God's Abundant Graciousness

Israel had his cleft lip repaired and then our Comms team
visited him and his family at home.

This past week has really shown me what a life giving thing it is (at least for me) to spend time with others. It’s been an absolutely amazing week, filled with awe at the graciousness of God and being grateful for all the people He has put in my life. It’s almost like this week was meant to be the opposite or reverse of all my weeks as a hermit. The entirety of one night was spent playing cards and laughing. Another night was spent baking cookies, talking out frustration and birthday planning. One night was spent watching Lord of the Rings and including our own hilarious commentary. I forgot how much I love watching movies with other people, especially people who are okay with you laughing and talking the whole time. Other nights were filled with worship, small group and our Hebrews Bible study, which are all incredibly life giving. I am learning so much from the people here, from all the different experiences, stories and wisdom that they have. It brings me to tears when I hear the amazing ways that God has called His children, called us out of despair, out of hopeless situations, out of self-destructive cycles. He meets each of us where we are.

This weekend was filled with sunshine and laughter.

This weekend a few of us rented a house on the beach, around 2 hours from Cotonou and I think it was exactly what we needed. It was my first night spent off ship since we got here, my first swim in the ocean since we got here. We spent the weekend alternating between swimming in the ocean, swimming in the pool, eating and laughing. I got a little taste of the American Midwest when we went for a late night drive down a dirt road along the beach and blasted country music. We had a morning workout in the sand and did Navy Seal style situps in the surf with our arms linked (I mean why not right?). We played cards and napped and read and laughed. There was so much laughter and ridiculousness. It was perfect.

Amongst all of this fun, I promise that I did do some work. Thankfully we had a week with no guests so Tiff and I were able to focus on planning and fixing processes. Some stuff had been getting missed because we were so busy, and we were able to catch up on all that stuff and start thinking about ways to make things easier for the crew. We have 4 teams coming back to back (starting tomorrow night), so we were able to start nailing down various moving pieces. It was nice to have a slower week, where I could have coffee with people, wander around and see how everyone was doing and put some plans in place.

I have also been added to one of the fire teams on the ship – BA control for Fire Team 1. My first question was, what’s BA control? BA stands for breathing apparatus, so basically I’m in charge of keeping track of how much air the fire team has left in their tanks. Being on a fire team means that you have to attend training on the weeks that there isn’t a fire drill and we had our first training last week. I was definitely outnumbered considering I was the only girl there, but it was really interesting. Rodrigo filled a room with smoke and turned the lights off and we got to go in and look around using a thermal detector. It’s interesting all the things you have to think about when putting out a fire on a ship. You don’t want to continuously spray water because all that water has to go somewhere after. You definitely don’t want to sink the ship by filling it up with water.

A few weeks ago, when Don was here, we participated in a
very official signing ceremony at the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs to set up a regional office here in Benin.

As I’m sure most of you know, this week was the U.S. presidential election. Some of the crew stayed up all night to watch the results. I woke up at around 4am, from a great dream where Hillary was elected and we were celebrating the election of the first female president, checked my phone and couldn’t believe it. Hard to sleep after seeing that Trump is leading and looks like he will win all of the swing states. I had such high hopes. It’s a little heart breaking considering she won the popular vote, and now it’s looking like she won it by almost 2 million votes. The Electoral College math just didn’t work out for her. As more and more people gathered around the TV in the morning and listened to Trump give his acceptance speech, one of the crew members came and asked if anyone wanted a commitment extension form. That was hilarious. We joked that this was the plan for recruiting more people for the new ship. It’s always so interesting to experience international events with such a diverse crew. People from many different countries were watching and discussing the results. Some people were content with the results, others were devastated, with everyone else falling somewhere in between that spectrum of emotions. I won’t say too much more on that, because we will just have to see what happens, but I wanted to share a little of what it was like to experience that in a community that includes many nations.

Two of the very best maxfax surgeons, hard at work - Dr.Gary
Parker and Dr.Mark Shrime.

This week also brought a really interesting and unexpected blessing that helped get rid of the election day blues. That morning I had no plans to go anywhere and by the end of the day I was headed to France, flights booked and everything. It’s a bit of a long story, but short version is that I started the process of applying to work for the Canadian Foreign Service, because it’s a really long process and mostly just to see how far I would get. Well, I’ve gotten further than I thought, and the next step is to write an in person test and the closest/most direct place that they are offering the test is in Paris, France. I mentioned it to my mom, and she was like, okay, we will pay for you to go and grandma and I will meet you there! I was astonished. What a blessing it is to have parents who believe in you that much, who help you chase your crazy dreams. So in less than three weeks I will be meeting my mom and my grandma in Paris, France. This has special significance for us because our family is French and I know they have long wanted to visit France. The whole thing is a special God blessing – the one test date falls on a week where I happen to be able to leave the ship because I’m not hosting a team, no one else on our team is gone and I’m generally not needed. By the end of the day we had flights and an airbnb booked. My mom told me that I keep life exciting. This made me think back on this year and I can’t help but marvel at what God has done in my life in one year. In terms of countries, this year I have been to Jamaica, Madagascar, Canada, USA (Texas), London (a few hours), South Africa, Benin and am now going to France. I know I say this often, but God has such big dreams for us – I would never have dreamed up something like this on my own.

I want to end with a thought that a friend shared with me a few weeks ago, when I was struggling with the question of why be excellent? He said the reason to be excellent is to be the shining light in a crowd of shadows. That has really stuck with me. What a beautiful image. That is my prayer for us: to be able to put aside ourselves and shine bright with God's light. To be so overflowing with God's love and joy and grace and peace that it pours out onto others. 

And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ—to the glory and praise of God. ~ Philippians 1:9-11

Last week our orthopedic screening got under way and this week surgeries start! These kids are warriors and they are ready
for surgery, months of rehab and then finally, straight legs.