say I am you (notes from home assignment)

Nelsons are in Portland for four more weeks: a soggy mid river update.

L to R: Sauvie Island, Hazel Nelson, the Colombia River, Washington.

Dear friends,

We have been in Portland now for several weeks, and it has been SO great to be “home”. It’s been four whole years since we were here. We have been to Target, to the grocery store, to Powells, to Chipotle, to the river, to church. We’ve shared many meals with dear friends and deeply enjoyed being back in our old home.

Here’s the schedule for the remainder of our time here. Even if you don’t regularly worship at these churches but want to come say hi, please swing by! otherwise, hit us up for a meal or coffee/drink. Our job this summer is primarily to BE here, to be with you all. We’ll make the time.

Sunday July 13th Grace Church in Milwaukee (morning service and fellowship lunch to follow)

Sunday July 20th Oaks Parish in Portland (morning service)

Sunday July 27th Evergreen Church in Beaverton (morning service).

Sunday August 3 tbd

one of many summer dinners in our Portland backyard. We’ve had that picnic table for almost 20 years, and known these friends about as long.

How’s it going? Everyone wants to know how it feels. To be back, to be home, to be IN AMERICA.

It’s been weird! and so sweet. There are pragmatic things: grocery stores continually melt our brains with the diversity of options and freshness of produce, the smooth roads strangely make our kids sort of carsick. Our bathroom trash cans are constantly full of toilet paper because nobody remembers to flush their toilet paper after they go. We still keep a huge mason jar of drinkable water by the sink, out of habit. We have eaten our collective weight in blueberries. Our dear old creaky house smells the SAME, with my grandmother’s paintings hanging in the entryway, old furniture from my childhood and our girls’ preschool paintings in frames on the wall. Mostly, our old friendships are intact. People that we’ve known for decades still know us, and we still know them. Our cups runneth over.

There are complicated things too. I’ve been working in an urgent care down the street from our house and covering a few days here and there at my old primary care clinic just south of Portland. On a positive note, the opiate/chronic pain situation is so much better. On the other hand, seems like more than half of the adults I see in the city are on a stimulant for attention issues. Literally everyone has real anxiety. Lots of people are taking GLP-1’s and we don't talk enough about the fact that there’s no real end game: you have to take them forever if you expect to keep the weight off. SO many people come to urgent care for things like: my knee hurts after hiking a lot this weekend. My throat is sore since yesterday and I have a trip (to Europe) coming up. My ears are a little plugged. I feel tired, and I want you to prescribe me a medicine to fix it. I’ve had a bunch of sexual partners in the last month and I think I might have chlamydia (or worse). Look at my itchy rash: is it a bug bite? My eyebrow is twitching and sometimes I feel dizzy. Do you think I have MS???

America is choking on, among other things, its own excess, and its own striving.

Humans are mostly the same everywhere though. The concern for bodily welfare, the waking in the night and worrying about things, the struggle with sugar and decay and a fat belly. The heartburn, the itchy rash, the aching knees. It’s heartening for me to remember that Jesus had a body, who got hungry and tired, whose feet got dirty. We’ve been in Guatemala for seven years (!) and this thing is the same. Probably has been the same for millennia.

Jon Guerra’s new album has been a BALM. If you haven’t listened to it, the way you should listen to it is: by yourself, on a long drive somewhere. With some time to really listen to it and appreciate the beauty of the world around you.

We’ll be back in Guatemala in August. Jeff takes the girls back August 4th, and I’ll be there on the 26th (after 3 months of work-commitment). I think it will be a great relief to be home, but I’ll keep you posted.

I’ll put a list of ways you can be praying for us below, but if you’re in the PNW, we’d love to see you if we haven’t already. (And if we’ve already seen you, we’d love to see you again!).

So much love,

Abbie & Jeff and the girls

Some ways you can pray for us:

— Cora (16) is in Colorado working a summer job. She’s thriving/glowing/at her peak, but pray for her heart and for her tired cross-cultural self, for the Pharisee that is down there in her heart, telling her she’s righteous ENOUGH. Pray for her to need Jesus, as for us all.

—Lucie is almost 14; pray for her acne, for her constant cringe, for her materialism, for her shame, for her to figure out how to know the Jesus of the fishes and loaves, the leaky nets, and the Jesus who broke tables.

-Super pragmatic: Hazel has a nasty ear infection and it isn’t responding to a week (so far) of antibiotics. Our health insurance makes complex care prohibitively expensive here, but free abroad. I’d love to take her to an ENT for an ear tube, but can’t figure out if it’s worth the cost.

—Also pragmatic: Guatemala had a bunch of earthquakes last week. Our house is fine, but the village 10 minutes up the road suffered 6 casualties and then lynched 5 (FIVE) people that were looting afterward. Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy.

—Last pragmatic thing: Jeff has been steadily losing vision in one eye for the last year. He had a retinal detachment and repair as a teenager, and we were THRILLED to find out that he has a cataract in that eye: fixable, not catastrophic. Figuring out insurance and scheduling (here in the US/not in Guatemala) is complicated. Pray for logistics and for God to provide, as he always does.

—Pray for our contentment, for godly wisdom, for godly discontent. For the capacity to see the forest from the forest fire.

— We are supposed to be raising support (ugh). Pray for our humility and the clarity to remind people that it’s worthwhile to give toward the care of the poor in the world. Our giving link is up there if you are not on our supporter list: we are trying to make up about a thousand dollar monthly-giving shortfall. We seem to always be fine, because God owns all of the cattle AND all of the hills, but still.