3/06/2015

Re-Entry Notes at 4 months

Re-entry has been filled first with refinishing the old apartment with new surfaces floor to ceiling and hardware in every room (We only got our fridge delivered a few weeks ago) then the fullness of Christmas and New Year with family and churches, and kids birthdays, and then Jim’s big knee replacement mid January. So much work in those early weeks just keeping ice around the house! So, too busy to think about re-entry!

I have learned over the years what I need for my mental health in transition (well, always!): that I need to be connected regularly with women, and creative friends…so I signed up right away for a weekly group of women, and am making sure that more than once a week I am socially getting together with creative people or women.

And I need to keep the music on and dive into some kind of creative project. I borrowed a guitar (for JIM) and have started toughening up my fingertips for the first time in more than 30 years, learning a song a week is my goal.

I also have the continued longing to put roots down, and a persistent disconnect that in my physical life I cannot. Our 14 months in Malaysia I started a raised garden on my rooftop patio and found it immensely satisfying to grow vegetables…so with my February birthday money I bought pots and potting soil and some seeds and starter plants. I tell people it is a spiritual exercise that symbolically represents my physical life... to garden… I tell the Lord how much I REALLY want to plant a fruit bearing tree that takes YEARS of cultivation to bear fruit, I want to put roots down DEEP. God instead says, “Here, how about these zucchini’s and summer squash? Loads of yield in only a couple months of nurture.”


So I’m keeping my eyes, ears and heart open for God’s orchestration of who is initiating and comes on the radar and what kinds of ministry can be fruitful no matter if I’m only here for a few months…a year. … I feel in some ways like a gardener/anthropologist. Maybe I’ll get some new business cards made with that title!

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