One year and Beyond

We have been back home in Washington for one month now. One of the most common questions we are asked is "Are you glad to be back?" That is a loaded question. We live in an unbelievably beautiful part of the country. This is small town living at its best! Our community may be small, but people take pride and joy in maintaining the beauty of this area and often step up to help our neighbors in need. Our school is one of the best in the county. We have a town doctor who has been known to make house calls. Why wouldn't we be happy to be back?

Well, of course we are happy to be back, but it is not without a deep, bittersweet feeling. If home is where the heart is, then Mexico is ALSO home. We are thoroughly enjoying reconnecting with the family and friends that we haven't seen in so long, but we also ache for the kids we left behind in Mexico. And we have come to realize that we had a ministry in Mexico that we long to go back to. So if you have read my last couple of blog posts, it may not come as a surprise to hear that we are indeed planning on returning to Mexico next summer, Lord willing, for as long as God can use us there.

You see, we realized that our ministry there was much more than Gabe being used as a teacher. God was using our whole family to minister specifically to the pre-teen and teenage girls in the children's home. For many of them, we were the only intact family they had experienced. Most of them came from single parent homes or homes where the parents were absent most of the time. Due to several reasons (one of which is the number of girls who had been abused by men), the girls' casas only had house moms in them, but no house dads. Astonishingly enough, there were only about 5 other families that had a mom, dad, and school age children serving at the Mission. There are a lot of singles and several couples without children, but not many families. Two of those families were the houseparents of the two boys' casas, so their ministry is primarily to the boys. Of the remaining families there, we were the only ones who had the time and passion to minister specifically to the girls (the other families had much more responsibility in various aspects of running the mission, so don't think they were slacking off or anything!)

When girls would come over to our house, they would see what a healthy family looks like. They could witness how a husband and wife should treat each other. They saw how a father and mother should treat their children. It may not seem like much to you and me, but for some of these kids it is life changing. Imagine if you never knew those kinds of healthy interactions? If you don't know how a man should treat a woman in a healthy relationship, what kinds of relationships are you likely to enter into? If the only "parenting" you have known is full of anger and neglect, what type of parent are you likely to be? I am not saying they saw a "perfect" family when they came over to our place. That idea is quite laughable! My kids weren't always well behaved. Gabe and I sometimes got frustrated with each other. But the girls from the casas were able to see how we dealt with those times. They witnessed Christ's love even when we had to correct our kids or work through some times of miscommunication. And through these experiences we saw transformation.

We don't know all of the back stories for the kids placed in the home. But when we first moved to Mexico, some of the girls were noticeably uncomfortable being around Gabe. Some wouldn't even really look him in the eye. We could tell they were fighting some of their own fears just being in the presence of a male. Fortunately, since we have so many kids of our own (and most of them daughters) there were always people around and that fact gave them a sense of security in that they wouldn't find themselves in a position of being alone with Gabe. And since we only have one son, and he is still young, even our children were safe in their eyes. Over the course of time, we watched these girls relax around us. By the time we left, these girls that were so scared and timid of Gabe at first had become comfortable enough to give him hugs and tease and laugh with him. They were transformed. And so was our idea of what our ministry was in Mexico.

So what now? Where do we go from here? Well, Gabe is committed to teaching this year in Trout Lake. So for the next year we are going to be as intentional here as we were in Mexico. We will continue to invest in the people here. In our family. In our friendships. In Gabe's students. These relationships are important to us and deserve our attention! We will simultaneously be working out all the details that will be involved with going long-term to Mexico. We need to figure out more permanent storage than my parents' pole barn! Look into home school options for when our kids outgrow the current grades offered by the Mission school. We would eventually like to find a suitable house to rent off-campus (but within walking distance) so that our kids can have a little more room and privacy and make available the option of having animals like chickens. This means we will need to spend the year trying to gain additional financial support. We will have to go through the process of becoming legal residents of Mexico, which I am told can be a lengthy process. There is a bit of a different mindset between taking a family to Mexico for a year and going for an indefinite length of time. I am glad that we have a year to figure out some of these things while still having time to enjoy the people and community here that we love.

We will likely be trying to visit the Mission once or twice over the course of this year. If you are interested in hearing more about it and/or possibly joining us for a short trip we would love to talk to you.