Milestone: Melissa's Classroom Packed

A few weeks ago, Melissa made it official and resigned from her position at Southside Elementary.  She had been teaching Kindergarten there for the last seven years.  We had hoped she might be able to take some sort of year long "leave of absence" to hold onto the job even as we serve at Cowman School in Vaudreuil, Haiti next year.  Turns out it wasn't even a remote possibility - such leaves are granted only for furthering one's education and the year's leave is predicated on a promise of serving at least two more years in the district following the leave.  So, no safety net for us; Melissa had to cut ties completely.

On the last day of school, a Friday, one of Melissa's coworkers asked if she would be spending all weekend cleaning out her classroom so she could be out of the building by the following Monday.  Ha!  It is not the sort of job that is completed in two days.  More like two weeks.

First, Melissa had a huge room - about as much square footage as a small house.  (Not exaggerating!) She had to sort through all sorts of furniture, games and files.  Secondly, the sorting wasn't simple and straightforward.  A flowchart would have been helpful... Bought with PTO money?  - Stays for the next teacher.  Bought with our money?  - Then ask Is this needed in Haiti? If "No", then stays for the next teacher or goes into long term storage.  If "Yes", then ask Is it feasible to ship? - If "No" to feasibility, then long term storage ... etc., etc.

Finally, Melissa has the spiritual gift of organization, so the resources bound for Haiti were not just tossed together into boxes randomly.  No, they stand largely ready to pull out of tubs and be put right to use.  (But just between you and me, I will bet you a thousand dollars it will take her almost two weeks to organize her classroom at Cowman once we reach Haiti in August!)

So every spare moment over the past two weeks has been devoted to clearing out the old classroom and preparing for the new.

The kids "helped" quite a bit over the last few days when both Melissa and I had to be there.  The best part apparently was the ride back to the classroom on the dolly after loading boxes into the van.

Since we are going through a similar sorting process at home, we decided for sanity's sake to rent a storage unit for the next two months in which to store items we HOPE to ship to Haiti.  (No guarantees - we'll have to see what we can afford.) These are all Melissa's classroom boxes.  I dare say that if we can get these things all shipped, she'll have one of the best supplied Kindergarten classroom on the entire island!

The classroom is almost empty and Caleb is ready to celebrate!

One last walk-through reveals a solar system we almost left behind.  How could we miss entire planets?!

Signed out and heading home!  Melissa will meet with her principal and the newly hired replacement on Monday and then her time at Southside will be officially over.

I tend to struggle with multi-tasking on the macro level, so I am glad for this milestone.  Now we can turn our attention to getting the house sold or rented, arranging various events on the calendar for these last two months, and raising the financial support we are still lacking. 

Caleb heads to Nerd Camp tomorrow and the rest of the family will be gearing up for a trip to Pennsylvania in a couple of days to speak at the church of some friends in Warfordsburg and to visit family and friends in the Pittsburgh area. 

Things are definitely moving and we'd love your prayer support. These milestones are wonderful, but they can be emotionally taxing.  Leaving Southside is bittersweet for Melissa.  She is so excited about getting started at Cowman, but she has wonderful memories from her years at Southside, including some exceptional classes, parents, helpers and co-workers.  Goodbyes are tough!

 Let us know of specific ways we can lift you in prayer, too!

House for Sale - Lesson #1

[I've been working on this topic for a couple of days off and on and finally came to the realization that it will be much too long for a single post, so I need to break it up.  The danger for me always is: will I come back to it and finish my thoughts?  I believe I will - because God has taught me so much through this whole process.]

Once again our house is empty and "up for grabs" - ready to sell or rent ... or rent to own.

