hello to anyone who might be out there! During my trip I will be blogging at justtwohands.blogspot.com
It seems fitting, a new adventure, a new page.
This one will be ignored until July-ish

Just a bus

Until today my picture of the next 6 months of my life has been just a lonely tour bus, rundown most likely, waiting outside the sliding doors of the airport terminal. That's all I see. Just a bus. All I know in Africa is this bus. It will take me somewhere, I don't know where because it's a town not even visible on google maps. And then, mystery. It's no wonder that my anticipation and excitement has not been foremost. How do you pack for a six month mystery at the end of a bus ride? What do you need for a mystery? How do you even think about a mystery? So I sit in my room knitting in order to find something useful to do with my hands amid the cloudiness of mysteriousness that all too often leaves me feeling dizzy.
Today my picture hasn't changed, but my heart has. I'm so stoked. I get to go on the adventure of a lifetime. And not even for the first time, and maybe not for the last! All the while I get to meet other people who are going too, or who have been, or who would like to. Somehow the idea of sharing the overflow of our gifts and skills with people who have so much to teach us about faith and patience is the most perfect picture in my mind.
So, I'm leaving kids' club; I'm leaving the girls and my church and my life living with my best friend. And parts of me are actually selfish enough to be sad about this. But as I move out of the familiar and take one tentative step toward that bus, I am washed with the assurance that He who called us to himself, by His divine nature, has given us everything we need for living a godly life. I've got everything I need. And everything, although it doesn't feel like it sometimes, is enough.

Too many cooks in the kitchen

While all of Saskatchewan huddled together with hot cocoa under fleece blankets over Christmas, I got to sip chilled wine on the patio amid cacti and desert heat. Not hot, hot heat mind you, but warm enough to wear bare legs outside. Our family has become so anti-traditional that it didn't even seem odd or amiss to be surrounded by nativity scenes displayed proudly in rock gardens; Santa and his reindeer making their way effortlessly over barren rooftops and dry decks. Strange. No white Christmas. No rosy cheeks, save those procured from one glass too many.
And it was there, in the beautiful kitchen of my mother's new home in a gated retirement community just outside of Phoenix that it became painfully obvious, there are far too many cooks in the kitchen. We are a family of cooks. Mom and Mark and I all fighting for head chef status, so unwilling and incapable of compromise. Fortunately maturity has tamed the insults and quelled the offense. in fact we even found it in ourselves to have a very lovely time.
Tonight, returning home to the frigid tundra I find myself deeply melancholy yet again. Only 2 weeks and 6 days until i get on a plane again. This time the destination will be so mysterious, the circumstances so out of my control, all my little cooks so far behind me. What am
I going to do without all my little cooks?

36 days

the money came
the date is picked
the renter confirmed
the contract finalized
the documents gathered
it's like this was all meant to happen.
I have 36 days until departure. I'm sort of crapping my pants at the thought of what awaits me on the other side of the world. But, as I grasp at straws, trying to make sense, I must confess these musings do me no good. Better to have patience, to wait and see.
In the meantime, I have enough to preoccupy me. I can't believe this is actually happening!

good day

The city is wrapped in a beautiful white coat. For the time being the wind is quelled and the air is so still, sun so warm, all of life feels like a movie set. Great flakes of snow land on hats and scarves and windshields and people are acting out the verses of silver bells on every corner. There's this feeling of anticipation and calm Sunday bliss that floats around town and settles into cozy, steamed-up coffee shop windows.
I feel like doing nothing but smiling or napping or seeing people I know today. I feel known today. I feel hopeful. I feel unworthy of the peace and the blessings and the hope, but I'm too tired to over analyze it. I just want to take them in, the blessings and the hopes, and rest. I want to extend it over to you. I want to give you this little piece of my cozy bed, this perfect line in a mindless novel, this sense that there's someone controlling the shmoz that's thumbing his nose just behind this sunset, waiting menacingly on Monday morning. And so we don't have to worry because it's all being taken care of.
Today I got to deposit $8,930 into my bank account. I had to shake my head at the girl who wondered how this money could possibly appear. I had to ask that girl where her faith is. It's coming, she tells me, it's building. And I hope for her sake, that she's right. This trip into the insanity, poverty, sadness, hopelessness needs to be laced with faith.
I can't consider it today. I just have to sit here. Glowing from an evening spent with old friends who bless my heart with their words and their love and their support. Smiling from the warm embrace of family that I now always seem to feel at church. Giggling that my friend Carissa has finally come home and Callie doesn't have TB and not everything is doomed. No, we've got a God who loves us very much indeed. Time to live loved.

Fun-raiser...

Tonight's the big night.
Will it be raining cash at the "Louise goes to Africa fun-raiser party"? Despite all of my trepidations in earlier posts, it would now seem that the startling $10,000 I had to come up with has shrunk substantially to a mere $4,450... less than half! And I haven't even had a fundraiser yet!
That means that I need to stop worrying and start having some faith.
Ring those phones Saskatoon.

Cherish

I just watched a video of a little girl called Cherish.
She's sitting on my lap as all the little kids at Kids Club sing "this little light of mine". It makes me wonder whether my light is in fact shining when I watch a thing like that, especially in light of Cherish's recent death.
How can this be? How can little girls die; little girls who sit on laps and clap hands and sing songs. How can this be?
And who am I that I get to know her, hold her, kiss her cheeks in this short time called her life? Who am I that I get to go on singing, not even taking the words very seriously.
I don't understand this life of endless privilege while abother baby girl, Tatiyana's cousin just died of whopping cough ten blocks from my house. How can this be?
I'm gonna let it shine, I guess...