The Last of The Firsts...

There are a lot of things we've missed in Angie's life.  A lot of firsts.  I'm a big fan of celebrations, occasions, dressing up, anything special; so firsts are kind of a big deal to me.

We'll never get to see little baby Angie experiencing all those firsts. Until this moment, I'm not sure I've ever even pictured her as an infant.  Man, I bet she was cuuuuute! We missed her take her first steps toddling around barefoot in the Bolivian sand. No one will ever know what her first word was. We can't even be sure which language it was in, Quechua or Spanish. And maybe most regrettably, we weren't there to witness her first little sin. Not a moment you other parents probably put in the scrapbook, but one that could have saved us a lot of heartache, if we'd been there to correct her gently and train her up with consistency.

But God has been more than fair to us. Even though we came into her life seven years in progress, we've never missed a birthday. God so generously put all three of us in the same place for her very first Christmas celebration, her third day at the orphanage Talita Cumi. I glowed at her first ballet recital, cheered at her first basketball game, and relished her first tennis match. I took pictures of her, and Ruby's, first sight of those much anticipated white flakes falling from the sky we take for granted, snow.  And it was my ears that captured her first sentence in English.

I have nothing to complain about, we couldn't have asked for more firsts as late in the game as we came in. But now I see, as we approach the end of our first year in the States, that the frequency of those novel moments is dwindling. I'm charging up the camera for Halloween and Thanksgiving, as I'm actively pursuing more squeals of surprise and delight. 

You've probably noticed I'm head over heels in love with autumn! But Angie can only press so many leaves with me before that gets old. So, yesterday I created a first. I remember her saying once, probably after seeing it in a movie, that she wanted to jump in a pile of leaves. When she got home from school, I was raking our front yard into a mini mountain. However, it turns out 11 is too old (or cool) to jump in leaf piles. Well, it's a good thing Ruby is not 11 yet!

We broke the ice by tossing Ruby's ball in and laughing--with her, not at her, of course-- as she rooted around for it blindly. 

But after a few minutes of that we were both submerged. And after a few more minutes I was wondering why I don't create play for us more often. It takes intentionality to put down what's easy and invent fun, it takes humility to keep trying when she rejects my attempts, and it takes some sacrifice to be buried in a pile of filthy leaves and let your child throw the dog's ball at you. But, really what do I have going that's more important than bonding with my tweenager? 

Our hour of carefree romping, didn't solve all our problems, we still had a doozy of a fight this morning, but it gave us a little firmer foundation to recover to. Thank you to you moms who always inspire me with your ingenious ideas. And to you tired moms, like me, the squeals of pure joy are worth a little effort. Someone please remind me of that next week when I forget...

The School-Visit Rockstar Tour

Juggling, that's what we women do, right?

From late August through October my balancing act looks something like this:

• Get the kiddo into a showering/bus-catching/homework-finishing/sports-playing/bed-timing routine
• Pack, unpack, repack, lose things as I...
• Drive 5,268-ish miles
• Watch as many of Angie's tennis matches as I can between miles
• Visit 9 university campuses
• Maintain an intermittently short and long-distance steamy relationship with my main man as I come and go from the home base
• Speak to and challenge 216 veterinary students to live out the call God has for their lives
• Attempt to find the perfect Fro-Yo combo with their fabulous student leaders, equipping them to serve their Christian Veterinary Fellowship groups well
• Celebrate my husband's birthday non-stop for a week against his will
• Encourage and appreciate 28 faculty advisers in college towns around the Southeast
• Keep up with the laundry because it's the one chore Jon hates
• Follow-up with each of those 200 plus contacts to make sure we're serving them as well as we can be
• Praise the Lord for the fall colors as the trees shed their gorgeous leaves
• Coordinate over 30 speakers for two of our Real Life Real Impact weekends coming up
• Vacation with the family to Ft. Walton Beach to visit my 95 year-old great uncle
• Cherish each and every story from the amazing students God allows me to mobilize...

It's been an incredible ride these past couple months working with student ministry, here are the beautiful leaders of the student groups I serve.

Auburn University

Tuskegee University

University of Tennessee

University of Georgia

Mississippi State University

Morehead State at Asbury's Mission Farm

University of Florida

Thank you Jon, Bulo, and Bula for all your help with Angie.  And thank you to each of you who is part of our team to make these campus ministries a reality around the Southeast. It's such a privilege to get to use my profession to guide others in using theirs for Christ. To partner with us check out Abounding and look for more details about the school visit tour in my next prayer letter...

Cheating At Any Age

Last week, while the in-laws were in town for Jon's birthday and we were bracing ourselves for the barrage of after school homework, I got a call from Angie's science teacher. Yep, if you muttered "Uh-oh" under your breath you were right. She was very nice and matter of fact (contrary to all of Angie's claims that she's basically a goon) when she told me that Angie had cheated on her science test. No, not glancing at her neighbor's paper, but you know, just using a study guide. Subtle. 

My alarm has been rising consistently as she's begun to venture beyond the "normal" mischief Jon and I remember from our childhood. The week before when she flipped us the bird for the first time, I asked Jon if he'd still be alive if he'd tried such a thing in his house. And I definitely don't remember my parents getting a call from my teachers about cheating. Probably partly because if I ever did commit such a crime, I likely wasn't as blatant about it. But what I also recognized in the aftermath of the call when we asked Angie why she cheated, and she said like it was the most obvious thing in the world, "because I didn't know the answers," was that I never had nearly the temptation to cheat that she must fight all the time.

From the stories about her peers and their homework habits, and Jon's recounting of the Open House he attended while I was out of town, where pretty much no other parents from Angie's classes bothered to show up, I gather that maybe she's not surrounded by the most hardworking, motivated, or responsible classmates. The teacher herself mentioned that other kids were cheating on the same test. But my real empathy comes from knowing that Angie likely goes into most tests and assignments in a state of confusion and (no matter how much we prepare) unpreparedness that I never experienced.

Then, yesterday, God granted me a further glimpse into her reality. Wednesday is the day we pray that Angie's homework load is lighter than two hours, since we have small group in the evening. Instead she came home with a normal-sized assignment that I could manage, albeit with slight incredulity that she has no textbook or even notes to use for finding the answers, but is just expected to Google all the information. The whopper, however, was the 5-paragraph essay she was expected to write on her own personal culture, with a nod to how one's culture affects their perspective on life, etc.

After struggling to get the truth about when she really found out about this paper and where were all the parts she was supposed to have already written, I vented about the preposterousness of such a task. And then I texted Jon, only half-jokingly, "Would you think less of me if I wrote Angie's essay for her?" I reasoned that I could pull out my hair for roughly 3-6 hours dictating how to spell every word, and correcting each attempt at sentence structure, after not-so gently leading her toward each thought to make up those sentences. Or I could spend ~20 minutes typing up 5 paragraphs (5 sentences each!) with plenty of spelling and grammatical errors (that would have been the hardest part), and we could get on with our lives. Of course I would get Angie's input about what she wanted to say and all, but come on teachers, really?! All the other parents are writing these too, right?  Oh, it was so tempting...

And in that instant I was, again, for the zillionth time, reminded not to judge. Why can I not remember this one simple lesson, without constant examples in my own life. Someday, I pray I'll have enough experience, wisdom, humility, and understanding to react with grace instead of judgment when I get those calls, or that finger, or that look and tone of voice (you know the ones I'm talking about). But until then, I've thrown Angie under the bus a bit here, in case any of you are in the same boat and need that gentle reminder that we're all just playing the cards we're dealt, and some of us have been given a better hand than others.

But for the grace of God go I...