A Blessed Thanksgiving
“There is a quiet light that shines in every heart. It draws no attention to itself, though it is always secretly there. It is what illuminates our minds to see beauty, our desire to seek possibility, and our hearts to love life. Without this subtle quickening our days would be empty and wearisome, and no horizon would ever awaken our longing. Our passion for life is quietly sustained from somewhere in us that is wedded to the energy and excitement of life. This shy inner light is what enables us to recognize and receive our very presence here as blessing. We enter the world as strangers who all at once become heirs to a harvest of memory, spirit, and drama that has long preceded us and will now enfold, nourish, and sustain us. The gift of the world is our first blessing.”
John O’Donohue, “To Bless the Space Between Us”
As we were packing for PNG last year, a former missionary gave us this advice: “Don’t take any books that are important to you. The humidity and mold will ruin them, but be sure to take whatever book you cannot live without.” It was good advice. We carefully selected about 50 books, among them the Bible and ELW, and the one that I “could not live without” is a book of blessings by John O’Donohue, “To Bless the Space Between Us.” \ I rather like to imagine the “space between us” as blessed in our journey together in mission work.
Nov. 21 marks our one-year anniversary in Papua New Guinea. We flew into this island country with energy and excitement, not really feeling fear but with a heightened awareness of entry into the unknown. While we came with some expectations, we really tried to divest ourselves of all expectation and just experience life as it comes to us.
As we celebrate the first of our four years of service, we feel very blessed; and as we think about family, friends, and all of you in the U.S. preparing for Thanksgiving, we give thanks for all of the support we’ve received this past year. We are reminded of all the missionaries who preceded us in the past 124 years. We give thanks and are blessed to be “heirs to a harvest of memory, spirit, and drama.”
We have known delight in many forms — the children who laugh and love to say our names as we walk to the office, the family who adopted us during our village immersion on our first Christmas, the beauty of the flowers and vegetation.
We have been blessed with meaningful work and good colleagues, both our Papuan New Guinean counterparts and our fellow missionaries. We have been blessed with good health, Rod’s ongoing battle with tropical sores and Nancy’s broken arm aside, and with people who care for us and about us: Sam, Viktoria, Sofi, our extended family.
We have known sadness---the death of a Papua New Guinean friend and colleague, the stark reality of sickness where malaria and TB are the top causes of illness and death, the visible presence of poverty and domestic violence. We live in the tension of the paradoxes of this country — wealth and poverty, simplicity and complexity, indigenous rituals and modern song and dance. We pinch ourselves and still wonder many days how we came to be doing this, and then we remind ourselves that it feels like the most natural thing in the world. We speak in Tok Pisin because it is so important to the relationships we are forming, even though we can get by with English. We laugh at our own mistakes.
One of our sponsoring churches once wrote and said “this is the first time we’ve ever sponsored real live missionaries in wild and faraway places!” We laughingly acknowledge that we are “real.” PNG does have some “wild” places and we have seen some of them. And, yes, it is “far away.”
I find great assurance, however, that we are all in ministry together regardless of distance, that we are truly One in Christ Jesus no matter where we are, and that “the space between us” is truly blessed. It is not just the 9,000 miles from the U.S. to Papua New Guinea that is blessed. But the space between Sullivan, Mo., and Cedarburg, Wis., is blessed, the space between Portage, Mich., and Lancaster, Wis., is blessed, the space between Overland Park, Kan., and Ludington, Mich., is blessed, the space between Willmar, Minn., and Sheboygan, Wis., is blessed.
And there are several more, many of you not knowing one another but joined in ministry and in blessing.
As each of you, our sponsoring churches and individuals, reflect on your past year, we suspect that you, too, have had delights, sadness, surprises and everyday encounters with the Holy. Our lives may not be as different as we think, for we are all called by Jesus to serve, to go out, to live our faith, to proclaim the Good News, to walk humbly with our God.
This Thanksgiving we say “thank you” for choosing to sponsor us in our work in Papua New Guinea, or mipela tok bikpela tenkyu. Some of you have sponsored missionaries before; others are experiencing it for the first time. Each of you is important to us, however, and critical to the work of ELCA Global Mission and ELC-PNG.
We wish you a Happy Thanksgiving and hold you in our prayers:
“I thank my God every time I remember you, constantly praying with joy in every one of my prayers for all of you, because of your sharing in the gospel from the first day until now. I am confident of this, that the one who began a good work among you will bring it to completion by the day of Jesus Christ. It is right for me to think this way about all of you, because you hold me in your heart for all of your share in God’s grace with me in my imprisonment and in the defense and confirmation of the gospel.” (Phil. 1:3-7)
God i blesim yupela!
Nancy Anderson and Rod Nordby
