The Rest of the Story.

aka It's Not Over Till it's Over and It's Not Over Till God Says It's Over."

From the day we shipped our container on March 6^th nearly two months have passed.  In that time we have prayed daily for God’s grace as a covering over our shipment because we knew once the container got to Italy, anything could happen.  It could get held up without cause, inspected without cause, have items go missing, or completely disappear. 

On April 13^th, the day before our container was due to arrive in Naples we received an URGENT email from the company in charge of clearing and transporting our container from customs in Naples to our house.  The email told us that we must immediately furnish a variety of important documents to them which they needed to have on hand when the container arrived.  One of these documents was an official declaration of residency that we needed to get printed in our local town hall AND notarized by the mayor.  We received the email on Monday at 12:30 right when the town hall had closed for the day. 

On Tuesday, April  14th we managed to get all the necessary papers in order (no small feat, it took the whole day) and contacted the clearing house in Naples right before closing and they told us that fax would not suffice, we had to send the original documents to them by certified mail.  At that time the post office had JUST CLOSED so we had to wait till Wednesday morning to mail them.  

On Wednesday, April 15^th (day 2) we mailed the necessary paperwork to the clearing agent.

On Thursday, April 16^th (day 3) we requested and received confirmation that our paperwork had arrived and was in order and the clearing agent would be presenting our papers on the Friday the 17^th.

On Monday, April  20^th (day 7) we called the clearing agent for news and they informed us that clearance of a container takes 3-5 business days from the time the paperwork is received by the port authority. While he affirmed that we were not given any notice to provide the necessary paperwork he said he gave us all the notice he had and there was nothing he could do about it and that we would be required to pay $200 CAD per day from day 6 forward that the container was held in port.

On Friday, April 24^th (day 10) we called again and he said that he had gone that day to inquire and the port authorities told him it still had not been processed.  This is 6 working days from when they received the paperwork.  Saturday was a national holiday, Sundays the port is closed.  At this point we knew they could hold our container for a month, enforce an inspection (at our expense) and allow the bill to mount to whatever amount they liked.  We were utterly helpless. 

God continued to challenge us through His word.  Notes from my devotional journal these past two weeks include;

 “It is good that I should learn to wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord.”  Lam 3:26

“You have taken up my cause, Oh Lord,” Lam 3:58

“You hear our cries for help and You deliver us out of our troubles. Many are the afflictions of the righteous but the Lord delivers him out of them all.”  Psa 34:4-9; 17,19

Welcome problems as opportunities to learn to grow in faith, trust, perseverance, patience and hope.  

“Do not lose heart. Be renewed in our inmost being every single day. Our light and momentary afflictions are preparing us for leadership in glory. Be afflicted but not crushed, perplexed but not given to despair.” 2 Cor 4:16-18

“Take heart, in this world you will have troubles but Jesus has overcome. Do not grow weary in persevering.”  

These are just a few samples, the pages of my journal are FILLED with promise after promise, exhortation after exhortation to wait confidently on the Lord, to persevere in trust and to make peace my breastplate.  I read and re-read and prayed and pleaded with God for the power to live these verses out.  I failed and succumbed to frustration and anxiety and anger numerous times but every time when I repented and returned to that place of trust I found a surer footing than I had previously known.

on Sunday, April 26^th (Day 12) we attended a province wide church service at the villa where we were married 19 years ago. There we met up with a gentleman who is a colonel in the finance department of the state.  When he heard our story he told us to let him handle it, that he would call his colleague in Naples and have our container released!

Monday, April 27^th (Day 13) the colonel called us to let us know that he had talked to the port authorities in Naples who had said they were holding our container pending inspection for drugs.  He vouched for us personally and told them we were full time missionaries and not to try to bleed poor innocents of money they didn’t have through unmerited inspection and detainment.  The port authorities agreed to release our container and waive the fees!

Tuesday, April 28^th (day 14) the clearing company in Naples contacted us and told us that our container would be released that day and that it would arrive at our house on Wednesday, April 29^th at 8:30 am and that they would be sending us the bill shortly.  Indeed we received a bill for $800 CAD, substantially less than the $200 per day we were told would be charged, but still not “waived fees” as the colonel had told us.  We contacted the colonel who contacted the port authorities who basically said “we reduced it by 50%, end of story.”

We really felt that God wanted to do more than just reduce these charges by 50% so we did not feel the story was over (little did we know!) I went to our room and knelt on the floor and laid it all out before God and told Him that if He wanted us to pay this money, that was fine, it’s all His money, He can use it how and where He wants.  But that if this was the enemy seeking to steal from God’s own that God would take care of business for us.  I did in that moment say that if we had to pay I would do so cheerfully, because God gives and God takes, and does as He sees fit.  We are just stewards.  We then looked at our shipping contract and saw that in no uncertain terms we were not responsible for any port fees in our door to door service.  At 11pm our time we received word from our shipping company assuring  us that they had already told the clearing agent that they would pay the bill so they didn’t know why he was sending it to us.  We slept easy, with smiles playing on our faces.

