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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Our Greatest Challenges

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Recently we had a chance to talk to some folks just preparing to go out as cross-culture workers. What a joy it was to have a part in preparing them for what they would face on the field. That made me think about what some of their greatest challenges would be. As we all know, there are few things more challenging than learning to live and serve effectively in a host culture. Just thinking back to our early years and first posting can give us the shakes! How did we ever manage? And how did our new friends tolerate us? Ultimately it was, and is Father’s faithfulness.

Some years ago I did a little informal survey of some PWs. Their answers fell into nine categories. I thought it might be a good time to take another look at these challenges. Keep in mind as you look at them, that many of these are stresses we, as workers, cannot change. We find ways to adapt and adjust our expectations. This isn’t bad, but it takes work on our part and grace from our Father- lots of it. [Read more…]

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Healing Encouraging Words

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Today’s newsletter is not about speaking a language like Russian or Swahili or Tamil. It is about the language of love. My husband wrote this article for married couples, but the principles apply to conversations in our family, among our staff, and even with nationals. Our words are powerful.

How old were you when you learned to talk? Very verbal children might say their first words at 10 months. By age two you probably had a vocabulary of 100 to 200 words, and the ability to form simple sentences. So you might say that you’ve been saying words all your life. But the real question is, “What have those words done?” Sure, millions of them, even most of them, are gone and forgotten, having served their momentary purpose. Others, though, had profound and lasting consequences.

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