Sad? Happy? Both?
I don’t know how the families of missionaries handled it in the past. When Dan and Dalaina were preparing to leave for Peru, several people asked me if I was OK with it. I usually replied with a heartfelt answer that we absolutely want them to be where God is calling them, and if that is in Peru then we are good with that. I then added that my tenderhearted wife Sonia would likely have a hard time letting the grandchildren go. I naively thought I would be strong enough to not be too affected. I was a new grandpa then, and had no idea how deeply I would hurt having them all go so far away for so long. They moved in April 2009, and we got to go visit them in August. Even though it was a relatively short time since we had seen them, we choose to go in August because our high school age daughter Amanda would have no good time to be away until the following spring. She plays basketball, so leaving over the Thanksgiving or Christmas breaks is not really an option. Now it looks like we won’t get to see them until this summer when they are here for a short furlough. Do you have any idea how much 1 and 2 year old boys change in a year? The twins won’t really know who we are. Thanks to Skype, Moses will remember us. When they are in Pucallpa we get to speak with them on video conference about once a week. A few weeks ago Sonia enjoyed reading Moses a bedtime story over the computer connection. Back here in California, basketball season just ended for Amanda. That means a lot more free time for us, and more time to feel the hurt of missing family. Since Dan, Dalaina and the kids are in Tsoroja right now we can’t even speak with them on the phone or Skype.
Several weeks ago our church had a series in James and we heard on many occasions about how God has a way of bringing joy in trials. A part of those messages included the odd phenomenon of our capacity to feel intense joy and pain at the same time. We are now living that first hand, with the intense pain of missing such key times in the lives of our grandkids, and yet having the incredible joy of seeing God’s hand at work in and through their lives. It is teaching us to continually turn back to an intimacy with God to meet our needs. It is odd how we tend to fill our time with good things that bring us joy, to the exclusion of having the greatest joy of that intimacy with Him. I guess that is why we can honestly be thankful in the midst of those trials since God sends them our way to bring about a good that we don’t normally take time to pursue.