Categories
Inspiration

Getting Established, All Over Again

Kyiv skyline

This post first appeared on Assist News Service in September 2015.

Last month I shared the sad circumstances surrounding our family’s relocation from the quiet town of Ternopil in Western Ukraine to Kyiv, the bustling capital of the country. I told how a dear friend and the pastor of a church in Kyiv had confessed to adultery, and the church leadership had asked us to come pastor the church. I wrote about the challenges and uncertainties we were facing as we transitioned from the pastorate of one church to another and prepared our four kids for the move. At the time, we hadn’t found a place to live, and we didn’t even know if our family budget could accommodate Kyiv’s higher rental prices or if we would be able to get our kids enrolled in a school nearby. Since then, God has graciously led us to the answers to these and other questions.

Categories
Inspiration

Relocating

My husband and me studying on the 6-hour bus ride to Kyiv, one of a number of trips to Kyiv that we have made in the last month.

This post first appeared on Assist News Service in July 2015.

A month ago, our lives turned upside down. In the ensuing chaos, my husband and I missed the anniversary of the day we met and let Father’s Day come and go without celebration. I am even routinely forgetting the day of the week and losing track of which city and sometimes which country I’m in. What caused this insanity?

Categories
Uncategorized

Okay, So It’s an Excuse . . .

I've been scarce in these parts for some time, so I wanted to show my virtual face and offer an explanation. One and a half weeks ago, we moved. It was just from an apartment on one side of the street to an apartment on the opposite side of the same street, but still, we moved. And in my opinion (and I've moved 9 times in the last 8 years and 8 months, so I should know) any move is a huge hassle, regardless of the distance involved. And when you move from the 4th floor of a building with no elevator to the 5th floor of another walk-up, it's potentially more of a hassle than moving across the country, even if those two buildings are on the same street. So our life is presently chaotic, and our living space is in a shambles, but we're t-h-r-i-l-l-e-d with our new place. And as soon as I locate the USB cable for the digital camera, I'll post some pictures . . .


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Categories
Inspiration

I’m Writing Again

All three of my children are currently asleep.

At the same time.

During daylight hours.

Do you have any idea how rare this is?

I don't think it would have happened at all except for the fact that one of them is ill, another seems like he might be catching it, and the third is only 5 months old, so he sleeps most of the time anyway.

Reading the blogs of others has inspired me to start writing again, but that's tough to do these days with three children ages 4 and under. It's possible to read while trying to keep the eldest child from bullying the middle child, while encouraging the middle child to finish his lunch, all while keeping the nursing infant latched on at the breast. It's possible to read like that, but not to write! So now that they're all sleeping, I'm going to start writing a new post.

Well, that was short-lived. The baby just woke up and is having a little snack as I type, which I am able to do while nursing a baby thanks to the amazing wrap-around nursing pillow that my parents sent me for my birthday.

I feel like I've finally got my act together after the birth of our most recent baby. It always seems to take me about a month to get back into a good rhythm with cooking, housework, parenting, personal hygiene, etc. So now that the apartment is not always a complete wreck, and I'm washing my hair twice a week, and I can find time to read to the boys in addition to their nighttime Bible story, I decided to take on a new project. Last week I hung pictures up in our living room. This might not sound like much, but for me it was a huge step. You see, before moving to our current city about three and a half years ago, we lived in Kyiv for four and a half years.

And we lived in seven different apartments during that time.

Seven apartments in four and a half years averages out to fewer than eight months per apartment. That's a lot of moving, and all of that moving was prefaced by the biggest move of all, my move from the U.S. to Ukraine. By the time we moved to our new city and our current apartment, circumstances had trained me to approach home decoration in light of our next move.

Our Ghetto Storage Solution

 

That's why instead of getting cupboards to store our things, we bought plastic bins and stacked them six feet high on shelves in our bedroom.When it's time to move again, I won't even have to pack these things; we'll just load up our storage bins and go. (Several months ago I finally had the brilliant idea of hiding the storage bins behind a fuzzy green blanket that coordinates with our bedroom curtains.)

That's why we don't own a television set; we ditched it before the last move because we found it too big and cumbersome to drag along yet again. (Somehow we felt differently about our hundreds of books, but that's a topic for another post.)

The problem with this approach is that we've been living in the same apartment for three and a half years, and I'm still acting like we're going to move out next month. Over the last two years, I've been given several pieces of original artwork, but since I was always thinking in terms of our next move, I was unwilling to drill holes in our concrete walls to hang them. Instead, they were propped awkwardly on bookshelves and windowsills. The beautiful oil painting that my husband gave me for my birthday was sitting on top of our wardrobe so that the kids couldn't maul it! But last week I finally took the plunge and decorated our living room walls. (Thanks to a care package from a friend in the States, however, I was able to do it with 3M Command picture-hanging strips instead of my husband's heavy-duty drill for concrete.) It looks wonderful–homey and inviting–and the oil painting of the Carpathian Mountains soothes my spirit every time I gaze at it:

Carpathian Mountains, oil on canvas

Why didn't I do this sooner? 

On the other hand, while constantly living in terms of the next move may be an awful way to approach home decorating, I've realized that it's exactly the way I should approach life as a whole. My next move is just around the corner. Am I storing my things in such a way that they will make the move with me? (Matthew 6:19-21) Am I getting rid of everything that is heavy or cumbersome? (Hebrews 12:1-2) Most importantly, am I living with the daily conviction that this life with all its trappings (good and bad) is just a temporary arrangement until Jesus takes me to my true home?


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