Wednesday, April 29th, 8:30 am the container shows up.  The driver hands us a bill for $800.  We tell him to call the clearing agent because our shipping company had emailed confirmation to him and us that they were liable for this bill.  He said “who is this clearing agent and what do I care about him.  I’m a driver only, pay me or I leave and the problem is yours.”

An hour later we manage to get a hold of the clearing agent who in turn tells us “yes, I got the email from U pack we ship, but who are they and what do I care?  How do I know they will pay me?   No, you must pay me or I will not release the container to you.  I will send it back and you will incur more storage fees and fines.”

Helpless, and unable to talk to our shipping company because it was the middle of the night for them, we went to the bank and made a certified check, paid the driver and unloaded our container.   We continued to commit the whole situation to God in prayer and 2 hours later, at 6:30 am north American time our shipping company wrote us a very sweet letter apologizing or all our stress and assuring us they will reimburse us the charges. 

And that, my friends, is the rest of the story.

Waxworks

I remember a breakthrough moment I had in my past, when six months into life with our fourth child I thought every cry for food in the middle of the night was the cry that would undo me.  I remember crying and crying and waking up with audible pleas on my tongue begging God to give me rest.  

Pietro gently encouraged me to change the focus of my prayer. To stop praying for the change of the outward circumstance but to pray for God to give me the strength and endurance and patience necessary to rise to the task and to get through the next day and the next, and the next. 

Maybe the greater miracle is not the answer to ones prayer for the change of circumstances, but the work that God does within when the circumstances don’t change. When the going is tough and the obstacles are many and I am tired and unraveled and realize there are only two ways this can go. The same sun that melts the wax can harden clay. 

When the heat is up and the pressure is on, I can be melted like wax and allow myself to be molded into whatever shape He chooses to pour me into, something He guarantees will be good and lovely and of benefit to Him.  Or I can dry up into an unpliable, twisted, gnarled vessel of hardened clay, prone to crack and shatter when battered. 

I am prone to harden, but I hate the cold, rough brittleness of dried clay.  Oh, I want to learn to melt into something soft, warm and pliable. To learn in the melting that circumstances should not and could not sway my resolve to pursue a life filled with grace, peace, joy , patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness and self control by God’s grace at work in me. That these characteristics can become fragrant essential oils stirred into the mix of me plus my circumstances plus my response to equal under the craftsmanship of His hand  a waxwork that is far bigger and better and more beautiful  than life as I currently know it.

Shifting Sand

Looking back at the heavy fog that was our walking weather for most of the duration of our journey until now I almost miss it. It was comforting in some way. It muffled one’s senses and made it so that all I could focus on was the One who was going before me and beckoning “follow.” Now that we have come out into the open on the other side of the pass, I feel myself almost shrinking back at the glaring brightness of reality.  Here we are, with the panorama of our future stretching out in front of us in all its stark clarity, and frankly, it’s a little overwhelming.

I grew up a small town country girl in the mountains and loved to explore the piney recesses on horseback. Then I married and we made our home in the prairies where I grew to love the wide open spaces and the gentle landscape of planting, crops and harvest. Mountains are solid, strong and bold, the prairies are steady, sure and simple. Here, I feel as though we have stepped off of  sure, dependable terrain and are wading through sand, the deep soft  kind that pulls you in and makes you slip always to one side as you go, stretching muscles in your legs you never even knew you had.

I didn’t imagine it would be like this. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I had some romantic notion of what life would be like here that doesn’t line up with reality.  I knew, we knew… we KNOW very well the reality of life here.  Maybe that is what makes it so hard right out of the starting gate.  Maybe if we weren’t so keenly aware of deep rooted traditions, culture, reality, we would be cushioned by a little of that honeymoon phase. But of course all that would result from that would be a delay in the crash, and sometimes those delays make you come down harder than ever.  No, I wouldn’t pick that if I had the choice.

In a way, we are both experiencing the phenomenon of what is called “re-entry” in missionary vocabulary.  We are coming back to a culture we once were part of only to realize we are no longer part of it and never will be part of it the way we once were again. The things that have happened to make us no longer part of it are rich experiences and lessons that of course no one else has shared or can relate to and because of that you are an oddity. We both went through this when we left the ship and went back to our respective home countries 20 years ago, then again when we moved to Italy in 2000, then again when we moved to Canada in 2004 and now, oh yay, we get to live it all over again.

This phenomenon of being a cultural oddity has a word in missionary vocabulary, too.  It is called “third culture”. You come from one culture with its own unique shape and characteristics and you find yourself seeking to integrate in a new culture that has a completely different shape and characteristics .  Visualize Canadian culture as a square and Italian culture as a circle, and of course right away the old adage “square peg in a round hole” sums it up well.  When you first find yourself being torn out of one culture and dropped into another, it is inevitable that you feel keenly the jut of the angles that  are in juxtaposition to the shape your own life has taken.