Over two years have passed since we first put our house on the market.  Early in 2011, after deciding that God was calling us to Haiti, we spent several months fixing up the place.  We even dealt with all those inconveniences that we had lived with for years but that we figured might be off putting to a prospective buyer - a missing outlet plate here, a  scuffed wall there, a sticky closet door here.  Overall, the house was in darn good shape; we had put a lot of sweat equity into it over the five years we had been living there.  Every wall had been painted, every light fixture updated, and every square foot of wood flooring sanded and refinished.  Likewise, on the outside: the dingy gray was gone and replaced with a beautiful "Ocean Foam" ... or something.  Even the kids' play structure in the backyard had gotten a face lift.

By March of 2011, we were ready to put the house on the market: for sale by owner.  We scheduled an Open House on either end of our spring break week and advertised it in the local paper.  By that point, though, the bottom had dropped out of the housing market, drying up every last bit of our sweat equity - and then some!

Still, we reasoned, God wanted us to go to the mission field, so He would sell our house.  When the Sunday of our first Open House arrived, we put the finishing touches in place, sent our four kids off to play with friends for the afternoon and eagerly awaited our first visitors.  Sitting on the couch in the living room beside the picture window at the front of the house would afford us a perfect view of approaching strangers, giving us plenty of time to jump up, rush to the front door, greet them and show them around the house.

That couch was where I fell asleep ... and enjoyed a nap completely uninterrupted by the doorbell.  Our second Open House a week later brought in one solitary couple - those two wandered through the house for 3 minutes and then disappeared without so much as a smile.

Melissa and I were crushed.  It wasn't just that crowds of potential buyers hadn't shown up ... Where was God?  Why didn't HE show up? Was this a sign?  How was I going to have a neat and tidy miraculous house sale story to share with others if God wasn't going to cooperate:   "We put the 'Open House' sign up and fifteen minutes later a couple walked in and offered cash - $10,000 over our asking price!  We serve a mighty God!" 

This was the first of several gut-level lessons God would teach us through this house. (I'm talking about "gut knowledge" beyond just "head knowledge" here!)

Lesson #1: Just because I believe I am following God's will, doesn't mean the path is going to be easy and paved with miracles.  Now this might strike you as obvious ... and it IS obvious and I already knew this in my head, but my gut was holding onto the belief that because God was calling us to work in Haiti, He was bound to expedite our transition. 

I say it is obvious that being in the center of God's will does not equal smooth sailing because anybody can open the Bible to just about any random passage and find proof right there in God's word. Case in point: Take a good look at the Apostle Paul's experience once he got launched onto the mission field.  His missionary life was filled with tales of prison time, a couple of attempted murders, beatings and shipwrecks. 
 
But even though we "know" that neither success nor failure is directly correlated with the quality of our relationship with God, how quick we are still to judge others and to evaluate our own standing with the Lord based on the positive or negative circumstances of our lives.  We forget that even what others might mean for evil, God can use for our good - even though it still looks very much like "bad" right now.  And we forget that the man who has to build more barns to store all his harvest may die tomorrow and lose it all ... and face judgment before God's throne. 

Truth is, at least part of me wanted that miraculous house sale to prove to myself and others that God really was calling us to Haiti.  The last chapter of Acts is so instructional regarding this in-grained attitude we carry with us regarding hardship as being equivalent to God's disapproval and blessings being God's thumbs up:  The Apostle Paul and many others are caught in a storm at sea and their ship breaks apart just off the coast of Malta.  All the victims survive and are cared for by the natives.  Paul goes to help build a fire as they are drying off and a snake latches onto his arm.  Acts 28:4 records the reaction of the islanders: When the natives [fn] saw the creature hanging from his hand, they began saying to one another, "Undoubtedly this man is a murderer, and though he has been saved from the sea, justice [fn] has not allowed him to live."  BUT when Paul fails to keel over and die in the coming minutes, the people "changed their minds and began to say that he was a god."
 
They were wrong on both counts!  The only thing the incident truly proved was that God was sovereign over all circumstances and His will was taking precedent - even over snake venom. 
So back to our real estate situation: the house is again up for sale and I am now more inclined to pray "Thy will be done" than to request a quick and easy sale.  I can honestly say I am more interested in a resolution that brings glory to God than one that just simplifies our life and finances.  If they happen to be one in the same, then yahoo!  Maybe in my next post I can tell you a bit about how God has put the house to good use over the last two years - in ways that would not have been possible if our Open Houses had been "successful".
 
