Shattered

The week of Thanksgiving, our world was shattered with the news that we would no longer be serving at the International Christian School of Vienna.  In one moment, without warning, we lost our whole lives.  Our home, our job, our kid's school, our ministry, our income, everything gone.

Our pain was almost unbearable and then we had to tell our kids.  Bearing our kid's pain was excruciating.  Even several weeks later, the emotions and shock of it all are difficult to process and oppressive to carry.

We don't really have a plan for what's next and we don't really know how we are going to get back to America by some time in February.  This was not our plan and in the deepest, darkest hours, it is easy to nurse anger and bitterness and hold them close to our hearts.

In the first stack of papers I cleaned preparing for another huge, overseas move, I found this letter given to Joe at graduation this past year by one of our graduating students.

"Dear Mr. Overby,
This letter is just to express my appreciation for the patience, hope and support you have given me in my time in the school. You have truly helped me stand where I am today.  I will never forget all you have done for me.  You have changed ICSV for the better, you create an environment and mood in the school.  So thank you for everything.  I wish you and your family all the best in the future and I would really like you to know I would never be here today if it weren't for your support.  So thank you! And thank you again so much! - J"

The last 4.5 years of our lives weren't wasted if we helped this one student.

And God has a plan.  God's plan is always better than ours, no matter how much the plan hurts.

The Neighborhood Grocery Store

We have been shopping at this little neighborhood store for the past 4 years.  We are familiar with the people that work there.  They greet us with friendly smiles in the familiar form of German words and even practice their English with us while we practice our German.  When other friends who live in Vienna talk about their horrible grocery store experiences, we are very grateful for our neighborhood Billa.

I think one of the reasons I like this little store so much is that in some ways it reminds me of my dad's store.  The way the produce, meat and cold section is set up, the cleanliness of the store and the way it is lighted bring back memories of Sundown Market.  So, in a way, it is a little bit of home right down the street.

A sign went up in our neighborhood store early last week, and it took me a few days to figure out what it said. The day I confirmed with the clerk how the sign translated into English, I walked home from the store in tears.  The store is closing on November 29th.  Why would I react this way?  It's just a grocery store. But this event brings to mind other life experiences.

The day my dad left his store, Sundown Market, for the last time, he entered the hospital where he was later diagnosed with cancer.  The following summer, Sundown Market was sold to a new owner.  The day I had to say goodbye to my dad's store, I cried more than any other time since my grandmother died.  Now, of course, those tears look like streams compared to the ocean of tears I've cried since that day. But, the store held so many memories of my dad especially with my kids.  It really felt like the beginning of saying goodbye to my dad even though he fought cancer for two more years after the store sold.

This is a difficult week anyway.  One that is painful with sweet memories at the best times.  To have "our" store close only serves to cut open the wounds of grief that are only beginning to heal.

The Nations of ICSV

Each year it amazes me how many different countries are represented at our little school.  This year, we have 230 students K - 12th grade from almost 50 different nations.

Here's a list of the nations represented at our school this year:
Australia
Austria
Burkina Faso
Canada
Costa Rica
Croatia
Cuba
Egypt
El Salvador
Ethiopia
France
Germany
Ghana
Greece
India
Indonesia
Iran
Iraq
Ireland
Italy
Jordan
Kenya
Libya
Macedonia
Malawi
Mauritius
Montenegro
Morocco
Namibia
Netherlands
New Zealand
Nigeria
Pakistan
Philippines
Poland
Russia
Slovakia
South Africa
South Korea
Sudan
Sweden
Switzerland
Taiwan
Tanzania
Thailand
United Kingdom
United States
Venezuela
Zimbabwe

What a great opportunity we have been given to share the Gospel with the nations while we live in Vienna.

Pray for Ace

See this little guy.  His name is Ace, and he is a very special little boy born with a special heart.  He was born with only half a heart (at least that is how I understand it, I am sure his mom could give you all the medical details) and that means his heart has to work twice as hard to do even the easy stuff like move oxygen throughout his body.  When he has any type of illness at all, his little heart has to work over the top hard to help him fight infection and keep his body functioning. 

Right now, this sweet boy is in the hospital with an ear infection, pneumonia, Rhinovirus and RSV! Would you please take a few minutes to pray for healing for Ace’s little body and strength for his heart?

But this is just the beginning of the story.  You see, sweet Ace has a little brother, Zane, who was also born with a special heart.  And although his heart condition is not as critical as Ace’s, it is not beneficial for Zane to be sick either.  Zane is at home but he is sick, too, with vomiting and a fever.

Please pray for Zane’s little body to be healed too and for him to stay out of the hospital.

And these sweet babies have a Dad who is not only taking care of Zane while he is sick, but juggling a job and 4 more boys at home.

Pray for Stan as he manages 5 boys at home who want to be with their mom, who are concerned about their brothers and who have to keep the house running.  The oldest boy is 14.  Pray for understanding from his boss so that he doesn’t have to worry about his job along with everything else.

And these 6 boys have a mom.  She keeps all 6 of these boys going; she teaches them at home; she runs several businesses from her home; she is the ultimate mom taxi.  And although she isn’t perfect, she is supermom, an amazing woman, a true friend and my hero.  And right now she is sitting in a hospital room with her baby in her lap, watching helplessly as he fights for his life.  Knowing that another one of her babies is sick at home and missing her husband and 4 healthy sons.  Her laundry isn’t getting done, her kids aren’t being feed or taught and she can’t do anything about it.

Please take a moment and pray for my friend, Michelle.  Pray for strength and courage, hope and peace, wisdom and rest.  She is tired and she has a long battle to fight.

