salt, fat, acid, heat.
a newsletter about parenting. ❤️
Dear friends,
I try to not start these letters by apologizing for how long it has taken to send, but this one is overdue. Sorry! Things have been nuts, not bad but REAL busy, and sitting down to digest things into something consumable by 400+ people from all over the place has taken more bandwidth than I had on hand.
First, I should say that having the diabetes fund up and running has been transformational for this burned out missionary nurse practitioner, and I can’t believe I didn’t do it sooner. Mario is finally walking around on his new leg (see grainy photo below). It was a rocky process to be honest, and I think learning to walk on a prosthesis was harder than we both expected, but it happened and we are comprehensively grateful. Metaphorically accurate!
Another thing that happened is that all (most?) 70-some odd of my insulin-dependent patients are doing a LOT better. I knew it was problematic for brittle diabetics, some of whom are on the brink of renal failure and blindness, to only have enough insulin to cover half the month. Giving people a whole vial of NPH that is self stable outside their (non-existent) refrigerator has literally saved some lives and a few kidneys, and at least one foot, which I'll spare you the pictures of, although I am SO proud of them.
The other silver lining, and maybe this is the biggest thing: my secular development friends have watched in amazement as more than ten times the amount we asked for poured into the fund. The total giving exceeded $30k, and everyone, from the folks at the prosthesis ministry to my colleagues at Hopkins to the partners in other non-profits working around the garbage dump were like WHAT. One friend dryly observed: Say what you will about the American church, those people are generous.
We are working through the Sermon on the Mount with our girls, and the section about being salt and light feels so applicable. What does it mean to lose your saltiness, or, conversely, to be a bright light on a dark hillside? It often involves giving generously, sacrificially, to bind up wounds and alleviate the injury of poverty in a broken world. The giving that went (and is still going 💫) into the diabetes program saved actual lives, and more than that, is a bright light shining into what seems at times like an inconceivable darkness. I could not be more grateful.
When we moved to Guatemala in 2018, our kids were 3, 7 and 9. So much water has passed under the proverbial bridge since then. Bewildered, I recently looked around and realized that we have two adult-sized teenagers, and our squishy toddler has shot up into a leggy, buck-toothed nine year old who is beginning to roll her eyes at us.
Living in Guatemala has been a wild adventure, and I’m so glad we decided to “kick over the table of normalcy,” as one of our friends put it at the time, and open a new chapter of family life in this beautiful and complex place. Everyone finally speaks Spanish with a nice accent, and they have developed some useful Guatemalan reflexes like a zen patience with unexpected hours-long traffic jams and the ability to roll over and sleep through fireworks and polka music blaring at all hours of the night. They are mango-variety experts, pretty good at making tortillas, and do this funny hand-shake finger snap gesture to express amazement or hilarity that is unique to Guatemalans. They are navigating adeptly the cultural nuances of being foreigners in a country they call home, and mostly have a great sense of humor about it all.
What has NOT been easy is figuring out how and where to go to church, how to do Christian formation as exiles (generally) in the world. (I’m not saying it’s easy anywhere—Portland was possibly more challenging in this regard, and the sort of universal nature of the problem is why I think this is newsletter material). We have tried to lean into the exile narrative—nobody is supposed to be comfortable in the world. God created us for joy (both His and ours). He taught us what love is and where it comes from almost before we understood light from dark. But He never intended us to consider this world our real home. To the extent that we can know Him and be with him, joy is possible, but exiles are how we start and finish, and missionary kids have a unique window into the freeing and crippling nature of what it means to be out of place in the world.
Going to church is hard, though. The Protestant section of the Amazon river that is Christendom is a maze of tributaries, splits brought about by millennia of immovable islands of pride and (mostly white, masculine) infighting. Picking the right canoe in the right part of the ecumenical river system is now a dizzying and mistake-prone endeavor. People get lost in the consumerism of navigating the church system, and they either get attacked by cannibals, BECOME cannibals, or give up the adventure altogether. I was raised in the evangelical heyday of the 80’s and 90’s in East Texas. I am uncomfortably aware of how the evangelical sausage is made and frankly: that I can go to church at all is a tribute to the kind faithfulness of God himself.
All that weary cynicism misses the point, though, which is that God did not intend for us to be or do work in the world alone. Certainly not abroad, and certainly not as we are raising kids.