In Canada we complain about the busy parking lot at Costco, having eight people in line in front of us at the till, the road conditions, computerized telephone services. Here, you can call a company or even the immigration office every five minutes all day long and never get an answer, and , surprise, surprise, no answering machine message to even try to glean information from if you wanted to.  Oh, and don’t expect anything to make sense.  If immigration says on the sign by the gate that their opening hours are from 8:30 am to 1:00 pm you would imagine you could drive the hour or more to their office any time between those hours and expect to be served right?  Wrong. 

What you won’t know and can’t know  unless someone gives you the personal cell phone number of someone on the inside who can tell you how to go about successfully applying for residency, is that you need to be in line by 8:30 when they open the gate because they will allow 70 people in and then close the gate and that is it.  Those 70 people get to go inside and spend their morning hoping and waiting to be seen.  We were the third people in line, and guess what they did, as we went through the gate, they checked and stacked our passports from the bottom up, so the first person in line was the last one to be served, meaning we were there by quarter to eight, waited till quarter to 12 and got out of there at quarter to one. Because two people who could only type with two fingers did both the gate processing and the paperwork processing inside.  Oh and good thing you thought of the right questions to ask that person with the cell phone because they would have forgotten to tell you what documents to bring and you would have had to go away and return and rewait three or four different times to procur the list of documents and photos and photocopies they require. Because they won't give you a paper that lists them, they will tell you when they get to that part of your processing that you need to go and come back when you have such and such.  And next time the same. Words can not begin to describe the insanity of the lack of system.

Wherever you go, whatever you do, be prepared to spend at LEAST two hours waiting to, and then filling out paper work.  And I am not kidding.  Just to open an account at the post office yesterday we spent two and a half hours with TWO people taking down our information, every single personal piece of information you could possibly fathom, including places of birth, the equivalent of our SIN numbers, identity card AND passport numbers, I can’t even remember what all, and just like in hospitals back home, they don’t just ask you these questions once but you go through a series of questions for one form and then repeat and repeat the same information at least four times to get through four different forms that are about four pages long each. We must have each had to sign our names about twelve times to complete the paperwork for our account.

The same was true for getting insurance for our van and ordering our kitchen from Ikea.  Truly, it is almost frightening.  Every move you make requires almost every possible piece of information about your identity.  Why in heaven’s name  Ikea needs to know where we were born is truly beyond me, but I think it’s because there are 60 million people in this country and identity and possible mixup between the 20,000 Giovanni Macarone’s  is an issue.   All this to say, with there being so much paperwork for us to go through this first month and the fact that you need to wait in line for at LEAST half an hour here wherever you go, often an hour or more, it has been exhausting and time consuming.

And then there’s the kids. Doing this as forty something, conscious and seasoned adults is one thing, and by no means a small thing. We have six beautiful, sensitive, amazingly tender children in our care and keeping who have stepped into the sand with us. Yeah we know they have a bit of the honeymooner in them. Especially since they love sand.  But sand can get old when it gets into your comfy shoes and rubs along your tender skin, when it blows into your eyes and you weren’t prepared to shield them with your hand, when it’s so hot it scalds you feet.  They are experiencing that too.

Italians are nothing if they aren’t opinionated and comfortable stating those opinions as fact. Because to them, their opinions are fact. So wherever we go we get two reactions without fail.  1. We are wonderful 2. We are crazy.  Italians are drawn to our family, the number of kids, the way they play together, take care of each other, their manners and our closeness as a family unit. It is wonderful  and rare in their eyes.  But it is so foreign to them, and their immediate response is one of concern for our kids.  Why would you bring them here?  Why would you uproot them from a safe, comfortable, secure, wonderful life in Canada and come to this? How will they survive being ripped from a 5 bedroom house in the country and crammed into a two bedroom apartment on a main drag?

We know very well what they mean by “this”. Especially here in the south. Wherever we look we see situations that make you catch your breath.  It’s not apparent on the surface but the reality of people’s coffers and scraping by day to day is inevitable when your only prospect is to take a temporary job planting tomatoes or else start learning German in the hopes of getting a job in a country that actually has a thriving economy. We know people who are doing both.  And yet when I hear these concerns over and over I have to say in my head, “Get thee behind me, Satan!”  For how the enemy would love to use these words and concerns to plant fear and anxiety in my life in regards to our children.

So here we are, wading through shifting sand, catching our bearings and our breath, taking in the cacophony of new sights and sounds (and it really is a cacophony) and seeking to do it with grace, and hope and joy, which are the things we most want to represent here.  And when our footing seems unsure, which is with most every step, we have a sure hand to hold and we are learning to cling to it and find comfort and strength in this one sure thing, that “when all around my soul gives way, He then is all my hope and stay.”