A Little Serendipity

My training class of Kittitian and Nevisian trainees met with our Institutional Point Persons yesterday afternoon, which made for a high point to the end of the day.  Lots of positive energy as each of us met our project supervisors (many for the first time) and discussed the ways we could help our respective schools and nonprofits for the next two years.  It turns out that my supervisor is also an avid chess player – yet another serendipitous match!

And speaking of serendipity, I'm coming to find out more and more what it means to have faith in God's ability to meet my emotional needs.  It's very challenging to go through training on island: you spend a day with familiars trudging through very general community development curriculum, and when you're through and exhausted, you catch a bus back to a world where you are a stranger.  In that moment, the feeling of loneliness or the dissatisfaction with this or that is the strongest.  And in spite of the flattering attention I receive from the squadron of mosquitoes apparently breeding outside my bedroom window, the need for familiar companionship (and in my case, preferably of the female persuasion!) is overwhelming.  But the reality is that even under the best of circumstances, there is no way to get around that these first few months, when I am living with my host family, apart from spending time with them.  Which I enjoy very much, please don't get me wrong – but they are busy folk as well, and are not always available to dote on poor old me.

Even in the face of this difficulty, however, God sees my need and has, on more than one occasion already, placed someone or something in my path to help alleviate these longings.  Last Saturday, it was my host family sister who invited me to the movies.  (Sorry, MIG, but I won't need to schedule TCoN:VotDT with you, since it looks like I'll be able to catch just about all the movies I want to see over the next two years, and in a nicer theater, and for about half the price to boot) Monday it was a currently serving Kittitian volunteer (check out her blog here) who invited me and a friend to the docks for a late-afternoon drink, yielding both a new acquaintance, and a nugget of cultural integration: I can mix a local Shandy now!  And then today it was running into a married couple who are also current PC Volunteers on the island (check out their blog here) who I had been trying to get in touch with anyway, because the gentleman is currently preparing to leave the very post I will be assuming at my assigned nonprofit.  So that worked out surprisingly well.

Anyone would tell you that it feels so unnatural to expect these sorts of happenstances, but as I try to keep my eyes open to God's workings around me, I can't help but wonder if that is exactly what God is saying to me right now.  Henry Blackaby's Experiencing God says that the Great Planner who calls us to join Him in His work uses prayer, the Word, circumstances, and the church in order to speak to us.  I believe this is one of those times that he has used identifiable circumstances to point me in the direction of a truth I will need very desperately over the coming years.

 Sorry to those I have not spoken to on the phone in a while – my host family's NetPhone, which is set up to provide local calls to the USA, has been glitchy as of late.  As soon as that is resolved, I'll be able to communicate more freely via telephone.  I'll also consider adding Skype services to my repertoire just as soon as I have a steady wireless internet connection.  That might not happen until I find a place of my own, but I don't mind because I'm awfully busy right now as it is.

Allow me to thank everyone again for their continued prayers, and please continue to remember the Clem family and their tragic loss.  God's peace be with them right now.