Missions - gearing up to leave, part 2 - holding pattern

We left for a 2 weeks road trip/family reunion through Northern Wyoming and Montana at 4am on August 4th. We left the house in good hands for those two weeks - hands who showed it to potential buyers for us once, collected mail, watered plants, mowed the lawn, etc. We left the house knowing we’d come back and have to hit the ground running to get packed up by our end of Oct. closing date that was agreed upon with our buyers, one of the first few folks that had looked at the house initially. We signed an electronic contract while on the trip and were relieved to have the home sale bit behind us. I’m a home body, we really all are to some extent, but I, in particular, love to travel but I really love to be home. Returning home from a long trip is wonderful. It’s bittersweet to return home knowing I’m back just to start disassembling the home we’ve built here and I knew it would be difficult for me to return from being gone for two weeks this go-round.

The trip was wonderful! I’ll devote a separate post to that. 5 days after we signed a contract with our buyers, and the last Friday of our trip Josh got an early morning call from our consultant from our sending organization. He’s the one that has processed through our entire application and moved us from one stage to the next in this now 2 year process. The news was hard to swallow - our November training has been cancelled, we are being pushed to the training at the end of January, but we are being told to hold that timeline loosely as well, as January training may be cancelled also. To shorten the explanation of why they are delaying us, there’s a large backlog of missionaries waiting to leave the States with no countries to let them in. Borders are closed to Americans because of Covid, and while some are accepting Americans, they are few and far between. There’s no sense in bringing in dozens more missionaries to train when there’s no where for them to go. There’s more to it than that, but we trust that the leadership of the organization has put long hard hours of prayer and deliberation into their decision. Our language school and the international school that the boys would be attending during our language training (we will homeschool at our final location, but are unable to devote the time to schooling them while doing language school ourselves - company policy) are both closed for the remainder of the calendar year. All schools in the entire country are closed. We aren’t sure yet wether they will open schools in this country at the beginning of 2021.
This was hard news to process so early in the morning and only a few days before returning home to get working on packing up the house. I had just started to feel ready to return home and get working. I could feel my fist grip on our current season of life loosening and my heart feeling more ready to move on, and I have continued to have to reorient my thinking, even these few weeks later, about what life looks like right now. It’s not negative, just different than expected.

The first order of business for Josh was to call his hospital admin and pray they hadn’t filled his position yet. We received an answer back quickly that they were relieved he’d be staying on for at least a few more months, and were just gearing up to hire a recruiter to find a replacement for him. Praise the Lord that he still has a job! The second order of business was to think through our housing situation. We made too hasty a decision to notify the buyers right away and ask to be released from the contract. We didn’t think or pray through this enough and could have handled it differently in those first few hours/days. As we talked through our option, the thought of moving into a month to month rental while trying to figure all the logistics of homeschooling, packing for two overseas moves on an unknown timeline and navigating an Omaha winter with 5 boys in an unfamiliar space was enough to make me feel sick to my stomach. We felt really badly about putting them in the position we did and told them outright that we wouldn’t take legal action and if they wanted to take legal action we would bow out and find somewhere else to live. It took some time for stuff to sink in for them, just as it did with us, and they agreed to release us from the contract. We still feel badly about it all, but we are so grateful for the Lord’s mercy in this situation and that we are in our home at least until the end of the year.

We are proceeding forward, a little more slowly that we expected, with prepping to leave. The process hasn’t totally stopped, we are just pushed back a few months, with the potential of being pushed back more. It was reassuring to talk to our team, all who are stuck stateside right now, and hear that this was a bit of a relief for them, as they aren’t sure when they will be allowed to return to the country and were feeling concerned about how they would prep for two large families and a single to come onto the team all at once. Honestly, personally, after the initial grief of the delay wore off, I was relieved to have more time with family and our community of believers here. Covid has put a wrench in our plans to travel and see family, and still does to some extent, but this extra time and slower autumn season than we were expecting, gives us extra time to plan visits and not feel hurried to cram stuff in amidst all the other chaos.

So that is where we are at now. We are doing a normal semester of school with the boys after expecting that it would be abbreviated and incomplete, and are soaking up time with family and loved ones.