I remember one specific night, overlooking the Nile in East Africa, moonlight licking the waves below me. I listened to the steady roar of water unseen, which somehow seemed like it should lessen with the dark.
My husband and I were visiting Uganda, exploring whether God was pulling us there.
Scrolling through Facebook that day brought a bit of sadness, glimpsing all those photos of a white Christmas in Little Rock, of all places.
I’d prayed for that so many times for my kids. Well, and myself.
Your first year overseas has a way of rearranging your life, your brain, your family, your body. So it makes sense your holidays would follow.
You may be wondering what Christmas looks like away from the lines to meet Santa, the obnoxious Black Friday ads–but also far from the welcoming hugs from mom, the family clustered around the tree or piano belting out carols.
My experience? Like most of overseas life, there were notable griefs and clarifying, memorable triumphs. Here, thoughts from my first Christmas overseas in Africa (edited from the original post on MomLifeToday.com).
In Go. Serve. Love’s passion to help you navigate a path overseas, we believe marketplace missions has 4.13 billion beautiful reasons for you to consider doing your career (yes, that one) overseas. So we’re psyched to welcome Sarah Galloway, nurse practitioner, wife, and mom, who’s recently moved her job overseas with the help of Scatter Global.
catter helps you find a job and live on mission where Jesus is not known. (See? Isn’t that cool?)
With holidays abroad, time with grandparents, parents, cousins, aunts and uncles becomes limited. Relationships can become distant. We have to work harder to keep the connection and make the effort to keep in touch.
But on the flip side? When holidays roll around, we’re somewhat on our own, choosing if we want to celebrate with friends or teammates, church members or other people from our community.
Sheri Kretzschmar serves in Guatemala as a missionary nurse with Health Talents International. She and her colleagues work with the local Churches of Christ, conducting mobile medical clinics in surrounding communities–where together, they demonstrate Jesus’ compassion.
Sheri lets us lean over her shoulder during an uncharacteristically busy surgery week of patients from local villages.
Let the surgeries begin!
photo credit imb.org
By Anonymous
“Don’t you want me to become a Christian?” It was a question thrown out like an accusation. “I want you to become a Muslim.”
When my husband John was younger, he hated hardware stores. (Work with me here.) He hated all the hooks sticking out of the walls to hang things on. To him, it felt like those hooks were headed straight for his eyes. It was an odd weakness that followed him to adulthood.
Yet years later, as we lived in a remote village in Ethiopia where John was working on a water project, he began having trouble with his eyes–a malady seeming particularly unfortunate following a lifetime vulnerability.
Since COVID-19 left me stranded in a remote part of Tanzania, I’ve been bemoaning the items I left behind.
First, I missed the comfort foods, a certain pair of shoes, an extra skirt. Then one day I realized that I was on my last few anxiety pills. As my supply dwindled, any of their positive effects were undone by my mounting fear of surviving without them.
