Flexibility

This morning I woke with some back pains. It happens as you get older, especially if you are stubborn like me and try to keep doing all the things you used to be able to do. I have learned that stretching often helps reduce some of the pain. The stretching itself may be slightly painful at the time, but it helps in the long run. As I sit here stretching while I write, I think about the flexibility we have learned and are learning. 

Living overseas can be a crash course in flexibility. Learning new things can be hard and even painful at times. The COVID pandemic has also shown us our need for increased flexibility. We learned to do school online, to have meetings via zoom, and to come up with creative solutions in many challenging situations. Even our family road trip helped us grow in flexibility. We learned to live together in an RV for a month, learned to find campgrounds and parking lots to overnight, and learned to overlook a lot of little offenses. All of these “opportunities for growth” in flexibility have certainly had their share of pain associated with them. Sometimes the pain is slight and sometimes it is a bit overwhelming. 

We have another opportunity to grow in this flexibility as it has become apparent that our family needs to stay here in the US for another couple of weeks. I am in the process of trying to change our flights yet again. The plan now is for us to land in Uganda a couple days before we start back to school. We are still trying to figure out if we will be able to meet with our students in person. Uganda has just come out of another COVID lockdown, and schools are not supposed to open until a “sufficient percentage of students ages 12-18 have been vaccinated.” It isn’t clear what that percentage is and the vaccines are not even available for students in Uganda at this time. So, it looks like it will be another school year requiring a high level of flexibility and creativity. 

We are still working on changing flights, figuring out where we will stay, how to cover our responsibilities in Uganda and beginning to think about how we can prepare for the school year. There is a lot of juggling and stretching going on. Please pray that as we are stretched, we will cling to the consistent, faithful loving-care of our Heavenly Father. While everything feels confusing and out of sorts, He is our constant. I pray that you also will find comfort in Him in the midst of whatever challenges you are facing today.