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March 26, 2008 in Family, For Real, God, Health, Let's Be Honest, Life, Whining 1

Right now I’m supposed to be preparing for a meeting about the theme for Student Life Camp 2009. That’s weird because I feel stuck in the mire of Student Life Camp 2008. Regardless, my mind is elsewhere.

I know that there are people who check out this blog and loathe long posts. If you’re one of those, sorry. However, if you are one of those people then you might not know what exactly this is referring to anyway since you probably didn’t read any of “The Philippine Chronicles.”

In one of those posts (Volume 3) I wrote about how I was struggling with the fact that I was in the Philippines while Liza was back here dealing with the culmination of our journey in infertility. Well, I misspoke (or miswrote as it were), that wasn’t the culmination. Yesterday was the culmination when Liza went for the pregnancy test. I’ll save you the suspense and go ahead and tell you that it was negative.

Below is the email Liza sent out to some friends about her feelings and reaction to his crappy news:

Unfortunately, our first round of IUI did not work for us. We appreciate each of you covering us in your prayers. Right now, I find peace knowing that I serve an ALL KNOWING God who has our journey to parenthood laid out before us and continues to prepare our hearts and minds for His plan. Honestly though, that is about the only thing getting me through the ache I feel inside.
There are a lot of questions, decisions, and unknowns for what happens next. My doctor really wants us to try at least one more time. Honestly, Chris and I just don’t know if we can go through the financial, emotional, and physically strain of it all again. We wonder if this is even God’s plan or if we should begin another route. We want to be good stewards of financial resources He has provided us and are beginning to question what to do next. I also am unsure of how much longer my body can wait before a hysterectomy will need to happen. I am hoping my doctor will let me wait until next summer, but we also don’t want to take anymore risks with my health than we have to. When? How? What? Where? Why? -all questions I am processing through. All questions I am trusting my Savior to continue to reveal in His timing.
For now, we will enjoy a month of not thinking about this, not having to make decisions! I will enjoy no doctor’s appointments and no shots. I will rest and find peace in my Comforter! I appreciate you continuing to pray through this with us. Chris and I are really open to how God chooses to put a family together for us. So, all I know to do is to continue to faithfully seek after Him with all that I am, looking to Him to fulfill desires He has placed in my heart to be a mom and recently instilled in Chris to be a dad! That excites me!
Thank you again for letting us share each step of this journey with you-the good, the bad, and the ugly. We feel so blessed to have a community that takes time to pray over us. We feel your prayers so much and are grateful for each one of you.
All my love,
Liza Kinsley

Let me first say that my wife is absolutely amazing. A lot of husbands take time on their blogs to express this sentiment about their own wives. This statement is the only example of relative truth. If I say my wife is the most amazing person in the world, and Bush or Aaron or Taylor or whoever says that their wife is the most amazing person in the world, we are all correct. Don’t fight me on this. Just accept it and move on.

Liza’s strength, grace, and depth never ceases to challenge me. I don’t let her know that enough. I don’t live up to it enough. But I’m not going to whine about that here.

Liza refers to my “recently instilled” desire to be a dad. Let me say that I have always wanted to be a dad. I just wasn’t in a hurry for it, and my timing for when it might be right certainly wasn’t lining up with Liza’s. However, her health and some other life circumstances (Roger, maybe you’re right, maybe it was the addition of Alfie in my life) changed my planned timing. I don’t know what the exact moment was, but since then I have been fully engaged in this journey.

Now is this journey over?

Certainly the journey for Liza and I to become parents is not. Even if it doesn’t work out this way, we know that there are other avenues. Even before we got married Liza and I had both been open with each other about our wanting to adopt. Even if we have children on our own, we know that God has a child (or children) elsewhere in the world for whom He wants us to be their parents.

But should we move on from trying to have one “naturally?”

And that brings me to something else. Nothing about this process has been “natural.” There’s a lot of drugs, a lot of shots, a lot of pills, cups, catheters, machines, ice, chemicals, etc., etc., etc. Excuse the frank language but there wasn’t even sex involved. So, I find myself asking, “is this what we’re supposed to be doing?” We know that there are procedures involved in infertility treatment that aren’t for us. For reasons that are both practical and ethical, we just don’t want to go there. But where is the line? Where is the point beyond which we have taken matters into our own hands (and those of our doctors and bank) and left God out of the equation except to ask that He bless our human efforts?