Prayer Request: Even as I finished writing this post tonight, I received a call from a stranger requesting a showing of the house tomorrow morning at 10.  Currently though, first dibs on the house belong to a new friend/sister in Christ who used to live in that neighborhood and would like to return.  She is working on figuring out finances with the bank.  I simply ask you to pray with us that God's will be done.  Thank you!

Plane Tickets

This afternoon I reserved 6 spots on the August 13th MFI flight to Cap Haitien, Haiti out of Ft. Pierce, Florida.  That's eleven weeks from today.  It felt both joyful and overwhelming.  I am already guessing that when the time comes, "ready or not" will be leaning decidedly in the "not" direction - as far as the physical preparations go. 

We are excited to have August 13th as our date because it means we will be flying in with our friends Bud and Jane, missionaries who (among other things) are connected to the orphanage for which Caleb has been raising money.  They will be returning to Haiti after a couple of months stateside and it will be so nice for us to reconnect and to enter the country alongside seasoned veterans. 

Over tacos at the dinner table tonight we discussed how so many things are going to change once we leave for Haiti and that the summer is going to fly by, so we need to appreciate all the little things we'll get to enjoy in the next few months. "Stop and smell the roses" and all that.

Just as we started to clear away the dirty dishes, the power flickered off, then on, and then off again - to stay off for a couple of hours.  How fitting!  No TV, no video games - and the laptops had uncharged batteries.  I did some reading, the kids played outside, Melissa found a comfortable spot on the couch to pass out.

Can't blame her. After staying up past midnight last night preparing, she had a crazy day.  It wasn't quite the last day of school, but it was the best day to schedule her kindergarten "graduation" program:

Melissa and her TA, Mrs. Anderson, herding 26 cats before heading to the stage to begin the program...

The kids sang several songs and were in top form for cuteness throughout the program.

Directing

The Princess gets her diploma

Melissa took a few minutes to recognize the incredible parent volunteers who have helped out this year in so many ways.

The parents surprised her with a ceramic plate with all the kids' thumbprints and names.  She was impressed with the amount of forethought and effort put into the gift.

Anyway, she deserved a bit of time on the couch tonight.  When I got to her school 30 minutes before the program, Melissa hadn't even had a chance to eat lunch and the lack of food and sleep were getting to her.  But she managed to pull it off. 

 

While Melissa was napping this evening, I encouraged Hannah to write her introduction for the new blog the kids have started, and since the computers were off, she blogged the old fashioned way - with pencil and paper.

 

I typed it up for her after the power came back on, but the words are all hers.  If you want to check out their blog, it is at 4grosskids.blogspot.com.  You can just click HERE.

Eleven weeks ... Yikes!

H-A-I-T-I Week

Hair Day

Caleb has been at it again.  He got permission from his school's principal to do a week long fundraiser for the orphans of The Potter's House in Vaudreuil, Haiti.  It's been sort of a "spirit week" where kids could participate in special themes each day for a 50 cent donation. The themes spelled out H-A-I-T-I. 
Monday was Hair day. 
Tuesday was Accessories day. 
Wednesday - Intelligence day. 
Today was Tie-dye day and tomorrow is Imitate someone famous day. 





Hair Day

Caleb was even able to address the entire student body on Tuesday over the various lunch hours - that's about a thousand students, kindergarten through sixth grade!  He's been working with a team of his classmates to collect the money from every classroom each day.  So far over $400 has been raised!

Intelligent Kindergartner

Intelligent 5th Grader

Caleb came out of the bedroom tonight a half hour after lights out. He said he was having trouble falling asleep because he couldn't get an image from Haiti out of his head tonight - that he often sees it at night and sometime even during the day - that it was this image that pushed him to do the fundraiser.  I asked him to describe it and he said, "I'll tell you, but I might cry."

