The Most Extreme Week
The Ladd house typically runs like a well-oiled machine. There are colour-coded calendars, two-week study projections, and weekly meal plans with dinner ingredients stored in the “Do Not Touch” drawer of the refrigerator. We’ve found our family’s flow by implementing routine, order and life-giving family dinners in the midst of a nation filled with unexpecteds.
Dear America, that seems expensive. But it’s not. It’s Rands not dollars!
We’ve learned to plan for things to not go as planned… like taking your grocery list to the chicken breast section for all the recipes you’d planned to make that week, only to find the grocery store doesn’t have a single chicken breast this week. Or the 10-minute drive to school taking an hour, just because it’s a Tuesday. Or major companies, government systems and entities deciding overnight to go on strike so you suddenly can’t find bread, the trash collectors didn’t come, or there’s no electricity. All of these things have actually become normal, and don’t affect the Ladd Family machine beyond making the list of our “highs and lows” at the dinner table.
I have to tell you though, the surprises in the last week have really surprised me. You may have read some of the highlights in last week’s Ladd Family Five. Here’s a quick snapshot:
We were told to watch our mailbox starting March 28 because our landlord isn’t sure we will continue having water on our property (indefinitely!) due to an unpaid bill he has from last year. This could mean a very sudden evacuation for our family and the church house we are renting. (Significant side note: Chris’ parents arrive on the 28th and our due date is April 2nd.)
Despite receiving insurance money to repair my car after being side-swiped in December, the repair guys called and said they can’t find new doors to replace mine and our sending the money back to us- making it extra difficult to upgrade me to a safer, two-kid, Mom machine.
And the biggest curveball of them all: Our immigration lawyer (supposed to be representing me in High Court this week to protect me from deportation and allow us to register Benjamin’s birth) went to jail for 1100 counts of fraud and crazy, big-league crime between 2011-2014!
Image from Times Live website.
AND, we also kicked off Love Jesus Church with our first discipleship group! Woohoo!!!
It felt like one of our most extreme weeks yet - normal life kept going with all of its normal surprises; I have grown into a full pregnant waddle; and Chris and I went to bed on more than one night unable to sift through the weight of all the plans not being plan-able anymore. Together, we found a crazy kind of comfort in the extremities of life. God has to be doing something. At the very least, the best part of it all is that we need to hear God’s voice more than ever. We decided to ask Him to just show us the next thing. One thing at a time. We don’t need to know the 5-year plan, not even the next-year plan. As badly as we want to know the June plan, we don’t even need that.
Despite nesting in hyper mode in a house that holds no promises, driving from store to store in Chris’ SUV only to find that the systematic shutdown of electricity through Cape Town is following me, and patiently awaiting to know where my paperwork is with High Court… I feel more peace and stability than I have since we moved to Cape Town. (I also feel an increasingly insatiable desire for Honest Chocolate… but we’ll just blame that on Benjamin.)
There’s nothing safer than needing a Saviour. That’s where my peace comes from. We were all made to desperately need our Saviour in every moment of every day. The Ladd Family has the joy and privilege of knowing how much we need him. We’re talking radical, head-spinning, what-just-happened awareness of our created design. And we got to walk in extra measures of that joy during this week of surprises. Every month when your donations are deposited into our account, we remember how much need we have and how incredibly blessed we are. And every day this week, we’ve asked God to show us how to do today with a greater appetite for His voice than we’ve ever had before. It’s been one of our best weeks!
This is not the part of the message where I wrap it up with a perfect bow and tell you how everything is panning out. Nothing panned and nothing planned yet, guys. But we’re having a pretty great today! All three of us woke up and heard God speak to us from His Word this morning, and we will gather around the dinner table tonight with ostrich spaghetti and celebrate the joy in that. When we pray tonight, we’ll pray for our lawyer’s heart to encounter the miracle we are living on - Jesus’ conquering love. And then we’ll do it again tomorrow, unwrapping and claiming each daily miracle God gives us.
I’ll take circumstantial crises for a unified family and the sound of God’s voice all day. Life is pretty great from where we’re sitting. And we believe for greatness in yours too - it all depends on what you’re looking at and listening to.
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