I don’t know. There’s not an easy answer to that.

We’ve spent a lot of money on this, thousands of dollars. Some of it has been our’s. Some of it has been other’s. Some of it is pretend money on a little plastic card for which we are now paying ridiculously exorbitant amount of interest. Are we being good financial stewards? And that’s just one issue. I don’t think that the money has been wasted. If nothing else it will hopefully give us an answer to the “what if” question that we could have potentially been asking for the rest of our lives. But it’s an expensive answer.

Our doctor and the nurses at our infertility program have seemed to assume for us that the first attempt wouldn’t work anyway. We’ve tried to ignore that and think positively. But they kept letting us know that Liza was on the lowest level of dosage and that we would up it the next time around. That is extremely frustrating for me. I know I’m not a doctor. I’m sure they had to see how Liza’s body would react to things, but why not jump forward to the second attempt or something and skip the first? Why not at least fake for us that we would have a chance?

This whole thing has not been a good experience for me for a number of reasons. The program seems cold and impersonal. There are millions of children in the world for whom we could be caring for a few. Like in ICU’s and at funeral homes, it has become increasingly evident that people just don’t know what to say to you in this situation. So, you’re left having to realize that they all mean well when what you really want to do is yell at them about how you’ve been praying and crying and screaming as much as Hannah did in the Bible but that still doesn’t mean that God is going to miraculously give you a child. Maybe that story is more for the purpose of telling us how Samuel the prophet and last judge came into the world than it does that God grants infertile women children if they pray hard enough.

Sorry. I’m not talking about you.

So, now what?

I don’t know. We’ll see. And we’ll let you know as soon as we do. So, don’t feel pressure to ask. I’ll bring it up if I want to talk about it.

In the meantime, thanks. Sincerely, thank you.

Inspiration…

March 23, 2008 in For Real, Ideas 0

The Inspiration of St. Matthew by Carvaggio

…can sometimes come from the strangest places.

Don’t you think?

The Philippine Chronicles, 6

March 17, 2008 in Church, Compassion, For Real, Travel, Woot Woot 3

We’re at the new island now, and we’re a little over halfway through our trip. So, they were gracious enough to plan into our hectic schedule a day to kinda relax and take it easy. I say that to give you fair warning that this post may seem cush and trivial when considered against everything else we’ve been doing. That’s because it is. However, it’s also needed and part of what makes a Compassion vision trip so effective, but I won’t get into all that now.

I woke up this morning and went to the lobby area (it’s not really inside, so I don’t know if it is actually a lobby) so I could use the internet. I grabbed some breakfast, bought an hour worth of wi-fi from the front desk and then called Liza on Skype (which rules, by the way; free plug for Skype). I also was able to post about yesterday, though I didn’t quite finish it before we left, but it should be finished by now.

We then went to Nice’s church (she’s one of the LDP’s that might be with us this summer). It was the 61st anniversary of the church. This means that it was founded in 1947 soon after the Japanese had been occupying the Philippines during WWII. So, the service was really centered around that, and they had pulled out all the stops. There was a lot of singing and a lot of dancing. However, it wasn’t really what I had expected. It was pretty modernized, a nice church building, a sound system, a live band, a screen and a projector. But it was still really cool to just see the people worshipping there and to hear how proud and joyful they are. And I mean really joyful. I won’t get off on a tangent here (even though I could), but I’ll just say that one of the things that has made it difficult for me to find a church lately is that people seem to have anything but joy at a lot of churches I visit or else it seems to be completely contrived (yes, I’m being judmental by saying that, I guess, but that’s not really the point). Anyway… before the service started there was a little boy running around the front just playing with a balloon. He would even run up onstage sometimes if his balloon got away from him and ended up there. I leaned over and asked Taylor what he thought would happen if a little boy was running around the stage playing before one of the services at our churches. We decided some uber-important dude, would get onto him or chide his mother for not making him stop.

