One important way to pray for single missionaries (that you might not already be thinking of)

So, for an intro to this blog post, please scroll down and read the post about praying for married missionaries. This post is based on the same principle, but there is a different prayer suggestion this time around.

While there are a host of ways to pray for any missionary, a big one for single missionaries is their housemate(s) or lack thereof situation. Most all single missionaries can attest to the fact that it's hard to find and keep a good housemate. Missionaries move a lot, so keeping the same housemate for an extended period is rare. It's exhausting to be frequently changing with whom you are living! Living alone can be financially impractical or emotionally undesirable, although certainly some people enjoy it. However, depending on where in the world a missionary is serving, it might not be a option. Having a housemate with whom you do not mesh well is incredibly stressful, but your missionary friend might not be able to say this outright in a newsletter prayer request. So just because your friend never says she is having a really difficult time with her housemate doesn't mean she's not, and she might really appreciate your prayer support.

You could pray about:

• Getting along well with current housemate
• Having good local friends (it's fun to have friends all over the world, but you also really need some friends who live close to you)
• Comfort through all of the good-byes that come as a part of the missionary life
• Emotional fortitude when to starting over repeatedly

Two case studies:

Hazel Gray

This is Hazel, who has had nine housemates over the past nine years. She's said hello to a lot of strangers and good-bye to a lot of friends as she, and they, have had to move apart for various reasons. Married missionaries say good-byes a lot, too, as they and their friends have to move apart, but at least they have a spouse and perhaps also children transitioning with them. It's rough going for singles to find and keep good friends who live near them. 

Hazel was polite enough to refrain from telling me if any of those nine housemates have been rotten apples, but surely some in that mix have been a bit more difficult to live with. On the positive side, housemate number eight was particularly great, but moved out last month (to get married, so a good reason for losing a housemate, but still difficult). So now Hazel is with housemate number nine, and her life is once again in transition as she adjusts to a new person in her home.

This is my friend who is working in a closed country

This is my friend, whom we'll call Ruth. Ruth works in a "creative access" country in Asia, so I can't be putting details of her up on the internet. She's a missionary who has had some interesting living situations over the past few years - here are just a few: two women who were very good friends with each other and from a different country than Ruth; a pregnant young national living apart from her husband, and later she also lived with the newborn baby; a large national family in a very poor home; and by herself. She is currently living alone, but is expecting a new housemate to move in next week.

Ruth, as is the case with many other single missionaries, has no national counterparts. In the country where she works, women get married when they are young. There are no 30+ single women, except for widows. It can be difficult for nationals to know how to relate to someone who is in a category entirely outside their cultural framework. Sometimes there is not much in common to talk about with other women, and the attention she receives from men is not often of the type she would prefer. So, difficult housing situations aside, friendships are few and far between, too.

Do you have a missionary friend who is working in a culture very different from her own? (And I say "her," because the number of single female missionaries is drastically higher than the number of single male ones.) Perhaps she struggles with similar issues. Pray for her housing situation and friendships with locals!

So, when you think of your single missionary friends, pray for them as they go through the inevitable revolving door of housemates and friends.

One important way to pray for missionary families (that you might not be thinking of already)

Missionaries often ask people to pray for them. They put little lists of prayer requests in their newsletters, and they talk about building prayer teams to support them in their work. If you are like me, you really care about missions and missionaries and want to pray for them, but sometimes you just can't think of a thing to pray about - those little lists are out of sight and out of mind, and you can't remember for the life of you what their current challenges are, and so you pray something very general about God helping them.

I am certainly not advocating that you ignore lists of specific prayer requests or paying attention to what you missionary friends have asked to you pray about, but sometimes when you go to open your fridge you see the prayer card with your friends' smiling faces on it, you are reminded to pray for them, yet your mind is totally blank as to what on earth to pray about for them.

One thing I think most all missionary couples/families (to come in the near future: a blog post about praying for single missionaries) almost always need prayer for is for their time apart from one another. One or more member of missionary families is often traveling or living away from the others. Sometimes these trips are just for one or two nights and sometimes it's a long-term arrangement, but it's very, very common for couples/families to have at least one member away fairly often. 

So when you can't think of what to pray about, pray for them about their time apart:

• safety for the one(s) traveling and the one(s) left at home
• smooth readjustments to them being back together again
• comfort when they are missing each other
• friends and fun to fill in for missing family members
• protection from craziness - everything just seems to go haywire when someone is gone!
• anything else you can think of - there are lots of ways you can think of about how to pray for families being temporarily separated, since many of the issues are the same as ones you might have faced yourself when having a family member away

Here are two examples (among MANY - when coming up with my examples, virtually all the missionaries I know could have been used as good examples, since they all travel a lot):

The Gilmores - Tim, Chris, Camden, Tirzah, and Braden

The Gilmores might be on the extreme end when it comes to dealing with frequent time apart! Tim, Chris, and Braden (youngest) live in Tanzania. Camden lives in the USA, where he's going to college. Tirzah lives in Kenya most of the time, where she's attending high school.  

Tim is often away for a week or two at a time traveling for meetings or to go out to villages. Earlier this year Chris was in Kenya to teach an ESL class for a few weeks. Since Tim also happened to have to be away then, Braden had to stay with another family for a week because both parents were traveling at the same time! He has two siblings, but he often feels a lot like an only child. Camden can't fly around the world to be with his family for Christmas break or the summer, which is really hard on everyone. Tirzah loves her boarding school, but calling home is not the same as sitting down with your family for dinner every night.

