave us to our husbands to be a “helper suitable” for him. Our role as mother adds a lot of new responsibilities. If we are employed, we have more responsibilities added to our lives.
But some of our roles and responsibilities are harder to identify. Depending on our husband’s work, we may play many different roles and have many added responsibilities. As an active member of our church we will have varying roles and responsibilities. Just as good citizens, we have roles and responsibilities to fulfill.
Distractions are the topic for this week. As I was thinking about this topic, I saw some different causes of distractions and some possible ways to deal with them.
I am the kind of person who likes to plan out my activities for the day. I used to schedule far too much for any one day and then be frustrated because I wasn’t able to complete my “assignment.” I saw anything that interrupted my schedule as a distraction from my “real” work. It has taken years for me to see that often the distractions are the “real” work for the day.
In November, 1990 a group of PWs from various organizations met together for a monthly fellowship meeting. We talked about the problems we faced when our husbands were traveling. Some interesting problems were voiced in our small group.
The most common problem had to do with the shifting of roles when our husbands were going in and out. How the husband and wife responded to the separations greatly effected the adjustments they made. One lady’s husband had been gone on a three month trip. She gave him a week or more to ease back into his role as head of the home because she was sensitive to his need to unwind before picking up the reins again. For another family the husband needed to quickly resume his role. He felt he no longer had a place in his own home when she carried on as she had been while they were apart. One wife whose husband was gone frequently for short periods found that the children were confused by the role shifts. It was necessary for her to continue making the decisions and disciplining the children for the first twenty-four hours or so after his return. This gave the children a sense of security in an otherwise disrupted schedule.
