count it all joy
Why Guatemala, then and now. No real news, but here's the update for summer 2022~
Hi all,
Happy Saturday to you all! It’s a warm, lazy morning here in our garden… the kids are playing Roblox and building tiny furniture for dolls out of popsicle sticks, Jeff is watching tennis and making French toast, we have a bunch of baby bunnies that keep escaping the chicken wire in the back of the yard, and I just had to tell Cora what day it is—she had no idea. I’ve been trying to eradicate a weird fungus from my gardenia and orange tree, and I just planted a new rosebush. Tomorrow is Sunday, and we’ll go to the small Anglican/Episcopal mission church here in Antigua and enjoy liturgy in English… usually we are at Iglesia Reforma in the city but we moonlight at St. Albans a couple of times a month, a habit we started during the pandemic when we had a hard time getting tickets to in-person church at Reforma.
This letter is overdue, largely because I keep waiting for something interesting or extraordinary to share, but the truth is: nothing much new has happened. We are living and breathing Guatemalan air, working hard in clinic, doing a lot of relationship work in our church and team worlds, spending time with families from school… I have some patients getting better, some patients really sick; Jeff has got a handful of new clients in the zone 3 clinic, including one couple. Doing couples counseling is harder than individual therapy in lots of interesting ways, but doing cross-cultural couples counseling in Spanish?? Wild.
What’s interesting, I suppose, is that we are at the start of our fifth year in Guatemala. The time has flown by, and we are at a sort of inflection point, checking in with our calling and praying about whether we should stay for another 5-year term with Serge. (Spoiler: unless some catastrophe happens, all pragmatic signs point toward staying put. We love being here and feel good about continuing on.)
Back in 2014, Jeff and I came to Guatemala for the first time together, to check it out and start considering whether/where/how we should do this insane thing of moving our family to Central America. On that trip we met Joél Aguilar, who has since become one of our best friends, at the offices of CMT… he was working with a network of ministries around Guatemala City at the time and we were wondering how and who we should work with if we came here. He (typical!) answered with more questions, which rang in our ears for many years afterward:
Why Guatemala? and what added value do you bring to my country??
The answer of course is that we love Guatemala, so much that it feels illogical. I think calling works that way: God puts certain loves in your heart, without reason or logic sometimes, and then, in his great kindness, calls you to do the work that you love. It’s not to say that the work won’t be hard or full of heartbreak, but the love will be there.
And that’s so true for us. Of course we love the tropical jungles and the volcanoes, the splendor of Lake Atitlan, the perfect weather and the colorful, chaotic picturesqueness of life here. But we also love the Mayan nose structure, the hands and feet of the people in our lives; I have a real affection for the neighborhood I work in, filled with piles of actual trash and filthy street dogs. For the swooping rings of buzzards that signal you are getting closer to the center of the city where the basuero is, because my patients and my community are in that place. We think Guatemalan Spanish is the most beautiful Spanish anywhere, and get a huge kick out of learning new, specific idioms that only make sense here.
We went to Spain last month for a conference with Serge… the all-company conference had been rescheduled twice, and it was honestly so wonderful to be in the same physical location with everyone in our organization. And what a gift for people like us, working for a fraction of the salaries we were making in the US, to have a trip to Europe essentially paid for and required every few years. We spent an extra week in Southern Spain at the end of the conference, and one night as we were watching the sun set over the medieval city of Ronda from our airbnb balcony, Lucie said, in a very different tone of voice than Joél all those years before,
Why Guatemala?!? We should really think about moving to Europe.
We cracked up, but it was a good chance to discuss with our kids what meaningful work looks like. Why God called us to lean into a broken place, to be uncomfortable at times, and why it’s worth it.
Eric Liddell, the Scottish missionary from Chariots of Fire, said one time,
When I run, I feel His pleasure.
And that is how our work and life in Guatemala feels to us. Deeply right, deeply good, and we are really grateful. I’ll put a list of ways you can be praying for us below, but know, as ever, how thankful we are to be partnered up with so many of you in this vocation… to share it with you is a real pleasure and honor, and we appreciate all the ways you give of your resources and prayers to keep us here, keep us going.
Love,
Abbie (and Jeff and the girls)
Ways you can pray, specifically:
Clinical work for me: pray for my patients! Rainy season means a lot of mud, wet skin problems, and horrific foot infections. I had a woman weep in my exam room for a solid half hour this week, in a rage about the unreasonableness of her husband who won’t deal with the neighbors whose sheet metal roof is pouring water down their wall. It’s just a whole lot of misery in an already excruciatingly hard existence.
Clinical work for Jeff: pray for his clients. Covid has been an unbelievable ordeal for already-traumatized Guatemalans living in poverty. Abusive family structures have been exacerbated, financial pressure has been unbearable, and the church largely does not have a theology for suffering and has been unequal to the present moment. Pastors are in rough shape. Pray for Jeff’s work to be effective and for God to use it to do deep, renewing work in the lives of the people he cares for.
Church: Iglesia Reforma is growing, so pray for deep roots and maturity as it grows. The average age is probably early 20’s, which… isn’t bad but also maybe isn’t healthy.
The girls have Spanish tutoring all summer. It’s embarrassing to admit, but Cora is the only one that really is fluent in Spanish. Pray for Lucie and Hazel to grow in their speaking confidence, and for the group of sisters (Carmen, Ingrid and Sandra) that are working with them.