Saturday, January 4, 2014

Monday, December 23

Why not, instead, see those limitations as God's gentle wooing?  He is our Creator.  We, the created.  Who knows better how to love, forgive, enervate, and establish us than our Creator?  The limitations He sends are invitations to His heart, His ways, His abundance.  ~Mary DeMuth, “Everything
I woke feeling like morning had punched me in the face.  A sinus headache has dogged every step I've taken in Marulaon since we arrived in November.  This is one of the many days I feel like I can hardly put one foot in front of the other.  I'm trying to see my limitations, my lack of strength and energy, as God's gentle wooing.

We've been without e-mail for five days now.  Today is especially rough because my side of the family is gathering to celebrate Christmas, and I have no way to communicate with them.  Once again, the Lord tucked a special gift of encouragement in my day, this time in the form of firewood!  Over the weekend, I asked for a cord of firewood from Skita and Eta's family because I knew we would be doing lots of cooking this week.  That firewood arrived in the morning, and throughout the course of the day, two more cords showed up from two more families.  I paid for each one of them and thanked them for helping us be able to be a part of the community by cooking.  Rain and “coolness” descended in the afternoon, and I walked over to Ofoaen's to visit.  She and two of her daughters had just arrived from their bush garden.  They were sopping wet and obviously cold.  I found them in their kitchen, now full of firewood.  I told Ofoaen that I would come back later to chat, after she had a chance to change clothes and warm up.  She said they had brought some firewood for me!  How in the world did everybody know that I had used up all of my firewood!?!  Her husband carried the firewood to my kitchen, and I went back to the house to get money to pay Ofaoen and to give her some time.  When I picked my way along the wet and  slippery paths to her house, she was sitting underneath waiting for me.  I tried to pay her, but she refused, saying that she was my friend.  Wow!

This culture is full of reciprocation.  Aaron is currently reading “Christianity and Animism in Melanesia” by Kenneth Nehrbass.  On page 80, I found this quote, “Tribal societies see giving and receiving not as a way of meeting a need but as a way of establishing relationships...the whole point of gift-giving is to attach strings.  Charity does not count as a gift, if inherent in the word gift is the notion of strengthening relationships.”  I don't know if this applies to my relationships or not, since I'm not part of a Lavukal tribe, but Ofaoean's willingness to think about me and provide something I needed, along with her unwillingness to receive money, certainly strengthened my relationship with her, and made me so thankful to my God who loves me and provides a sister when mine is so very, very far away.

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