Keeping the Homefires Burning

What a crazy week the past 7 days have been! So full of decisions and emotions.

Soon after the earthquake in Haiti, I thought about Kendall’s family involvement in that country. His grandpa started a mission there, Water for Life, drilling wells. Most, if not all, of Kendall’s extended family have been there at some point. Several have been there for extended periods of time. Currently, Kendall’s aunt and uncle and a cousin are living in Haiti- his aunt and uncle in Port au Prince and his cousin in another town. I had a thought that probably in a few months, the men in Kendall’s family would want to go down to do construction. I told myself, “You have to be supportive and let him go.” It looked big.

Late Sunday night in the 3 hours between a 12-hour day shift and an 8-hour night shift (not smart), Kendall got a call from his brother, Jared, in Fort Wayne. Jared was getting a medical group around to go to Haiti. Kendall was getting ready to go in to work, so nothing was decided then. Monday he decided he would go, leaving on Tuesday. The hospital let him off work. As the day went on, things were not going so well on the Fort Wayne end. Jared called and said they couldn’t leave as soon as he thought- they might go later in the week, but it would probably be the following Monday. That evening (Monday), Kendall got a call asking him to work another night shift. He took it, thinking about the work he would be missing if he went to Haiti the following week.

Tuesday morning while Kendall was sleeping after work, I got a call from Jared saying that they were flying out of Florida Thursday, so Kendall needed to be there by the following night (Wednesday). This is very confusing, I know. It was so fast. I won’t go into more details about getting ready, but we’ll just say it felt extremely stressful and chaotic on top of the other emotions we were feeling at the time. We both felt scared. The reports out of Haiti at that time were scarier than what we’re seeing now.

Through the craziness, I felt a peace. I wasn’t sure how the many aspects of it would work out, but it just seemed like this was what we were to do.

He finally left early Wednesday morning. He drove 5 hours to Winnipeg and finally landed in Orlando close to midnight. The team then drove an hour or two to the town they would be leaving from in the morning.

It’s been a rough week. But somehow I am just really sensing God’s grace. I’m not sure how else to put it. Some of it is through people. (Of course we just decided to stay up here in Red Lake and now I would love to be able to be at my parents’ and with my sister-in-law in nearby Fort Wayne.) But my community up here has been so supportive. So far, I haven’t sat at home for an evening. And I don’t plan to. I feel so much better when I’m with people. I’ve been invited places and when I’m not invited anywhere, I’ve pushed myself to invite myself to someone’s house.

Yesterday after church, one of the men came up to me and invited us over to his family’s house in the afternoon so he could play in the snow with the boys. He said, “I saw them during church and just thought maybe they could run off some energy and maybe they needed a father figure.” It is true that the boys were crawling over the row of chairs in front of me and that sometimes their feet were sticking up out of the row more than their heads and that Evan found it necessary to speak very loudly to me and that there was just a low-grade craziness in my little area of the church. I will also say that it felt like a very laid back Sunday because of weather-related cancellations and few people showing up, so I wasn’t overly strict or concerned. And I will say that their behavior wasn’t that different from any Sunday Kendall is working. But even so, I appreciated it. And no, I would not have appreciated it from just anyone. But this particular man is distantly related to Kendall and I have just decided that because of the lack of relatives here, his family is our family. So, I leave off the ‘2^nd’s and ‘3^rd’s and say that his daughters are my cousins and his grandson is Eli and Evan’s cousin. That’s how I decided to look at it. So late afternoon, I took the boys to “Uncle Walter’s” and I went inside and chatted with “Aunt Sue.” He ran them hard outside, building snowboys and sledding and climbing.

I’m also sensing God’s grace in that I’m mostly doing okay at taking things one day at a time. I fight fear, but I’ve been able to fight it decently well. I feel like this is a way that I can give and I know Kendall is doing a wonderful job of nursing- both bodies and spirits.

Last night I ended up having a long chat with my sister-in-law, Jolene (Jared’s wife) via facebook chat. It started out with sadness. We’ve both been very emotional and are dealing with some of the same things. The chat degenerated into a hilarious dialogue. I’m sure it was terribly inappropriate, considering what our husbands are actually experiencing. We were both sitting at our computers cracking up. If my neighbor had been listening outside my door, she would have thought I was sobbing and gasping for breath. If she had gone outside to peek in my window, she would have thought that I had finally gone over the edge when she saw my insane laughter. I have a transcript of the conversation that still cracks me up when I look at it. We’ll just say that communication breaks down between husband and wife when you are limited to a very few expensive minutes on the phone every once in awhile. The ones in Haiti just aren’t able to express all of their genuine love and missing-you-ness and concern for your well-being. And the ones keeping the homefires burning know that their husbands are busy and want to be supportive and don’t want to add to any burdens. So we vented and the cracked ourselves up and went back to talking about the tears. It was so good to laugh like that between the tears and the stomachaches.

Not that it has been all tears and stomachaches. Though I can’t wait til he’s back, I’m glad Kendall is in Haiti right now. I’m glad we can give in this way. I’m glad that Kendall can have this experience. I have thought about women in the military whose husbands leave for a much, much longer time and go to much more dangerous situations. I know that in the bigger picture, this is not that long and that there are more dangerous places to be. Even though I can’t have my parents right now, I have a very good community to be in. Lots of support.

I’m feeling thankful.