Having lived most of the last 23 years abroad, I am not sure how you would classify us culturally or emotionally any longer. We are such a mix of so many different experiences and countries and cities and languages over the course of our lives. We are Westerners passport-wise, but we live very small and unusual compared to practically anyone we know from the West.
We drive the oldest cars, have the smallest apartment, live like poor church mice in a poverty stricken part of town, yet we spend and give amazing amounts of resources each year to the work and ministry that we are involved in and enjoy. None of this is said with any pride, because someone gave us all those resources to begin with, and we do not view them as ours to spend on ourselves. And most of the time I am 100% ok with living like this, except when I am not.
Lately I am not. Honestly I have been really weary of eating off the plastic table that we have been using for the last five years. We would have been using it longer than that but the two places we lived previously came with actual tables to eat on. And for some reason, maybe after spilling my coffee a million times did me in, or perhaps it was just how amazingly ugly this picnic table has become, but for some reason, I wanted a real table to eat on. I have to confess, it is the one piece of furniture that my parents have that I am jealous for, a huge beautiful wood table. It has such a sense of permanence to it, longevity to it, and they have had it most of my life!
Of course our apartment is way too small to have a table like the one my parents have, but I have been hankering for a table for a long long while now. One with some weight to it, some "we are gonna stay here a long time" feel to it. Now the first wall I had to climb was to get Brenda to agree to spending a dime on anything for us. That took me over a year. Finally she capitulated as she finally got the sense of how important this was to me, no matter how irrational. But getting us to both agree on which table to get, oh my that was a serious wall to climb. We would go to a furniture showroom and she invariably would want to buy the cheapest one there. That is precisely why we have been eating off a plastic table for years! I would invariably want the most well-made one, regardless of the cost. I was wanting something with some substance!
Well long story short, we finally moved a table into the apartment today and got rid of that horrid old plastic thing. Sometimes, you need a bit of permanence to shed that "I am living out of a suitcase" feeling. Here is a pic of the long negotiated piece of furniture in question.
