Peter's Wife – Page 38

Depression

Most of us will experience depression sometime in our lives, but some will experience a deep depression. Being outside our home culture can delay recognizing what is wrong or make getting help difficult. Margaret got us thinking about depression as a topic for Peter’s Wife when she sent an article by Dick Innes called Overcoming Depression.

Depression can be an occupational hazard for PWs. We live outside our home culture without many of the support systems the average woman has. Lacking the feedback of friends and family we can turn a molehill into a mountain or slowly, inch-by-inch, slip into a deep depression.

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Third Culture Kids (TCKs)

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My husband and I arrived back in southeast Asia last Wednesday. We checked into a hotel for a couple days to get over jet lag and reacclimate to our second home.

Our family lived here for eight years while our boys attended a school for PW kids. Then we moved back to the States for our eldest son to attend college. For the last nine years we’ve been making two trips each year for two months each time. So we feel at home here.

For about a week before we leave the US and for a few days when we arrive, I feel like I’m changing gears. Everything here is quite familiar and I’m quite comfortable, yet everything is so different from the US. When we try to describe life here, our friends back home tend to think different is bad. We try to tell them this is a modern city with all the conveniences. They could eat western food all the time if they chose to. They could buy everything they would want here. Yet they still seem to think we are some kind of different breed to be able to come to this part of the world.

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Spiritual Life

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Keeping up your spiritual life while living in another culture can be most challenging. Our days are often filled with so many demands on our time and strength that personal quiet time will get pushed aside if we don’t make a concerted effort to make it first in our lives.

The beginning of the day
Not being a morning person, devotions first thing in the morning has always been a hard discipline for me. I’ve cried to God, ” How can I come away with You, Lord, when my feet can’t even find the floor before 7 A.M.? Lord, You know I truly want to be with You, show me the way.”

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Keeping Romance Alive

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Living in a culture other than you own adds stress to marriage. It is already tough when you are busy and tired and constantly interrupted to remember to keep the spark alive. It’s important to take a few minutes every so often to just think about romance and its importance to your marriage.

Distractions from work, children and even your calling can squeeze any romance out of us. Unsettled disagreements cause tensions to rise. Sometimes we just get too busy to deal with the little irritations. Disappointment over what our mate fails to do chills romance. In some situations we look like we are shirking our responsibilities or not taking our work seriously if we take time to be alone together. Let’s look at each of these problems a little closer. When we have spent the whole day putting out fires it can be hard to spark romance. Many times though, if one of you begins wooing, the other will find there really is a little left to share.

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Distractions

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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.

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