Tag: Homeschool

Posted on

Grace Upon Grace

I had a very wise mentor remind me a couple months ago that God gives us “grace upon grace”. She was expressing this as something the Lord had been reminding her of at the time, but also as an encouragement to me. At the time of this conversation I was entering the first trimester with baby no. 4 while also tackling being a first time homeschooling mom living overseas. As a seasoned homeschool mom herself she was speaking from experience that there is certainly a learning curve to the homeschool life just as there is with anything. Given our life circumstances she was offering it as an extra encouragement to rest in God’s grace, especially when things didn’t go exactly as I planned or hoped with homeschool. A big part of this seems to be weighing out my expectations for myself as a teacher, for my kids as students, as well as what we can reasonably accomplish each day with a 1st grader, preschooler and a 1 year old.

“Expectation” is a theme that just keeps popping up as I can find myself trying to “measure up” to expectations in other areas as well such as who I should be as a missionary. Whether it’s from assuming our supporters have certain expectations of me or comparing myself to the other missionaries whose newsletters show up in my inbox it can be a vicious game and one that does not take into account God’s grace or sufficiency in my life. In each area of life I am guilty of playing this game – mother, wife, teacher, homemaker, language learner etc. etc. etc.

Suffice it to say that I need to be regularly (like daily? or hourly? or minutely?) resting in the Lord, who He is and who I am in light of who He says I am. I am a chosen, adopted child of God whose sins have been forgiven. I’ve been given new life and a new identity. My worth is not measured by how well I’m meeting expectations or by what I can contribute (a truth I often forget –> I’ve contributed nothing, Jesus contributed everything). In this God has been reminding me to abide in Him, to rest in Him, to find peace in Him. And in this I’m also being reminded that I can’t do everything, but I can be faithful in the areas God has called me to for each season of life.

So what does this season of life look like? It’s a season of finishing well and preparing for change. As I type this we are coming to the end of our first term here in Senegal. We have been away from the States for 3 years. We have made two international moves, had a baby in Africa, started homeschooling, learned (*are learning) a new language (we’ve discovered this is a process), made so many connections with Senegalese people as well as our expat community here, discovered how long and slow cultural acquisition is, grown lots in our marriage and parenting, learned more about who God is by seeing Him through the lens of other cultures and also seen our faith get deepened tremendously through trials and triumphs, homesickness and creating a home, high highs and low lows. We’ve barely scratched the surface on what it means to do ministry and life cross-culturally and we are so grateful we get to walk this, at times heart wrenching and exhausting while simultaneously beautiful, life.

We are excited for our upcoming time in the States to be close to family, to share about the past three years with those who have invested so much for us to be here, to have our baby, to rest well, to get further equipped for the work ahead, to show our kids the city and state we grew up in and love and so on. We are also already so excited for our return to Senegal at the end of the year! What will our second term hold? Each season in it’s time.

For these final three months before our first home assignment I am seeking the Lord for what He has and am resting in His goodness each day. May I walk faithfully the path He has – all glory be to Christ my King.

– Selina

Posted on

New Friends in the Neighborhood

If you’ve followed along with our journey then you know that we have a heart for our neighborhood and long to connect with our neighbors, but have found this more difficult than we expected. Culturally it’s been hard to figure out how to connect, especially on a deeper level than brief conversations on the street.

This has been a huge prayer point since we moved here. Fast forward to last weekend when our neighbors had a party. Parties here go all day and late into the night and involve a big tent in the road, load music, drums and plenty of dancing. At one point the dancing was in the road right outside our house (see the video below) so we watched from the porch for a bit.

Some partygoers got a kick out of our kids dancing on the porch and it apparently drew the particular attention of some kids who were at the party. Funny enough this was actually our first security breach as Mia had been the last one in once we were done watching the dancing and I (Selina) had forgotten to double check that she had bolted the door securely. She had not. So you can imagine my surprise when, at 7:30pm, after one ring of the doorbell six or seven young girls in fancy dresses walked right into the house wondering if our daughter could come out to play with them! At this point our kids were already in bed so I told them to come back the next day. In all reality we didn’t think they actually would return, especially because we weren’t sure if they were from the neighborhood or had travelled to the area just for the party.

The next morning was a Sunday and we ended up staying home from church after Adam had had some really strange heartburn through the night and wasn’t feeling well (side note: he’s totally fine now!). Around 10am (a time we would have normally been at church) our doorbell rang and a little nine year old girl (we’ll call her G) from the neighborhood asked if she could play. At first I just had Mia and Des play on the porch with her, but eventually asked if she wanted to come play inside. She ended up spending five hours with us that day!

G came back the next day as well and even brought a friend at one point. We ended up being so grateful for those two days with her, especially after finding out that she was leaving for a month for a trip to a village outside of Dakar. We pray she comes back to visit when she returns!

We thought at that point that perhaps that would be the end of our visitors for awhile since G was clearly the most comfortable about coming in and hanging out with us, but apparently word got around and later in the week two more young girls stopped by asking to come play and one even brought her two year old brother! It has been so sweet to see our kids playing with these Senegalese children as this is something we have longed and prayed for, but have struggled to establish. We are prayerful that these friends will continue to come back to play, that our kids can build relationships with them and that we can also get to know their families. 

Three things of note:

  1. These opportunities have been plausible mainly on account of us homeschooling. We have the availability and the flexibility to grow these relationships, especially since we know our time with these kids will be more limited once October comes and their school starts back up. We had prayed that homeschooling would allow greater opportunities for ministry as a family and already God is answering this prayer in cool ways!
  2. Mia in particular has been very anxious about interacting with kids who don’t know any English. We think some of this anxiety may be connected to the year she spent in French school when she was unable to communicate at all. Even at our church she gets quite nervous to be around the Senegalese kids and has no desire to go to Sunday school since it’s either in French or Wolof. By God’s grace, and again in response to lots of prayer, she has had no hesitation at all being around these kids even though they only speak Wolof and a little bit of French.
  3. I was talking with a friend from Ghana who noted that the way these neighborhood kids (even the two year old) are comfortable being out and about and in our home is largely connected to the culture. In this we are so grateful to have found a way to open up our home to neighbors even though it is not something we would have thought up on our own!

Please pray with us over these relationships. For wisdom when interacting with the kids, opportunities to share the gospel and also for connections with their parents. This last point is a particularly interesting one as we’ve had four different kids over and have only met one parent so far, G’s mom. She was super nice, but only spoke Wolof so communicating was basically impossible past initial greetings. At least we gathered that she didn’t mind G being at our house, but we would love prayers on how to navigate this wisely.

-Selina

Dancing outside our front door around 6pm (the party had started in the morning).
The party still rolling at 11pm 🙂 Thankfully our kids are used to these noises and aren’t bothered!