Another New Journey!
I know holidays are normally busy but this one has seemed extra busy. Since our last update I took my trip to Moody Aviation up in Spokane Washington. It was good trip! full of early morning study sessions, aviation maintenance theory, and snow. Yes you ready that right, SNOW, this Florida boy was quite cold. I was in class learning theory and procedures from 8 till 4 each day. We pulled apart magnetos, alternators, engines, and even did some metal working. All in all I was a bit jealous of all the toys that the students at Moody had to work with. They had lathes, welders, system troubleshooting boards, and a plethora of maintenance instructors who could answer any question they have. Several of the conversations I had with the students confirmed to me the phenomena that the grass is in fact always greener on the other side of the fence. When they heard all the “real world experience” I had they said that they wish they had that opportunity. However when I saw all of their training equipment and the people they had teaching them I wanted what they had. It can be very hard to really appreciate what you have in front of you and what you have been through. After talking to the students I both grew in my appreciation for what I had in my training and I grew in the knowledge of what I was lacking. We got to do some really fun and amazing things at I-Tec that the school would probably have a liability heart attack over. All of that to say that you don’t really know what you have until you experience something else.
On that note Anna and I have another big update for everyone. We are adopting! But not that kind of adoption. At the beginning of the year we found out that biological kids were not one of the cards life had dealt us. Turns out there are a lot of very complicated processes that go into having a child and if even the smallest component is missing it wont happen. So we are doing a thing called embryo adoption. This is where a couple like us is donated the embryos that were left over after another couples IVF cycle. It’s some pretty SIFI stuff. Infertility is a tough road to find yourself on. It can feel really isolated, confusing, and to be honest depressing. You see your friends having Kids and growing their families while you are going through a very unnatural and painful process. You desire to grow your family and yet you feel powerless to do anything about it. Its all a bit disorientating. You also have to wrestle through the questions of “why God?”. There is a prevalent teaching in the evangelical church culture and purity culture that says if you doing life the RIGHT way then God will bless you with all that you desire. There is a kind of transactional relationship we have been sold that says God will bless you if you (fill in the blank). No matter how much you think your theology says otherwise it is really hard to get past that approach to God when you have been saturated in it. Thankfully God has given us the Bible and the book of Job. It’s a hard read but man oh man is it good. That book singlehandedly and poetically dismantles the view of relationship with God being transactional in nature. I mean for crying out loud the book starts by calling Job blameless. Yet despite his blamelessness and his suffering Gods response to all of Jobs questions is that his ways are not our ways, and that his thoughts are not our thoughts. He is the infinite creator of everything and we are but smoke in the wind. And yet he desires to have relationship with us and to give us his spirit and allow us to abundantly experience life. Though embryo adoption wasn’t our initial plan for growing our family, what abundance of life we have already experienced in the process. Both Joy and sadness, grief and peace, pain and life. You can never really have the good in life without having the bad also, just like you can never know what you have until you see the other side.
We will be updating you all again in a few weeks to tell you about how my TE goes and where we will be going as missionaries.
May the lord bless you and keep you. Make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you. May he turn his face toward you and give you rest.