Missionary Thank You Notes

I decided to follow the lead of Jimmy Fallon and write some of my own thank you notes to a few things that make missionary life great!

Thank you extraneous letters in the English alphabet (I’m looking at you letter c). You make home schooling a nightmare, yet meet the needs of every missionary working on creating an alphabet for an unwritten language. How could we possibly represent all these different vowel sounds without you? In fact, without you, our translations would look more like alien languages and less like a bunch of kindergarteners putting random letters together to tell Bible stories.

Portions of scripture translated into Hewa language. Don't worry, it's supposed to look like that.

Thank you missionary guesthouse kitchens for coming fully equipped with four five- inch skillets, 17 dull peelers, grapefruit spoons, and one 20-gallon pot. Frying four separate individual eggs for breakfast, making gouged vegetable salad for lunch, and enough spaghetti to feed an entire prison (just noodles no sauce) was exactly what I had written down in my weekly meal planner. I also really enjoyed remembering that grapefruit exists since I have never seen one in this country! It is amazing how well you anticipate my needs!

Thank you tropical weather for ruining so many things in my life. My peeled and rusting non-stick cookware, the mold growing in my expensive camera lens, and every now useless electronic that I thought I couldn’t possibly live without are all great reminders that I should only be storing up treasures in heaven. I also now realize why my village neighbors still live in the stone-age. I bet one of their great great-great grandfathers actually invented the iPod but after you quickly destroyed it he realized there would be no market for this device and went back to making whatever he wanted out of sticks and leaves.

Thank you also, flights in small aircraft in tropical weather. You make heaven feel nearer and my prayer life stronger with every flight!

Thank you host culture fashion for making me feel like I “blend in” but actually making me look like I am trying to celebrate Halloween all year long.

Thank you fashion of my home culture for changing so rapidly, no matter how often I come back to you I always look outdated. I love that when walking around in public my family can be easily recognized as missionaries or mistakenly pegged for people who were accidentally locked in a bunker for the last 10 years.