"Go ahead and cry, buddy."

"It was from our first trip to Haiti.  We were on the back of the big truck returning from VBS one day and we were driving through a village.  There were lots of houses close together and they didn't even have doors. And I looked at one house and two little boys were coming out the doorway.  They didn't have any clothes on and you could see their ribs."

I assured him that even though it was painful to remember, it was a good thing because it showed how sensitive his heart was.  "God is already using your heart and I know even greater things are coming."

"That's what I'm trying to figure out - what to do next," he says. 

Yeah - I was pretty much fighting back tears myself by that point.

We brainstormed some ideas - I will let you know what comes of them!



This is his only-half-awake-but-going-to-school face
on Tie-dye Day.

Things Are About to Change

It's funny.  Melissa and I have had our hopes up about getting started in Haiti for several months now.  You may recall that we had even naively believed last November that we might be able to start in January.  Recently, we spent a couple of weeks pestering folks at OMS about getting assurance that we could start for certain this coming August (well, as "certain" as is allowed within "God willing").  We kept saying, "If only we knew for sure that we could get started with the new school year, we'd be so excited!"

So now there is a sure path to get us started in August, and, believe me, we ARE excited.  But, speaking for myself, I've noticed I am feeling roughly equal parts excitement and anxiousness.

I am a worrier by nature ... by sinful nature!  I have to actively work at resting in - and trusting in - Christ.  I need to be reminded now and then that Jesus does not advise us not to worry - He commands it.

Recall Matthew 6:

²⁵ “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? ²⁶ Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? ²⁷ Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?

²⁸ “And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. ²⁹ Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. ³⁰ If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? ³¹ So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ ³² For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them."

So the problem with worry is that it exposes a gaping lack of faith.  Along with the rebuke, Jesus' words are packed with incredible reassurances.

"Don't worry because you are valuable to God!"

"Don't worry because God's provision for you is not dependent on your works or even the size of your faith."

"Don't worry.  Your heavenly Father is well aware of your needs."

And then, as often happens in Scripture, there is a reversal.  The Word doesn't often leave it at "Don't do this." It's usually "Don't do this - do THAT instead." And that's how Jesus addresses the worry issue here:

^"33 But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. ³⁴ Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own."

That's what I mean by reversal: "Don't worry - instead, make the Kingdom your top priority." 

Notice, seeking the Kingdom will not result in a trouble-free existence.  Each day will still bring trouble - but not more than can be handled that day. 

Times of change can be nerve-wracking.  We imagine so many things that could go wrong. So, as things are about to change for our family, I am choosing to direct my mental energies toward seeking the Kingdom of God rather than in "trying to add a single hour to my life". 

I came across a quote from author Andy Andrews on Twitter today that I found reassuring: "Every good thing that has happened in your life happened because something changed."

We Have Clearance, Clarence!

Praise God.  We're introducing the latest students to enroll for fall classes at Cowman International School in Vaudreuil, Haiti:

 

Sarah (6 - entering 1st grade), Samuel (9 - entering 5th grade), Hannah (11 - entering 6th grade), and Caleb (12 - entering 7th grade)! Don't they look adorable in their Haitian school uniforms? 

It will take all the self-control I can muster to not overuse my exclamation points for this particular post.

After some prayer, pleading, Skyping and emailing on our part and some accommodations and number crunching on the parts of the field and OMS headquarters, we have a Green Light for an August departure for Haiti.  Hallelujah!

Unfortunately, this does not mean that we are 100% funded.  So why is an exception being made for us?  Because the need for teachers at Cowman is urgent.  The kindergarten slot which Melissa is excited to fill has already been open for a year - this past year it was filled by the principal, who ran herself ragged trying to meet both the demands of a class of 5 and 6 year olds and the administrative demands of the entire school.  Meanwhile, in the upper grades where I will teach, a full class of 6th graders is currently finishing up the year and will be expecting to continue with Cowman into the 7th grade next year.  AND Cowman is losing one of the upper grade level teachers in two weeks as this school year closes. 

