Faith, depression, stress...and action

1/10/2019

We got back very early Wednesday from our two week trip to Honduras, hosting a team during that time along with some other meetings and some fun activities. It was chock full of new things for us as a family, even with hosting a group which we are familiar with, there was quite a bit of change from the normal routine.

I noticed in this trip though especially, with this perfect storm of sorts of new activities, a lot of travel, a bunch of change, end of the year accounting, a mission Christmas gathering, and more...that the stress level was perceptible. At least it was perceptible by Cecilia in both Valerie and myself. Not sure who else might have noticed.

I try to peel back the curtain on the reality of our mission work with some regularity here in this blog, and just knew that writing some of this down would be good for me when I got some time.

Looking back at the week, everything went very well, and it was a great week. I could say that with great frequency in general, and even more when it comes to hosting groups.

But I knew going into this that not having a home, dealing with some unknowns, and just the activities of the week was going to be more than I could handle by myself. I made my schedule starting by getting up no later than 5:20 (most mornings by 4:45) to get a few tasks completed and get in a run. This helped physically. It also kept me tired enough late at night that I could not stay up stressing or wondering about the next day.

Prayer was definitely an ongoing part of every day and evening as well. The funny thing though is how quickly prayer can be forgotten when things go well. I specifically mean here that I would pray about the day to come, like the mission Christmas party which is probably going into it my most stressful day of the year, and then as we were leaving, I found myself saying "wow, that went pretty well!" And then almost as quickly as I thought that, the Holy Spirit or the other side of my brain slapped me up the psychological face..."yeah, didn't you pray for help? For strength? For success? For edifying and encouraging everyone that came? Why do you think this all just 'worked'?" I felt so stupid, and happily re-educated for the umpteenth time all at the same time.

Dealing with all of this can bring on some of my depression tendencies. Without prayer and some constant confronting of myself, I think falling apart into a ball of anxiety and lack of ability to do anything would be a very regular occurrence. It still does indeed happen from time to time. I noticed getting back to Honduras that my back started bothering me again, then remembered that it had not bothered me when I was in the US. I wondered if that was due to the roads/vehicles, or do stress and anxiety? Hmmmm At least I was able to actually leave the house every day!

Thankfully, with enough prayer, a smidge of faith, and perseverance, you can come out the other side each day and see God's providence, and doing things where you find He did not really need you anyway, and does it in ways both amazing, wonderful, and just enough eye opening to continue to say "ahha, I see what You did there" and keep going, because even with all the grim stuff I mentioned above, how can you not also be excited to see what He is going to do next?

There was quite a bit of that in this trip to Honduras. But out of the blue, I got this picture on the right from Maria. Doing the outing with the Milk Project kids was something we came up with, but how to do it, what to do, who to bring...it was all kind of a shot in the dark of trying to make a big holiday something special and fun for the kids. Trying to remember that while getting bogged with details can be a challenge.

We did it, and it went very well. Again, I was pleasantly surprised...but should I have been? And this picture she sent...having some fun with the bumper cars, nice. I almost just gave it a quick glance and filed it away except it came with the following text: "Nataly does not like to play. She only takes care of her brother and helps her mother. She says that she never played as a child. Today I saw her smile, and that does not happen often. She was very happy. Thank you for that gift for the children."

Thanks be to God for that gift, and many more.