Counting the Cost

Lately, I have been struggling with living across the ocean from my family. My dad had double knee replacement surgery recently. My mom has been busy and sometimes overwhelmed with caring for him.  I am thankful that my brothers are both nearby and that my parents have a wonderful church community and other friends who have been there with them. I am also extremely thankful for technology which allows me to video chat with them often. But I wish I could be there and hug them. We do have a “fall break” right now in our school schedule, and David was willing to juggle things at home for a week with our 5 kids. As I discussed the possibility of going for a visit, my parents didn’t think it was worth the trouble and cost since in the end it would be less than a handful of days of me being there with them before I needed to fly back to teach again. (One other teacher is also currently away and finding a substitute for middle and high school mathematics isn’t easy.) 

While I have been sad about not being able to be with my parents at this time, I have also been hoping and praying that we would be able to visit them as a family around Christmas time. Evie’s adoption was finalized in August and I thought surely we would have the documents to be able to travel by December. It is now October and it feels like we have made very little progress in this process. It has been a bit discouraging. When we apply for any document we are told to wait weeks to months for it. The usual wording is “be patient.” In general I used to think of myself as a patient person, but lately it has been a struggle. We have time off school this week during which we could go to Kampala to apply for the passport if we had these two documents that we are still waiting to receive. When we start back to school next week we have parent teacher conferences every day for two weeks. It would be very difficult to get to the passport office in Kampala during those two weeks. By the time we reach the end of our conference schedule, it will be just a little over a month from the time we need to leave if we are going to travel. It will also take time to process the passport and then time to get a visa. All of this makes me think that we need to get these documents this week. 

Here is a picture of Evie and me from our Ugandan culture celebration last week. Don’t you think this beautiful little girl would bring some cheer to her grandparents? 

As I was talking with a Ugandan friend this morning, we were discussing how we often don’t know what God is doing in a situation and it can be a struggle to trust him in the midst of the unknowns. She shared about being deceived and the money she had worked hard to save, being stolen. I shared about my struggles with wanting to see my family, but the challenges of getting all the documents. I also told her that I am trying to choose to trust that God has a good plan whether or not we get these documents. I remembered the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego from Daniel chapter three. We talked about how these three men had to trust God with something much bigger than visiting their parents. They had refused to bow down to King Nebuchadnezzar’s idol and were going to be thrown into a burning fiery furnace. And this is how they answered the king:

 “O Nebuchadnezzar, we have no need to answer you in this matter. If this be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of your hand, O king. But if not, be it known to you, O king, that we will not serve your gods or worship the golden image you have set up.” (Daniel 3: 16-18)

You may wonder, how does getting a passport relate to worshiping an idol? I am realizing that when I demand that God works when and how I want, I’m actually setting my desires up as the idol. It is a good thing to want my family to be able to travel together so that Evie can meet our family in the US. But when I get angry with God and irritable with others when it doesn’t happen, it reveals that this good desire has become an idol in my heart. I want to be like Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, saying that God is able to provide these documents so that we can travel, but even if he does not, I will still worship only him.

Please pray with me that God will provide these documents for our family to be able to travel together. But also pray with me that regardless of how he chooses to answer that request, I will trust in him knowing that his plans are best.