echoing spaces and a rotator cuff

Yesterday marks one month. One month until we move to Ecuador.

You know that sound of stepping into a gallery at an art museum? The sound of your steps echoing back from the walls as you slowly walk through the nearly empty spaces. Every once in a while, I hear that sound now while walking through our little Chicago apartment. As more and more boxes are filled and headed to Salvation Army and friends stop by to claim items from what I have been calling the “Hoskins Estate Sale”, our home is feeling empty. And that sound of echoing foot steps is somewhat haunting as I think back over these past 4 years and all of the life that has been lived between these now empty walls. Yet, it is a sound that is also pregnant with anticipation as I dream about what new space our echoing foot steps will fill and find the walls that will hold our life in this next chapter.

This post will no doubt be all over the place, much like everything in our life right now. But hopefully will catch you all up a little bit about the goings-on as we close in on our move date.

First of all, answers to a few FAQs that keep coming up as we bump into folks interested in what this next step holds for us.

We will fly into Quito on June 17th and are excited to be reunited with friends and colleagues once again. We don’t have a home yet, but will be living with our dear friends and fellow ECC missionaries, Kristina and Erik Amundsen, while we hunt for a place to live and start to settle in. First order of business will most likely be to find and purchase a car and from there find a new home. We are so grateful to the Amundsen’s for letting us invade their life for a few weeks while we find our footing once again.

We have had many questions about how exactly we are going about moving down to Quito. Due to extremely high import taxes, we are not shipping anything down and will move only with what we can take with us on the plane. Gratefully we have had lots of help along the way already! We took a few suitcases full of our things down when we went to Ecuador in November and have had many friends and church groups who were heading down to Ecuador offer to take a suitcase or two for us. And the Amundsen’s (again) have been gracious enough to store our things until we arrive. So in many senses we will be “starting over”, needing to furnish our apartment and pull together all of those items like dishes and towels and such that we won’t be moving down with us once we have feet there on the ground.

Chris is driving out to Colorado tomorrow. He will be preaching at Applewood Community Covenant Church and thus will wrap up our church visits in this whirlwind year of travel and making connections. Our trusty CR-V will be passed along to Chris’s brother and his family and Chris will fly back home.

In other developments, Chris tore his rotator cuff last week playing soccer. Physical therapy starts today and he will have a consultation with an orthopedic surgeon before we leave to discuss if surgery will need to be in his future. Frustrating, to say the least, when so much of our days are now filled with packing and lifting and moving heavy things. Our community has been great and I suppose this gives us yet another opportunity to live into the fact that we can not go this alone and we must ask for help when it is needed. And deep breaths. Lots of deep breaths. Chris seems to have a history of having medical injuries or issues pop up right before a move. I think we either have to never move again or I will need to put him in a protective bubble approximately 4 weeks before said move.

All in all, we are hanging in there. All of the big pieces are in place, and now we are left with a list of millions of little details to get through before June 17th. And in the midst of it all, trying our best to cling to life giving rhythms and guard time with each other and our community here.

And never far from our mind is the reality that our new home is a country ravaged by the earthquake that happened April 16th and we woke up to news just this morning that another quake occurred during the night. While the rest of the world has moved on to other headlines, Ecuador is faced with the reality of a recovery and rebuilding that will take years and years.