Pushing Fear Aside

Since the day we closed on our house in Mississippi, 24 hours before we boarded a plane to France (yes 24 hours!), it's been a crazy sprint every single day.  

As a self-professed procrastinator for the first 40 years of my life, I've found new energy after 40 in conquering fears that used to paralyze me.

So getting stuck in a French parking garage on a Saturday night at 8:30 pm? I push fear aside, put on my problem-solving cape, and get our Venezuelan friends to help translate, all the while eating my dinner out of the grocery cart.  My oldest child is in the wrong grade in his first 6 weeks of French public school? I march up to the school with determination and very elementary French, knowing French administration is notoriously difficult and abrasive, and push fear aside, using a big, persistent, very American smile that won't accept no as an answer. Graciously, I meet some wonderful French people in the school administration who help me get things moving in the right direction (it still takes 6 weeks), to the shock of even my French friends.

I take the wrong turn on the French highway, realize I have no gas and it's luckily 10 km to the next gas station (you can't find a gas station at every exit like the US) but still can't figure out which gas to pump because, yes, even that is different than the US. I push fear aside and hold up the line of cars asking several French people for help in my embarrassingly simple French. As I am exiting the gas station, a French couple stops me to be sure I am ok and didn't have any problems - another unusual encounter, I am told, especially for someone who doesn't speak good French.

The list is endless - faith over fear, courage over cowardice. What did I discover?  On the other side of fear are opportunities of unexpected grace, getting what you don't think you deserve or what you don't expect to receive. We will share some of our favorites in upcoming posts. All to say, I have seized every day as a huge mountain to climb that can be addressed 1 step at a time with no time to waste on feeling disappointed, surprised, or sorry for myself.

My kids are watching me navigate a whole new culture and a whole new language without the self-assuredness I projected in the United States. As I am learning alongside my children and my husband, our skillset as a team is expanding exponentially, we need, even depend, on each other's gift set in ways I would have never dreamed.  It's already a grand adventure.

Linda T serves as a GlobalGrace missionary in Paris, France