And open teaching positions do not gather quite as many resumes in Haiti as they do in Indiana.  So, for better or worse, we are it.

So, if we aren't 100% funded, how is it even physically possible for us to go?

A) If we raise another few hundred dollars in monthly pledges, then...

B) the remaining shortfall each month will be covered by the funds our generous ministry partners have already given to date.

(And together, that will get us through the first year at least.)

We have had some folks who, in faith and with great generosity, have been sending money to our support account for some time now - upwards of 18 months in some cases!  (THAT exclamation point was irresistible.) THEY are the reason our family will reach the starting line in August.  Our gratitude to these brothers and sisters in Christ is boundless.  You are precious to us and we are so eager to begin the work you are enabling in Haiti. 

If you are not one of our partners but the Lord is nudging you in that direction, NOW would be an awesome time to get started!  (That's the last exclamation point. I promise.)  You can initiate the process by visiting the official One Mission Society website HERE or our own support site HERE or give us a call or send an email (sgross@onemissionsociety.org).  Thank you and God bless.

Nerd Camp and May Updates

Dats (now age 12!) received a letter of acceptance in the mail today.  He is so doggone cute when he gets excited.  He is going to STEM Camp (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) - what I am calling NERD Camp.  It will be held on the campus of IU in June for nearly two weeks.  The best part (in this frugal father's opinion) is that it is all FREE.  Potential campers all apply with an essay and teacher recommendations and grade requirements and, if selected, attend camp at no charge. We are so grateful for Dats' teacher who introduced us to this opportunity and then took the time to guide him through the application process.
 
In the midst of this, I can't help but marvel at how different Dats is from me!  When I was about his age, I had my one and only camp experience - also on a college campus.  It was not voluntary and I was not excited.  It was basketball camp and I spent most of my week in the dorm room with "a stomach ache".  Crying. 
 
But whereas I was shy, Dats is bold and outgoing. He really sees every stranger as a potential friend.  I envy that about him.  That perspective will serve him well throughout life.
 
Those two weeks will be long ones for Melissa and me.  We've never had any of our kids away from the family for that long.  It will be odd to travel without him, too, but we already have a speaking/sharing trip to Pennsylvania in the works for the weekend in the middle of his camp - and our trip may include a "swing" through Florida if we can work it out!
 
And that's a good segue into what is currently on our plate.  We just celebrated two birthdays - Dats turned 12 and The Drama Queen turned 11.  And we are in the midst of the final weeks of school, which especially keeps Melissa hopping.
 
Meanwhile, our house will soon be open again and that means we will need to either take another shot at selling it or find new renters.  Either way, Melissa and I have talked about it and it seems wise to dismantle the above ground pool in the backyard.  The cover had to be tossed at the end of last season, the lining is on its final lap and the decking is getting wobbly.  It would be a lot of upkeep for any renter and it is not a plus for most buyers.  If we end up renting it out for another year, we will have to find someone here locally who can be our "acting landlord", and I don't want to saddle that person with the responsibility of winterizing the pool this fall and reopening it next spring. 
 
At this moment, we are still hopeful for an August departure and thus, there are a thousand and one jobs to be done in the meantime even beyond the house/pool issues.  We need to keep pressing forward with the funding process while tying up loose ends here.  For instance, we know there will be a huge neighborhood-wide garage sale on May 25 and we need to take advantage of the traffic it will generate to get rid of some more stuff.  We can't leave my mother-in-law with a garage full of boxes! 
 
Three weeks of the month of July will be spent in Greenwood at One Mission Society headquarters for training in doing cross-cultural training.  Even the kids will get training and we will all be living in an apartment on the OMS campus during that time. 
 
Then, God willing, we'll be packing suitcases in August.  Time will tell!  We certainly appreciate your prayers now and in the hectic weeks to come...