You (probably) do not know the Gilmores, but I bet you do know a missionary family who needs prayer! Maybe hearing about this family inspires you to pray for your friends when they are inevitably apart.

The Heffts - Paul, Melissa, Josiah, and Anna

The Heffts live in the USA, but Paul works in Tanzania. That means three to four times a year, he is in Tanzania for about three to four weeks each time. Multiply that out, and you'll realize it's a lot! The phone and internet networks is not amazingly reliable in Tanzania (or many other places - chances are your missionary friends deal with this problem, too), and that combined with the large time zone difference means that they don't always get to call and Skype as regularly as they might want. 

Melissa knows all about what it's like to be a temporary single parent - a lot of work! And as for things going a bit crazy when your spouse is away, she's got some good examples of that one, too. Having one's routine and home dynamics change often, according to whether your spouse is around or not, is also stressful.

Earlier this year Paul also got to do the single-parenting thing, because Melissa did a typesetting course for three weeks. (That would be typesetting as in preparing translated Scriptures for publication.) Imagine a family without their wife/mom around for three weeks, and that should inspire you to pray!

Again, you likely don't know the Heffts, but think about the missionaries you do know - at least one of them travels a lot, I am sure. And I'm very, very sure they would greatly appreciate your prayers for their family in regards to that big aspect of their lives.

Zarya - age two can be great

Some days having a two-year-old is just the best. You get to play outside with crazy cuteness like picture number one, and if you succeed in playing enough, you can create the effect of picture number two (notice the undone puzzle and scattered toys - she was supposed to be having 30 minutes of quiet play time in her room, but opted for an hour long snooze in her bean bag instead. Fine with me!).

The Hidden Thrills of Spell-checking

I'm on day twelve of spell-checking a massive amount of Ikizu translation. It's not the most exciting job, but I have a secret passion for finding those little accidents that have slipped through the cracks. You know, when an extra vowel has snuck into a word, when the prefix for the perfective got confused with the extremely similar one for the past tense - exciting stuff like that.

This evening as I was (quite successfully) combining watching The Voice with spell-checking, I laughed when I saw a list of four words next to each other. I showed Andrew my screen and joked, "Think any of these might be wrong?" (If you missed the intonation there, it was the pattern that meant, "Can you believe the mistakes I find? There's no way all four of these words are correct!")

See what I mean?

abhahirɨ
abhahiri
abhahiiri
abhahɨɨrɨ

But guess what? I checked them all, and they are all right! And we're not just talking a little tweak of a different suffix on the same root, but like totally, completely different words! How exciting is that late in the evening of day 12 of spell-checking?

In respective order, they mean:

he should take them
angel
relative
he gave them

COOL!. I love Ikizu.

Backyard View

My friend Chris Gilmore takes amazing photos, and what's even more amazing is that she takes them with a very ordinary camera! This is one of her recent shots of Lake Victoria.

Can you believe that I used to live in a town that was right on this lake? In fact, two of the houses I lived in had lake views, and one actually abutted the lake in the backyard - that's right, my back fence was on the beach!

Gorgeous as this is, let's remember that there is bilharzia in the lake, as well as massive troops of lake flies hidden in there, just waiting to rise out and swarm the neighborhood. But I still miss it!

Cute, but wiggly

Have you taken any pictures of small children recently? Ai yai yai! For Andrew's birthday, I wanted to take a few pictures of the kids for him. He loves pictures and doesn't get as many chances as I do to take them of Zarya and Jerod, so I thought it would be a (cheap, easy) sweet gift. Well, I can't deny that it was cheap, but easy?! What planet of immobile, yet cheerful, babies/toddlers was my brain visiting?

I finally ended up with a decent ONE, but here is an example of about 50 that happened along the way...

At least on this outtake, Zarya was being helpful and prevented him from totally taking off for another room or something!

They both sat still! And smiled!

Ginger Lime Cookies

Ginger Lime ones are on the left

Want to make some Ginger Lime Cookies with the recipe I made up? Try them, you'll like them (okay, provided you like both ginger and lime, that is)! The Indiana County Fair judges might or might not have liked ginger and lime, since they got 3rd place.

3 cups all-purpose flour

3/4 teaspoon baking powder

1/4 teaspoon salt

2 Tbls ginger powder

1 cup unsalted butter, softened

1 cup sugar

2 inches fresh ginger

1 egg

1 tablespoon milk

1 tsp lime zest

Powdered sugar, for rolling out dough

1 cup powdered sugar, sifted

1 1/2 tablespoons fresh lime juice

Directions

Mix together flour, baking powder, salt and ginger powder. Set aside.

Put the fresh ginger and sugar in a food processor and pulverize them.

Place butter and sugar/ginger in large bowl and beat. Add egg, milk, and lime zest and beat to combine. Gradually add flour mixture. Wrap the dough in cling wrap and refrigerate for 2 hours.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.

Sprinkle surface where you will roll out dough with powdered sugar. Place dough on the surface, cover dough with the cling wrap, and press it down with your hands (the cling wrap keeps the dough from sticking to your hands). Re-sprinkle more powdered sugar underneath the dough if need be. Still with the cling wrap over teh dough, use a rolling pin to roll out dough to 1/4-inch thick. Move the dough around and check underneath frequently to make sure it is not sticking. Cut into desired shape, place at least 1-inch apart on greased baking sheet, parchment, or silicone baking mat, and bake for about 9 minutes or until cookies are just beginning to turn brown around the edges. Immediately remove to wire racks for cooling.

Mix powdered sugar and lime juice and ice cooled cookies.