“It’s me. Hi! I’m the problem. It’s me.”

Most parents with a teenaged daughter could identify Taylor Swift’s ballad Anti-Hero. With a teenaged daughter in the house, we have all learned some Swiftie lyrics this year. And today, it’s my message to you also. I just want to say, if you haven’t seen many blog posts or read newsletters in your inbox this fall, you didn’t miss them. It is not you. It’s me. 🙂 It’s us.

We arrived back in Texas in August, moved the boys into their colleges and have set up our household again with the gracious help of several church families. As I write here in November, we’ve only got a couple family heirlooms and a lost pair of shoes to track down still from four years of storage with friends and family. We mistakenly believed we could afford a used vehicle, which has worked for us on so many other occasions. But we really failed to understand inflation and the 2023 used car market. We have been blessed to borrow some cars here and there, and God blessed us with a donated 17-year-old Ford Explorer named Frida, who has lots of life left. We continue to search for a used car and never imagined it would take months!

After the final battles in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Tolkien writes about some of the warriors going to the Houses of Healing. If I had to sum up where we are at this fall – it is in the Houses of Healing. We moved to Cameroon before the global pandemic and navigated a tumultuous 4-year term, including this past year under a high level of challenge in a variety of ways. The prevailing feeling is “battle-weary”.

Like little Jr. Asparagus in Veggie Tales returning from the pie wars with goop all over his face and his helmet on crooked, we need to heal. We need to catch up on many medical visits, to sleep, to attend to some particular emotional issues with our kids, and feed on God’s Word. It is tempting for us to jump right in to serving, but we are intentionally in a season of rest and healing. It feels like we are hibernating for winter in order to prepare for new spring growth.

It is always energizing and encouraging to share victorious stories with you, but this does not feel like one of those… yet. So we may be quieter than normal.
We may look a bit dazed and confused.
We are processing.
We are reconnecting with the friends and family we left behind.

We are resting.
We still need you all.