After a lot of poking around the various church options near and far from our house, we happily landed at Iglesia Reforma in Guatemala City. In our Portland church planting days, we used to joke that we were just looking for the “winsome reformed church:” good teaching, hot coffee, not too much bickering, and with Jesus palpably at the fore. “Let’s keep the main thing the main thing.” A balance exists and it is more or less alive (in Spanish!) at Reforma.
The girls are grouchy about waking up early on a Sunday morning, driving almost an hour and making it to the 8 am service. We made a deal last year that if they can get dressed and into the car without committing any felonies, they are entitled to hash browns at McDonald’s on the way home. To sweeten the deal, if they can pay attention to the sermon (or Sunday school, in Hazel’s case) enough to report back at least two unique points or questions, they can upgrade to a breakfast sandwich. It’s a working system, and we’ve had some really great sermon conversations on the way home over the last couple of years.
This summer, though, Lucie’s church attitude hit a sort of new low. She is generally Too Cool for us lately, and is a member of what can best be described as a sort of sorority-level clique at school. Lu is not more complicated or less endearing than our other two, but she has always demanded the majority of our parenting energy. She’s brilliant (an architect in the making, has an incredible engineering and building mind) and devious (used a red marker to fake a positive covid test this summer to get out of language school, regularly gets busted for bold-faced lies). She was a hard baby, a truly crazy toddler, Ramona Quimby incarnate as an elementary kid, and now she’s a hormonal 13-year old with a withering mean-girl stare. We love her to pieces but she is an exhausting person to parent. Staying in the game as she individuates over the next few years may kill us both.
This July we were sitting at church together. I’d just spent most of the sermon-hour passing her the Scripture passages in English and translating bits and pieces I know she wasn’t picking up, trying to help her get to that sausage and egg McMuffin I know she wanted. She kept shifting around in her chair, so obviously ready to just get out of there. I decided to level with her. Look, Lu: I get it. This is a ridiculous hour to be up and out the door at church, and these people are not cool. There is something inherently terrible about adults singing together. We do a weird juice and cracker thing at the end, plus announcements. It’s a strange ritual that I can imagine you are looking forward to shaking off in just a few years when you leave our home for good.
But—and here’s the catch—what if it’s all real? What if we are Narnians and this the weekly meeting of Narnians in exile, all over the world? What if the stone table and the White Witch are all real and a living Aslan walks among us?
What if it’s TRUE?
And, for a brief moment, she got it. She’s been living inside the Lord of the Rings stories this year, and is still in that twilight of childhood where fantasy novels and reality run together. She blessedly does not yet suffer from the cynicism of adult reality. We’ve started referring to church as a wizarding meeting and reminding each other that while the world goes not well, the kingdom comes.
Our life here is not a joke—we did walk away from a comfortable American existence to serve the poor at a real expense to our wealth and standing in the world, and our kids are beginning to understand what that means. We followed Aslan off a cliff, and in spite of all my church baggage, I know we are better off for having done so. Even if we’re wrong and the whole thing has been a mirage, I would rather have lived and died in pursuit of a real King than to have lived a comfortable life that insulated me from the reality of struggle and brokenness in the good world that God made.
I don’t know how many of you are managing the Gordian knot of parenting teenagers in this dark day and age. (PLEASE SEND TIPS IF YOU HAVE THEM). I imagine, though, that it’s not easy anywhere. I think the thing I should say is a paraphrase of something the late, great Tim Keller said: our salvation is fortunately not dependent on the strength of our faith, but on the OBJECT of our faith. If you’re falling off a cliff, strong faith in a weak branch is fatally inferior to weak faith in a strong branch.
Pray, as ever, for our faith and for our faith in parenting. Pray for other Narnians in our kids’ social world to show their faces, and for them to have the bravery to be the sorts of people they know they are called to be. Pray for real cultural humility as we continue to navigate the jagged edges of being rich Christians in an age of hunger. Pray for Guatemala, for the kingdom to come.
So much love,
Abbie & Jeff
How to pray:
—for our faith! to not be feeble, or blind, or without love for the good world that God made.
—for our girls to see and taste that the Lord is good. “…wine and milk, without money and without cost.”
—for our burnout. We’re tired, and a little twitchy. I don’t know what else to say, but just pray for good rest and against the sort of ankle-sucking fatigue of the muddy world.
your words to your daughter were words I needed to hear. tears while reading, thank you.