So, we sold the kids to go to Korea. Don’t know what that means for a blog called The Daily Dad, but it can’t be good.
My Bride and I are invited to speak at a medical missions conference – she’s a keynote, I’m an addendum – by a Korean doc colleague we worked with in Yemen some years ago.
Faithful Reader might even recall a reference to him from my first book, Ninety-Nine Windows. Dr. John Park was the man navigating the dusty roads of Sana’a, driving me and our bins of household goods from the Sana’a airport to the flat where My Bride and I lived on a street with no name. It was Day One of our new life in Arabia.
Of course, we had no kids at that time.
Now in Seoul, Jean will share something about our ongoing overseas work, specifically her work with Save the Mothers in East Africa.
My address to the South Koreans – apparently there will be many hundreds, each one, no doubt, wondering why a writer is speaking to them – will touch on the theme of being surprised by the joy of mission and what I do.
I will refer to something that I heard some years before Dr. John from Korea drove me through those streets of Sana’a. Something that changed my life, really. It was from a sociologist who asked people the rather thoughtful question of ‘If you had to live your life again, what would you do different?’
The question was asked to older folks with a foot or crutch or cane or whatever half in the grave, the sort of people who no longer care about the hair in their ears and who have plenty of time to think about these matters.
Sometime before they dropped into eternity, this is what they said: Top 3 answers, they said: I’d risk more. I’d reflect more. And I’d do more to leave something behind.
So in the spirit of leaving something behind, we’ve left the kids behind.
Okay, we didn’t actually sell them. We’re actually just sort of leasing them out. And yes, into good hands. But there are these lease-to-own options and they can be a pretty good deal for all involved. The kids, of course, might look into them just as much as us.
http://www.thomasfroese.com/if-you-could-live-your-life-over-again/