End of the year round-up

habitò en tiendas de campaña
he lived in tents
~ Hebrews 11:9

We have never lived in tents for longer than a couple of nights, but we have felt rather transient this year.

We began our life together as tenants of Andy and Jessica Hansen, Covenant College graduates, scientists, parents of Anemone and Isaiah, and friends who live in Chattanooga’s historic neighborhood of St. Elmo, in a small duplex with real wood paneling and fish tiles in the shower. In May we moved seven streets north, to the upstairs of Joe and Rachel Staven’s Victorian bungalow, where we shared meals and life in preparation for Honduras. In August, we traveled across town to East Ridge, where we stayed with Grandma Clarkson and enjoyed card games and ice cream and memories of Chattanooga as it has changed in the 60 years she’s known it. On September 26, we flew to Honduras and moved in with Petra and Billy in an affluent suburb of La Ceiba while we studied Spanish. In October, finally, we came up to Las Mangas, where we currently live in an airy, rustic dormitory overlooking the Rio Congrehal, with Joe and Rachel downstairs (still), Peter Johnson and many kind Hondurans up the road, and our friends Chris and Larry returning to live with us in January.

It has been a year (as one might expect in a first year of marriage) of discovering each other at every turn and learning to live life entirely with the other person; of being “confronted intimately day after day with the mystery of…life outside of oneself” as Mike Mason puts it. For two people used to thinking and making decisions for ourselves, it has not been easy, but it has certainly been good. Tom is deciding and acting more, Kelly is waiting more, and we are becoming better and better friends. God be praised.

The year has also been a walk toward Honduras, and we have been prepared for it in ways we could not have planned. At Kim Honeycutt’s invitation, Kelly helped plan and teach English classes at Esperanza del Barrio, a local Hispanic mission, which as it turns out was excellent practice for our task in Honduras from February to November 2004 – teaching English at Instituto El Rey, a local Christian secondary school.

We had been planning to move to Honduras since before we were engaged, and so our ten months in Chattanooga were filled with preparations and packing instead of finding a house or starting a career. But we were rich in fellowship nonetheless, with college friends and with the saints at Bethlehem-Wiley Church and St. Elmo Presbyterian, who loved us and supported us as we prepared to go. And we had work as well. Tom’s job at the National Christian Foundation as Dave Worland’s assistant was a gift both in daily fellowship with Dave and in a regular salary and health insurance. Kelly was able to finish up her classwork for an education certification, and her job at Esperanza allowed us to save more for Honduras.

And so we wrestle with two compulsions. One, the call to live as foreigners, as Abraham did “en tiendas de campaña”, forever ready to pack up and go – for if Abraham built no house but only hoped to live in God’s city, it can only be that we are to do the same. Two, a desire that seems equally honorable: to buy some land and start tilling it; to build a home and start filling it with children; to live rooted in one place for the rest of our lives. We don’t know how these two inclinations will fit together, but trust that they will, as God is good and completely trustworthy.

And that is where we are today, after one year. We love you, thank God for you, and look forward to hearing from you. May the wonder of the Incarnation live in your hearts this Christmas and every day of 2004.

Tom and Kelly Okie.
APD 458
La Ceiba, Honduras
okie@wibler.com