Balancing the glorious and the mundane

I guess the mood to write hasn’t struck me very often this past week or two, because Stephen has done all the updating! Let’s see… I’ve been doing a lot of odds and ends the last few weeks. If anything, it’s taught me that life “here” is just like life “there”. I’m not sure if I can describe what I mean by that… I guess that all the mundane daily tasks of life still happen here. Much of the missionaries daily lives are taken up with ordinary things like paperwork, housework, maintenance, etc. Not everything is fun and glorious with inspiring results. The last few weeks Stephen has been busy with more of the fun and glorious stuff (though he might disagree with that) and I’ve been busy helping people with more of the mundane and ordinary stuff. It has made me think about what is more pleasing to the Lord. There is a surgeon who lives here 6 months of the year, and he just left to go back home. Before he left he was talking about how doing surgery always seems to be the more dramatic and glorious thing, but how he believes the nurse’s aid who shows kindness to a patient is just as much, if not more, valuable in the Lord’s eyes. Perhaps we sometimes have it backwards. Perhaps the Lord does not care so much about the result of what we do but the attitude and the motive with which we do it.

While Stephen has been in the hospital or clinic all day, I’ve been able to get a more well-rounded view of what life here is like – and I like it! I’ve been in lots of villages and markets, even a few of the people’s homes. We are different, but we are also so much the same in the truly important things. But I also really like being in the hospital, especially when Stephen and I can work together. Yesterday I got to follow a Togolese nurse (Mawuli) around so that he could show me the ropes in the hospital from a nursing perspective. Fortunately he spoke English – but it is still rather intimidating when I don’t know what I’m doing and he was under the impression that I did! For instance, how in the world do you run an IV without a pump? And how in the world do you mix medications? And how do you know when a baby ate last if it isn’t charted? And how in the world did I get stuck with giving shots and suppositories, two of my least favorite tasks of all time? ;-) Again, it’s so different… and yet so much the same. But you know, nursing is simpler here and I like that.

This weekend Stephen and I are traveling to a city up north called Mango. It is in a Muslim area, and ABWE is building a new hospital there (the town actually begged them to) which should be done in 2014. We are very excited about this project and what they are doing – we’ll try to write more about it when we come back. Pray for us – it’s an 8 hr drive on bad roads. Some people we know are driving us up, but we’ll be coming back by bus on Tuesday (sounds kind of adventurous to me!) We’ll try to post soon after we return, but I don’t think we’ll have access to internet until then.