The End of a Season

Well, sorry for the silence for so long on the blog. To be honest, we've been sensing change for a while now, but weren't sure what it was. Instead of hitting the keyboard and writing about it, we hit our knees and prayed. And fasted. And prayed some more. For months. The answers weren't what we were expecting, but were very clear - we're going back to Iowa. This season in Guatemala will be coming to an end in 23 days.

Talk about a mixed bag of feelings!

As we've mentioned before, we started this blog as away of being transparent about the process and realities of living on the mission field. Whelp, I guess this is part of it, so we want to share what we're experiencing. At the same time, though, this is, um, beyond not easy. Or simple. And our emotions are all over the place. And some of them are kind of messy and ugly. And, to be totally transparent, in some ways it's felt like we've been living our lives in a bit of a fishbowl for the past 4 years (what with fundraising and newsletters and blogging and such) and we're kind of looking forward to not doing that any more.

Soooo.... I guess what that means is we may blog as it feels useful or informative or cathartic, but we might not. We've received so much support and love through our posts, and we just want to thank you for that! We also want to ask for your grace during the months ahead. We've been warned that re-entry is actually the hardest part of mission life (!?!). We're just sort of starting to get a glimpse of that reality, and even more so because our oldest daughter returned last summer and has shared her experiences with us over the past 10 months. I just want to let you know up front that in the process of going back, honesty and catharsis might not be pretty sometimes, and we hope you'll understand if that's the case.

Thanks for being with us all this time in Guatemala. We know God's got exciting things ahead as well!