And another wedding!
September 26, 2021
Dear Friends,
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Thank you so much for praying and for
caring. What a blessing you
are!
We have celebrated another Tibbetts wedding -
Joshua and Megan (with Natalie) joined their lives
on September 5 in Poulsbo, Washington. It was
a beautiful wedding with Scott officiating and
mostly keeping from tears :). What a
joy! Our whole family pitched in and helped
with setting up the wedding venue. We had a
gorgeous rehearsal dinner at Megan's mom's house
which overlooks the Puget Sounds from the Port
Orchard side. Joshua had chosen Thai food and
we enjoyed the delicious memories of our years
in Thailand as we celebrated
together.
Josh and Megan are setting up home in Bremerton, WA
with the expectation that Josh will be deployed on
his submarine for one more 3 month stint sometime
soon. We are praying that he can be back on
land in time to be present for his son Michael's
birth (due January 19, 2022). Sometime after
that Joshua will need to go away for 4 months of
training and then Josh and Megan with Natalie and
Michael will move to Guam where he will serve out
the rest of his 2
½
-3 years in the Navy. Please pray for all these adjustments and adventures as they start out married life together, and for a firm foundation in the Lord. We pray that their church family will be a good support as we are so far away at the other end of the US (over 47 hours by car)!!
And (of course!), we have another wedding to
anticipate - Alysha and Jacob will marry in
Wilmington, NC on October 16. (Yes, that's 3
weddings for Tibbetts' kids in 3.5 months!!
We'll be all done with kids getting married at that
point.) Please pray for this wedding as well
- for all the details to come together for a
lovely, God-honoring wedding. My great desire
is that my parents will be able to attend. They did
not make Nathan's wedding due to canceled flights
and they did not make Joshua's wedding because my
dad was just recovering from being very ill.
He is now on occasional oxygen instead of full-time
oxygen and MAY be well enough to attend - they will
decide on October 1 if he'll try to make the
trip. My mom plans to attend with my siblings
if dad can't make it. Would appreciate your
prayers!
Also, Alysha is nannying for a family who have 6
kids ages something like 22, 20, 18, 16, 7 and
6. Alysha does cooking, cleaning and some
care for the 16, 7 and 6 year olds who live at
home. The mother Liz has had cancer for over
1.5 years. On about September 17, Liz went
into hospice and is only expected to live days or
weeks. The 7 and 6 year old were told that
their mom is dying by their dad Reid in Alysha's
presence on September 17, and that afternoon Alysha
took Joel and Jubilee to visit their mom in
hospice. As you can imagine, this is a very
hard time for the family. Alysha describes it
as a "heavy weight" as she goes into work each
day. Please pray for Alysha as she cares for
this precious Christian family and also anticipates
(and finishes preparing for) her wedding in less
than 3 weeks.
The other big prayer request for me is that this
week on 28, 29 and 30th of September (Tuesday,
Wednesday, Thursday) is my biggest event of my job
- facilitating the TCK Advisor Consultation.
This event is supposed to take place at our
International Center in Singapore with all of the
Third Culture Kid (MK) Advisors from each of our
sending countries (US, UK, Philippines, South
Africa, Australia, Japan, etc.) and our receiving
countries (Cambodia, Thailand, Japan, etc.) coming
together for training and encouragement.
Usually this happens Monday through Friday 9-5, but
because we are doing the Consultation virtually on
Zoom (due to Covid) we have reduced the
Consultation to 7-9 a.m. Eastern time on 3 days
with the Zoom room being open for an hour before
and an hour after the Consultation so TCK Advisors
can network and connect. For some attending
(in Europe, Asia, Australia/New Zealand), this will
be the middle of the day for them, for others it
will be evening and for a few it will be 9-11
p.m.!
Please pray for all of the technology to work,
especially for those working in more sensitive
countries where they are not openly known to be
missionaries, thus all attendees need to be careful
what we say in our Zoom meetings. A trained
mental health worker will be talking about and
training us in Mental Health issues and responses
for missionary kids and families - self-harm,
gender identity, cyberbullying and sexting are all
potential issues for missionary kids just like kids
in the rest of the world. And missionary kids
have also suffered greatly in this Covid
time. Many kids have experienced much greater
isolation, lockdown and restrictions than those of
us in some other countries. Some missionary
kids have also been locked out of the countries
where their families have served for years and
forced to relocate because they can't get visas to
return. Other missionary kids have stayed
much longer in their field or homeside countries
because of visa issues.
During this Consultation, other TCK Advisors will
be facilitating sessions on how to debrief
missionary kids and their families through these
issues and the many transitions missionary kids and
their families face as they move between cultures
and countries. It has been said that most
missionary kids experience more losses by the
age of 18 than most mono-cultural (single
culture) adults do in an entire lifetime. And
these kids face these losses at young ages when
they have not yet developed or been given coping
skills to properly process these losses and griefs
so many have high toppling grief towers by the time
they are 18 years of age when they may return to
their passport (or other countries) to go to
university or take up a job/career. For some
TCKs, this means they will fall apart or have
mental or other breakdowns unless they get good
help to process all they have been through.
(See The
Grief Tower: A Practical Guide to Processing Grief
with Third Culture Kids: Wells, Lauren:
9798594115217: AmazonSmile: Books for more
information on this.) Our TCK Advisors need
to grow in skills and understanding of debriefing
TCKs and equipping parents to debrief their kids so
they will process losses and grief well and thrive
on the mission field, as well as in
adulthood.
Other things that will be covered in the
Consultation - continuing to develop our flow of
training project, providing good training for our
workers on TCK issues throughout their time of
service - before they go to the field, when they
first arrive, over the years, preparing for
returning to passport countries and so on.
There will be information shared about the Asia
Education Resource Consortium to help families with
education on the field, as well as a discussion on
what might be negative system messages in OMF that
we need to root out and healthy system messages
that we need to convey. We hope to see
bridges built between TCK Advisors who work in the
sending centers as well as those on the field, and
resources shared, as well as friendships
encouraged.
These are large tasks - especially as all of this
will be done in approximately 6 hours of virtual
Zoom meetings between 40-50 participants.
Please pray! This is a God-sized task and I'm
sure there will be satanic opposition. There
always is. We know that your prayers will
make a huge difference.
We look forward to our time with our kids/spouses
in North Carolina as each of us (with our families)
is going through some kind of transition or another
- we all wish to be walking closely with God,
however He may lead us!
Thanks so much for listening to all this and for
lifting us up.
Your friends,
Jennifer and Scott and family
Jennifer and Scott and family
"May the God of hope fill you with all joy and
peace in believing, so that by the power of the
Holy Spirit you may abound in hope. I myself
am satisfied about you, my brothers, that you
yourselves are full of goodness, filled with all
knowledge and able to instruct one another."
Romans 15:13-14