Five years. All in all it is not very long. When your goal is death do us part, and I plan to be at least 100, then five years is just a blip. I have watched my parents and my grandparents celebrate 30 years, 50 years and other such milestones. When it comes to a marathon of marriage, five years is just a hundred-yard dash.
However, I remember elementary school me trying out track for the first time, and boy did my little legs think that 100 yards was about the farthest a person could ever go. When 100 yards is the farthest you have gone, it can feel like quite a feat (well 300 feet actually). And no matter if it is 5k or a marathon, five years or a hundred, milestones deserve to be celebrated.
We got to celebrate our milestone in Honduras during Month 10 of our Race. But only after one of the hardest months of our 60 months of marriage.
You see, on the race you have a leadership team in charge of your squad. And they will be awesome, amazing people who have your best interest in heart, but sometimes you may not agree whole heartedly with their decisions. It had been decided that Honduras would be another Manistry month for our squad. Our Squad Mentor gave us three options, 1) have a month were we are our own team, just the two of us, 2) Have James join me on an all-girls team, but have his own ministry doing manual labor, or 3) be on two separate teams again and be three to four hours apart.
None of these options put a smile on our faces and we felt like we chose the least of the three evils. We would separate again. We would be spending three weeks apart, meeting up for a weekend getaway for our five year anniversary, and then separating again for three more days to finish out the month.
James lived and worked with the guys on our squad at Ninos de La Luz (Children of the Light). This was a group foster home for boys in La Ceiba. James got to play a lot futbol, watch a lot of futbol, and play more futbol with the 15 boys that lived there. They mostly did life with the kids there, a few manual labor projects, a few guys taught English, they took turns leading morning devotions at the school, and leading devotions at night at the boys home.
I lived outside of San Pedro Sula with a Pastor and his large, extended, Latin American family. We hung out with the family quite often, with our “little sister” Kadre who was 5 and our “little brother” Johnathon who was 12. We had plenty of cousins to hang out with too, Nancy, Omar, Andrea, Carlos – just to name a few. Our days were spent walking to church in the morning – helping with a small program they had there for the kids. We sang songs, performed Bible skits, played games, helped hand out plates of food, and loved on the kids every way we could. We did this again in the afternoon (however, some days schedules would change and we would only go to one of the sessions, or maybe it would rain and we would stay at home all day, who knows!). We also had church five nights a week. Sometimes we did a skit or sang a few songs for church too! We were usually given about 15 minutes heads up for this. It was a good time.
But, back to us know as a married couple.
What did we learn this month? We learned that having two manistry months suck.
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And that is where I truly wanted to end this blog. But, I am in nature a long winded person, and so I feel like I owe you more words. I do not want to cheat you.
We learned that the manistry month is hard, but that the month following the separation is hard as well.
As I look back now I see that Malaysia (the month after our first manistry month) was fraught with pain, struggle, fighting, and of course at the end – growth. I see this month full of the same kind of struggles.
James and I walked into this month feeling drained, empty, and at some level depressed.
Looking at it now, I do not see the second manistry month as being good for us. I only hope that in a few months, or a few years, I can look back and see something more that we learned.
But for this season, last month and this month, this season was a season of struggle and pain.
The four and a half days we had together to celebrate our five year anniversary was an amazing time together. It was a great time to see how the Race may have changed our relationship and us individually for the rest of our lives. – But hopefully I will write more on that later in a different blog.
I do not have much more to write about the month. I have no pretty bow to tie it up with this time. We realized that we do life better with each other than without each other. The first month apart we focused on making sure that we are not making each other our “idol” and that God of course is first in our lives and that He is our first comforter and provider. The second month, we seemed to only feel the pain and the emptiness that is left when our second comforter, provider, supporter, encourager, listener, and friend is gone.
What good will this pain bring? I guess time will tell.
For those who are married and are going to do the Race, when you get to training camp I would encourage you to talk to your Squad Mentor about how to set expectations for Manistry month(s), and you may get the “do not expect anything, do not set expectations” answer, but I am not sure that answer may be good enough. Talk about if you will have one month, or if there may be a possibility for a second month of separation – and what that might look like for you. If the World Race keeps up this new tradition of more than one manistry month, even for the squads with married couples, then I think it would help for married couples to be mentally prepared. I know the surprise of the second manistry month was not a pleasant one for us.
