This is so wierd. We’ve been here long enough now that I sometimes hear a Northern Irish or British accent and think it’s an American accent because it’s sounds so normal. We were watching a British movie on TV the other day and I totally could not tell what the accents were. I wasn’t convinced they weren’t American accents until we noticed they were driving on the left side of the road.
It just happened again today. We’re at a big craft fair and this girl came up to Ange’s booth. I thought she had an American accent, but I couldn’t tell for sure at all. It’s like I couldn’t remember the difference momentarily, and we had to ask our Irish friend Kerry what kind of accent it was (it actually was American, by the way).
I’m sure it’s just a transitional thing as my brain gets more and more used to living here, but it’s sure wierd.
I wanted to give a short update because we’ve been a bit absent in the blog department. One reason is that we’ve been really busy in the evenings lately and haven’t had a lot of time to sit and write about everything we’re doing. The other reason is that the nature of the work we’re doing makes it awkward to write about. If the whole point is to show love to people who have been burned by religion, it would be really damaging for someone to stumble on our blog, read about themselves and feel like they’re a project or the friendship is fake in some way and we don’t actually care about them. I will just say, for those of you who are praying with us, that things are going really well in that department.
If you want to pray with us about those things, you can join us in asking for “John 4 encounters” (the woman at the well) with people. I am hoping to sit down soon and write a lengthier post about that one, but it’s come to be one of the guiding passages for how we want to do things.
I think we’re also hitting another little wave of culture shock (which, I’m told would be more aptly named “creeping cultural disorientation”). We’ve been here six months next week so that is about right.
