There are so many people sick in our neighborhood right now. There have been about ten kids with fevers for the past couple days, some with vomiting and sore throats. It has spread to the adults, and three moms were down for a few days.

Four kids came to the door last night to tell me their mom was sick and vomiting. We headed over to her house and checked her temperature, got her some medicine, and tried to get her eighteen-month-old to stop crawling on her.

As I went to leave, two of the kids came with me to walk back to the house.

Later, they all came back, saying that she was throwing up more. Then they motioned to her wrists, made a slicing motion, and said the Burmese word for blood. And then eight-year-old Yedi said, “Kelli, red.”

This scared me, not sure how she slit her wrist throwing up, or if somehow the happiest woman in the community was hurting herself?

We ran over to the house and discovered it wasn’t an emergency at all.

She had been throwing up, and it was red. For some reason the slit-your-wrist motion was their chosen way to communicate blood.

But really, I had given her some red throat lozenges for her cough. There was no blood at all, and certainly no slit wrists; just a few small miscommunications.

As I went to go back, the mom said something to two of the kids. This time I understood, though: she was having them escort me home! At first, I thought it was sweet. Then I decided it was a little insulting that she thought I should have an escort to get to my house 50 meters away; and that she thought her five-year-old son and eight-year-old daughter would provide safety for me!

Growing up, we had a beautiful garden that my mom kept nicely manicured. All the vegetables grew in rows with tags to show what each row was.

Our community garden does not look like this at all. It has a crooked path down the middle where the kids walk to our back door; it has laundry hanging on the fence and soaking by the water spigot. There are weeds everywhere.

But it continues to grow! We currently have lemongrass, eggplants, bananas, moringa, papaya, red sorrel, and a new mango tree! And those are just the things we know of–the neighbors come to gather some things that I have no idea what they are.

Last week some new fruit showed up a tree, which the kids are always watching for. Yuh Meh Oo and Yedi came running to tell us when we got home. They pointed it out, but we weren’t sure what it was at this young stage. It looked like a small lime, so Stephen looked up a photo on his phone. They shook their heads no and started talking up a smattering of Burmese between each other.

Then Yuh Meh Oo turns to me and says, “G…”
A few moments go by.
“G-U…G-U-A! Kelli, G-U-A?”
“Oh! Guava? G-U-A-V-A, guava?”

We showed them a picture again. They beamed at the success of communication. And I guess we have guava on the way, too!

For his anger is but for a moment, and his favor is for a lifetime.
Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning.
Psalm 30:5

I have prayed over this verse many times over the past year or so.

Sometimes it feels as though joy doesn’t come in the morning: some mornings it is difficult to get out of bed knowing that you are waking up in the same world, the same body, and the same story you went to sleep in.

I think about our neighbors. Do they feel that joy comes with each morning? What if their mornings bring realities of fear and insecurities?

With Christ, my weeping should find joy each morning. As a human with failures, it doesn’t always.

But as we drove home yesterday, we were discussing our lives, everything from our recently purchased vehicle to our families and hopes for the community and plans for our ministry…and I felt like I was glimpsing the sunrise. I felt like God just pointed forward over the horizon–maybe a the sun rising over a mountain range, or a dark curtain rising to reveal a bright beam of light–and said to look forward, because the morning is coming. The sunrise is emerging.

It was just a little over a month ago that we had the money in our account to purchase a car, and decided we should begin moving forward to find one. It seemed overwhelming then–in a way that seems quite ridiculous now, but then it felt just very, very overwhelming.

We didn’t know what we were doing, but knew we had to purchase it in a larger city such as Bangkok or Chiang Mai. But each visit to these cities requires a bus ride, finding transportation around town, and finding friends or paying for accommodations. We could look over the car, but how would we really know with a used car? If we found a car in Chiang Mai, there was a mechanic we knew of there, but it would cost $100 for an inspection. How many cars do you have inspected? If you make the trip up there and rule it out yourself, you’ve spent some money. If you get up there and get an inspection and rule it out, you’ve spent even more money. But how many of these would we have to do?

