I’ll post more soon, but please pray now if you see this.

Our neighborhood is flooding rapidly. The neighbors woke us up a little before 7am this morning, as the water was about two feet over the road and 3 or 4 in their low-lying community.

For the past couple of hours, the neighborhood has been working to bring valuables into our property–the only dry area on the street. The young children have retreated into our house, and a mother with her seventh child–just five days old.

I’ve got rice, beans, and noodles cooking; some co-workers are on the way to bring more rice for today.

Please just pray with us for the rain to stop and waters to go down. It has continued to rise and is creeping into our driveway. Pray for wisdom for us as we try to maintain some level of sanity in a very, very full house. And please pray for their homes, lives, and the months of costly repairs that are ahead.

More to come when I get some food ready.

We’re feeling pretty popular these days: we have more visitors coming our way!

Stephen’s mom and sweet friend, Karen, have booked tickets for the end of January!  Pretty amazingly exciting, because we will have four visitors in the next five months, and hopefully a furlough to the blessed US of A shortly following.

We are watching the Olympics when we can, amidst a number of trips to the hospital this week (think five times in three days) and the spinning wheel while YouTube loads.

It is inspiring a great deal of American pride.

I was watching Track & Field last night. I recognized one of the American names, but just thought it was odd that somehow it sounded familiar: I don’t watch Track & Field avidly. I got on Facebook later to see the same guy won a silver medal–and I recognized his name because he graduated from my high school!  What a small world. More pride for my country, state, and a little bit of pride for the run-down school I graduated from!

I have been amazed at the commentary. Having somewhat adjusted to the polite, indirect Asian culture, the British honesty is, well, really honest!  I do think my jaw dropped a little at comments of, “Oh, that was just terrible!” and “She wasn’t even close,”  or “That was a disappointing performance!”

Ouch.

A chicken joined my training course today.
Classic.

Over the past year and a half, it seems we have been adjusting to the weight of living here. It has come in small increments, with additional questions, challenges, and dilemmas. Almost like adding a brick each week to a backpack, maybe two or three on occasion, but overall just a steady increase. 

And then suddenly, the backpack is removed for ten days, while you rest on an exotic island in south Thailand.

…Do you see where I’m going with this?

Because when you return to the life you know, the life not on an exotic beach, the glorious backpack of living in a fallen world returns. In full force.

Upon arriving, we saw the poverty of our neighborhood in comparison to the West or development. And yes, it was horrible. It was a weighted brick. But to return to your neighborhood, see the poverty, and know their names–this is a bigger brick, if you will. 

To know rest on a beach, choosing your own schedule again; and then be welcomed with children yelling your name outside the bedroom window at minutes before 8am followed by a patient to take to the hospital right around dinner time. And suddenly, the life that goes around us is writing our schedule again. And every decision is, again, weighted.

Really, I have the same questions now that I have always had. We still live in a broken world with pain and suffering. Sometimes its a malnourished child or repeated poverty; sometimes it’s just me wanting to be near family or learn a language. Very little has truly changed.

But the weight of the questions this week is greater. It’s more unfamiliar, because I took a breath of unweighted, fresh air. 

My sweet sister sent us a package yesterday, full of the kids’ drawings, notes, and new shirts for each of us!  I’m sporting my new shirt today and love it.  The kids do, too: I got the universal sign for “pretty” this morning when I came out. Which, I’ll note, the universal sign for pretty is a little seductive, which you particularly notice when a child does it to you.

But really, what I love about the shirt: the smell. Smells can take you to place from so long ago or so far away. And this shirt smells just like my sister. Like her house. Like her kids.

So I’m wearing it today and smelling it. All day.

It’s official!

Tickets are booked, and we have visitors coming in just over two months!  My parents are making a trip around the world, stopping in England, Uganda, and then Thailand.

We are really excited to see some familiar, loved faces.

And to the rest of you, just know the invitation is always open 🙂

We took two flights home, from Phuket to Bangkok and Bangkok to Mae Sot, both on a small Asian airline. We arrived safely, but I will say they adjusted our flight times by at least two hours on the way there and the way back, so it all seems a little disorganized.

For an in-flight treat, they handed out brown lunch sacks with a child-sized water and some odd Asian treat that my Western tongue generally didn’t appreciate.

Until our last flight.

We’re with about twelve other people on a little propeller plane to Mae Sot, and Stephen turns around his brown paper bag and sees its sealed with a sticker and a logo we recognize.

With hope, he asks, “Auntie Anne’s?”

This is one of his favorite treats–an Auntie Anne’s soft pretzel. I open my bag and see there is, in fact, an Auntie Anne’s bag inside.

I was shocked, thinking they had just found free stickers or something, and replied, “Wow, it’s your lucky day. It is Auntie Anne’s!”

I pull out the small bag and open it to find, instead of a pretzel, a 3″ pizza. It might have been 4″ before it got smashed, but it was now oblong, cold, and topped with a mystery “meat” and “cheese.”  I tried a small, risky bite.

“Oh, and it has pineapple.”  …Which Stephen hates.

“Awesome.”

And then we laughed. Pretty hard.  Because we’re back.

We exited the plane into a dreary rain within the hour, and came back to our house to discover our water pump broke while we were gone. So now we’re trying to get enough water into the house to at least flush the toilet until we can sort it out tomorrow.

This past week was more of a blessing than I could say.

And I suppose that’s really it: I can’t describe it. I can’t describe how much God knew exactly when we needed to go and where and orchestrated every moment. I can’t describe how thankful I am for that breath of fresh air and the weight lifted from our shoulders.

And now we return to this–whatever this is. In Stephen’s words, “It’s good to home, listening to kids arguing in a language I don’t understand.”