Eager Model Makers

Elizabeth helping Tim put the finishing touches on the pilot for his model airplane.

“1:48… I thought that was the time it was supposed to take to put this model together.” – Noah, speaking of the scale indicators on the side of his model box

Last week, the helicopter came in to deliver a couple of months of groceries, a few hard goods, and four packages. Among other things, one of the packages contained three plastic model kits (Thanks Amy and Sunday School Class!) – the kind that line the shelves of hobby shops.  The boys were thrilled. Dad was thrilled.  Despite my own failings at age ten to carefully and patiently sand, paint, and fit each piece of the excitingly detailed military aircraft, I was sure that it would be different for my own kids… and it was. I didn’t have two brothers to urge me along. Turns out that six hands and three tubes of model glue can produce quite similar results to what I remember producing myself but in about ½ the time.

So why the urgency? I had been confident that the perfectionistic side of our eldest would slow the pace of the model making to a reasonable rate and the end product would be leaps and bounds above anything I myself ever produced. It wasn’t until dinner time that I figured it out. The conversation at the table was dominated by model making and I was called on to speak of the models in my own past. When I mentioned to them that, in their models, 1 inch of plastic represented 48 inches of the real machine, Noah’s prompt reply  revealed much of his thinking. Turns out that our precise child is also our competitive child who was not in favor (after spending more than 3 hours putting plastic pieces together) of taking more than double what he took to be the recommended time on this particular model build. Now to find out if we can get model glue out of hair…off the table… nostrils*?

The thing with model making though, is that most of work that goes into making a model really nice is extremely time consuming and doesn’t necessarily feel like it is moving the actual work discernibly forward.

Rainy days mean that the boys are looking for fun things to do under the shelter of a roof. This is a knot tying station that we built.

Eager

It is a bit of an ironic twist that the church planting effort here in Pal is paralleling those model frustrations – where most of the work we are doing right now is laying foundations  for the upcoming translation and literacy projects. It’s not that progress is not there, it just buried three layers deep in grammar analysis. I have friends who work on code for computers and some months their work is merely to unravel how some parts of a program work together so that bugs in the software may be addressed. Painstaking, frustrating, and solitary. Some days I am tempted just to grab part A and a big ol’ tube of Testor’s adhesive and start sticking this language thing  together…

By the way, does anyone out there know how to remove modified mid-sentence verbs from one’s nostrils?

Noah dressed as the narrator for the family play that he wrote and directed.

Loss

Even as we can joke about the work here a bit (I mean, it is quite a feat to get conjugated anything stuck in a nasal passage – how much more so in a prayer letter?) the last few weeks have been rather painful for us. Our friends and companions, the Lockwoods, partners through so many of the stresses and challenges of getting here and doing what we are doing, have decided that Pal is not the wise place to have their family right now. They will be transitioning to a role on one of our support centers where we are sure they will be a real blessing. As for us, we are rewriting (again) what the next steps will be for us as a team given our current personnel and giftings. Everything is still on track for our Literacy Kick-off in April, but beyond that, we are not sure when everyone on the team will be able to be online for prepping materials for the teaching that should take place in the spring of 2014.

Prasie!

-          We’ve all been healthy!

-          Interest in the upcoming first literacy class (April of this year) is very high and excitement is building

-          Good relationships with Pal folks

-          Homeschooling is going smoothly

Pray!

-           Encouragement and progress.

-          Multiplied Time

-          Transition for the Lockwoods

-          Relationships in the village and excitement for being a part of things.

-          Weariness.

Thanks for being there for us,

Nate for the family

Posted via email from PNG Time