We have been here for 7 months… wow, so there’s that!

So as you know our maid (we’ll call her “M”) has become a really good friend of ours… the other night was M’s birthday party, no not party, she wanted to make very clear it wasn’t a party… just a Birthday Dinner!  We were honored to be invited as her friends.  By now we have been to their house for meals and just for hanging out, we are also enjoying getting to know her sister (we’ll call her “S”) who worked for my brother for a few years.  This week we got go meet their other sister (we’ll call her F) who lives in another town and is attending school there, she just came for a visit.  And last night I got to sit and help baby sit the meat that was cooking over the little grill (little grill of coals sitting on the ground)  in the hallway (open hallway to outside).  They insisted that I didn’t have to help, but decided to give me a job because I really wanted to do something.  I didn’t know what I was doing and almost dropped all the meat in the fire, but they let me do it… they let me help!!  It was a big deal for me.  “S” sat with me and talked with me for a while, as I was talking with her (in French mind you)  I was reflecting on the last 7 months and how far we have come in relationships with our African friends, and how honored and blessed I feel to have these friends.  I told “S” how glad I was to know her family and how much I was growing to love them, and she let me know the same thing about our family.  We laughed and joked throughout the evening with all three sisters, and enjoyed the dynamic of all of them together along with their mom “T”.  We didn’t understand a lot of the dialogue between the rest of the people there because french is not the first language they would choose to speak, but we are pretty used to that by now too.  “S” is sensitive to us and talks to us while the rest speak in another language.

We are learning more about this culture on a daily basis and I’m sure are making mistakes frequently, but I am also getting that this takes time and that we won’t know depth of some things until we have been here for a while.

If you know me well you know that I don’t love to feed my children lots of sugar.  Well when going to a birthday party, it is rude to deny my children an entire little bottle of soda, along with their 2 different kinds of cake, and hey if there’s candy too, give it to the kids… they need it!!  I told “M” that the girls could split a soda, she looked at me and said a firm “NO!”  I said “no really, it’s okay, they don’t need all that”  and with a little anger in her eye, she said an even firmer “NO Lily!”  I thought to me self, okay I’m not gonna fight this one, at this moment I can either give my children a lot of sugar or really offend my good friend… sugar for the kids it is.

So here I am once again, my heart becoming attached to a place, to the people… this always happens!  Ha, I love that I love deep relationships, I also can see the pain ahead as one day we will say goodbye to these people we love here too, and as much as I should be getting used to leaving people I love I don’t think it will ever get any easier.  But for today, as I focus on today I am thankful to the Lord for these relationships that we are building around us, and the connections that are being made.  Please pray for us that we can continue to be humble before the Lord, that we can continue to dive deeper into these relationships, that we can open our hearts more to these people and to this culture.

Happy Birthday!

Happy Birthday!