Then you have the financial complications. The money was sitting in our community fund in a US bank. We typically withdraw our money from a local ATM, and then we are charged a fee that is reimbursed by our bank. However, this is limited to a certain amount, which such a large sum for a car would exceed. This would cause ATM fees to add up pretty significantly, so we started looking at our other options for wireless transfers and Western Union and what-not. Stephen discovered the cheapest way for us to do this was to open a bank account with a Thai bank that also has a branch in the US, so we started the paperwork and mess for that, knowing it would take some time.

Just a few days into doing our research and uncovering all the messes ahead of us, a friend saw an ad for a car that looked right for us. She mentioned it and we sent off an email to express our interest.

Stephen and I sat there talking about it, discussing that it seemed perfect for us, but was so fast–do we go to Chiang Mai now? Do we schedule an inspection? We don’t have our account created yet and we don’t have the money transferred, so really we don’t have the ability to actually purchase it. But we didn’t want to see a great opportunity go by us…

I remember at the end of the conversation we came to a few conclusions. First, we had to be willing to spend some money in exploring–that was part of living where we live. We’d incur expenses traveling and having cars inspected and such: that’s part of living in another country, in a weird little border town, with few contacts and limited communication! Second, some of the options probably wouldn’t work. We just had to be ready for things to go wrong, because they probably would.

I realize now how pessimistic this sounds, and I want to shout that we we’re just being realistic; but I know that’s what all pessimists say! But also I know that things can go how you least expect it when you’re in another country, so perhaps it isn’t that they go wrong–just unexpectedly.

Either way, I remember saying at the end of that, “But, it is for the community. And while it seems that things have gone so wrong for us recently, everything related to the community just keeps working. God is clearly in it that, blessing it and protecting it.” I sarcastically threw in at the end, “Just watch our first attempt go perfectly and everything fall into place!” I’m sure I threw a loud “HA!” at the end of it, too.

But it did–everything fell into place! And that’s precisely why it’s worth noting.

God sorted out the details for the first car we looked at; the inspection happened within days and was oh-so-helpful, allowing us to confidently negotiate the price down $1,300! We were able to get the money to Thailand with minimal fees. We were able to sort out paperwork on our second trip to Chiang Mai, have a few small repairs made, and then drive it back to Mae Sot. We even had a place to stay in Chiang Mai with friends and a free car to borrow while we purchased ours.

It was relatively painless amidst a season of some painful events.

I keep coming back to this since we purchased the car. God has truly been good to us in our relationships with our neighbors. I cannot explain it all, but we can hope He is working and that He is receiving the glory. And we can be so thankful for it. We are so thankful for those friendships; we are so thankful for what it is teaching us. We are so thankful for the ways He has provided and the ways He has challenged us. We are so thankful for the ways we have continually been shown God’s goodness, His sovereignty; His grace for us.

So that in the midst of so many funny stories, in the place where our normal is most certainly over, and even in my pessimism|realism: we can’t wait to see what God has ahead, because if He is in it, of course it will work.

We’re admittedly an Apple family, and I’m happy to be a Mac user. Stephen, though, is a little more committed than I am and keeps up with a number of blogs following new developments and changes in the company.

We are currently reading Walter Isaacson’s biography on Steve Jobs. We learned that when the first Macintosh was released in 1984, Jobs told the whole development that “real artists sign their work.” He had each team member sign their name to a paper, then had all forty-six engraved on the inside of every model of the first Macintosh. We thought this was a pretty cool idea, and probably an incredible honor to so many of them now.

This year is the 30th anniversary of the Mac. Through his following of Apple blogs, Stephen learned that Apple printed ten big banners for the anniversary party in Cupertino. In the design of the banners, the name of every Apple employee in their history–tens of thousands–is printed. And that, folks, means Stephen’s name is on one of those banners!

He might not admit it again, but he’s excited. A little piece of the pie!