After the church they had prepared food and drinks for people to hang around and spend time together to celebrate the church’s anniversary. Of course we immediate found ourselves with plates full of stuff. I sampled everthing and some of it was pretty good, like the banana chips and banana bread. However, there was also some kind of tamale thing, and it wasn’t so hot. They also gave us bottles of some red drink that they called red tea. It tasted like Kool Aid. I was hot so I drank all of mine. Later we found out they had made it. Supposedly the water had been boiled, but the bottle may have been cleaned out with who know’s what. A waiting game ensued to see if anyone would show symptoms of some horrible stomach illness. We didn’t, but it did make us feel like a bunch of pansies, like, “oh, I’m sorry. I can’t have what you prepared for me. I’m American. Our stomachs are weak. We really only eat processed foods.”

After “fellowshipping” for awhile, we hopped on our vans and came back to the hotel (Actually, to be perfectly honest, it’s more like a resort. No, it is a resort). We changed and caught a boat across to another island to a beach (I can hear your groans now). We ate lunch there and spent the afternoon engaging in various activities. I’ll spare you the details of the $10 hour-long massages by the water that had a little Filipino lady bending Graham like a pretzel or the snorkeling outing to an outlying coral reef where a sea serpent was spotted.

So, after our afternoon of nothing important, we came back to the resort, changed again, and went to a “cultural dinner.” That phrase can mean anything so we didn’t know what to expect. The dinner was good. The hotel catered it. But here’s the deal… evidently we’re the first (or possibly the second, depending on who you ask) Compassion advocate group to visit Davao City. That’s because the island we’re on (Mindalau) is known for its criminal and terrorist activity (though it’s nowhere near us). So, whenever the Filipino Compassion office suggests that groups come here, the American office in Colorado Springs says “no.” But for some reason they let us come. Hmm… Anyway, the Compassion LDP graduates and alumni association were so excited for us to be here (and for our coming to hopefully open doors for other groups to visit in the future) that they planned the whole evening for us. There was worship and singing and dancing and all kinds of fun.

One singing group consisted of four cousins who were all former Compassion children. They were amazing. Very personable and incredible singers as well as performers.

The last dance the group performed was with these two long bamboo poles on the ground that two people would slap together on every third beat. The dancers would dance in between the poles avoiding the slaps. After they were done, of course, they wanted us to join in. I was the second to give it a try, and I have to say that I didn’t do that bad.

At the end of the night, though, came the culmination of everything. The balut challenge.

Let me give some history here. There’s a show on the travel channel called Strange Foods or something like that. Basically, this guy goes around to different places and tastes of the local cuisine, no matter how bizarre it might be. Taylor saw an episode before we left where this dude was in the Philippines and ate some kind of cooked baby duck out of an egg.

On the first day we were here we asked the Filipinos about it. They lit up and said that this food had been featured on Fear Factor as well and that it really was a common delicacy around here. So, we’ve been talking about trying it all week, like really trying to gas each other up. So, Nice contacted her sister here in Davao and had her prepare two dozen of the things. Not everyone tried it and not everyone finished it, but it was great fun for all, Filipino and American alike.

Below is a video of the experience intercut with Pattie’s explanation of just what it is. Some of the audio sucks, and some settings got jacked on the camera so parts might be a little grainy, but you’ll get the idea.

And that’s that. We see our last project tomorrow, and we’ve still got a ton of filming to do. Pray for us.

Signing off.

Xanga, the Bane of My Blogging Life

March 6, 2008 in For Real 0

I got out of this blogging game mainly because I got fed up with Xanga.  There are a few reasons for this occurence, but I won’t bore you with them here.

Now that I’m re-embracing my blogging life I thought it might be nice to import some of my old Xanga posts.  WordPress does not do this easily, and I am positive that the blame lies not with them but with Xanga.

I have read countless forums on how to do this and found myself diving into unknown territory of downloading and running scripts that I really don’t understand.  All of this has come to no fruition.

So now I am just copying from my Xanga and posting here.  This works only on the basest level of efficiency.  I haven’t even been able to figure out how to do the comments yet.  We’ll see.

If anyone has any suggestions, I’m all ears.

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