But most of all this family has a Father.  And He holds them in the palm of His hand.  And He hears the prayers of His people.  Thanks for taking time to pray for my friends.

Sprechen Sie Deutsch?

I will never forget the time Caylah pointed excitedly at the smooth purple fruit in the box at the grocery store and said, “Look, Mom, it’s a Zwetschgen!  I don’t know the English word for it, but we learned about it in Deutsch class!”  Or the time I was on the phone with my mom and she asked what flavor of “Kool-Aid” the kids were drinking.  The word that came out of my mouth was Himbeere; it was only a few hours later and long after I was off the phone that the word raspberry even entered my mind.

German language is a part of our everyday life.  I find the longer we live here that I think certain things in German more often than English.  One of these is my grocery list.  Obviously, everything at the store is labeled in German, and we look for it in German so it just sticks in my head in German.  The other situation is ordering food at a restaurant.  In fact, we often ask for the German menu because we don’t understand what the English menu is offering for choices.  Fried pork steak and Wienerschnitzel are just not the same things.  We have a few conversations we throw around at home and sometimes we will have simple dialogues in the language.  Bethany corrects us when we make a mistake in pronunciation or word usage.

The three kids have a much better knowledge of German and Joe has his high school classes to fall back on so I am usually the least well-spoken of the group.  I also find that if I don’t know the word in German, I can often throw in a French vocabulary word that comes from the depth of my high school memory and confuse everyone.  The kids have classes in German at school from 3 to 5 hours a week, and although we are not immersed in the language, it is part of our daily experience.

So why am I giving all this information about the German language?  Because we will speak German when we are in the States.  It is a part of us and we can’t remove it.  We may not even realize we are doing it, we may not be able to remember the English word or there may not be an English word equivalent.   We will not do it to make you feel stupid or inadequate or as a way of “bragging” about our “infinite” knowledge.  It is a part of our everyday existence.  Among all of the people we interact with each day on a regular basis, it is very normal to throw German words and phrases around.

We do understand that this habit might get annoying after a while and you may feel uncomfortable around us.  It is always acceptable to ask us politely to not speak German around you and we will do our best to comply with your wishes.  Please also show us a bit of grace and understanding because it is never our desire to alienate anyone but we have been changed by the culture in which we live.

Now if you want to hear some real language bragging, you can ask the girls to sing “Jesus Loves Me” in Korean or ask how many languages in which they can greet one another.  They could probably sing songs in several different African dialects, too.  At this point, you are welcome to roll your eyes and ask them to move along.

Worldview

We went to a mall in the Dallas area the last time we were in the States.  It was filled with people and most of them were much darker skinned than we were. At one point we had stopped to people watch and one of the girls pulled my ear very close to her mouth.  “Mom, “she said, “ why are there so many Africans in Dallas?”

Now if any of you had heard this conversation, you might have gotten a little tense.  Or maybe you would’ve gotten on your soap box about racism or inequality or thinking you are better than someone else.  But my daughter has a different worldview about people that have dark skin than someone born and raised in West Texas.  She has true relationships with people born in Africa.  Every student that is in her class with dark skin comes from an African nation: Zimbabwe, Angola, Ethiopia, Namibia and Nigeria.  So she just naturally assumes that all people that have dark skin are from Africa.  This is her worldview.

My daughter has deep friendships with these children.  She enjoys their time together, goes to their birthday parties, plays soccer with them and cries when they leave.  She knows about their home cultures and how they adapt to Austrian culture; she shares their joy when they see snow for the first time or when they go ice skating.  She can find their country on a map and knows the flag that represents their country.  But more than anything, she knows them as people.

So her comment in Dallas was not spurred by racism, but by surprise at seeing so many people with whom she thought she could identify.  She was naturally very disappointed when I told her that all these dark skinned people were probably Americans whose ancestors had been brought from Africa centuries before.  With eyes wide she said, “When there was slavery?” And at my nod, she replied, “Slavery is bad.  I’m so glad Africans aren’t slaves anymore.”  My daughter says that with more heart felt conviction than most Americans because of her real relationship with African families.

Third Culture Kids like my children have very different worldviews.  They are formed from their birth country added to the country in which they live and, in our case, flavored by the many cultures we come into contact with through our international community. Over the next few blogs, I want to share some of those differences with our friends and family.  Maybe it will help our kids be better understood should we get to come back to the States this summer.  They want more than anything to be loved and accepted by those they love and maybe a little help understanding them will make that easier.

Some Good News

The past 2 years with both Joe and I being in administrative positions at ICSV has made it more difficult for us to find good news to share.  We have an amazing staff and fabulous students, but often when you are in a position of leadership, you tend to hear all the bad junk that goes around.  So today, I want to focus on some good news.


The school has moved much closer to fiscal equality.  We have cut back on spending, scaled back our staff and made a budget that almost breaks even with 243 students.  And God has sent us 243 students!

That means we can start cautiously planning for the future.  Looking at ways to increase our teaching staff, improve our education level and find ways to use our current space for a greater number of students.  This is the same place we were 2 years ago, but now we can do all of this with fiscal responsibility and, God willing, with no more debt.

We have a great many new student inquiries for next school year already!  When we had to dissolve our marketing department and our international liaison program last year, we thought that our enrollment would sharply decline.  But God is so faithful, He continues to prove that His hand is upon our ministry and that He is working in Vienna.  God does have a sense of humor, too.  The 3 classes in our school that are at maximum capacity (2nd, 4th and 10th grades) are the ones getting the majority of inquiries.  Pray that we will have wisdom to find creative ways to fit as many of these students in our building as possible.  Our building capacity is technically 300 students, but because of space limits in each class, new students have to fit in classes that we have free space.

Our teachers have been very busy sowing the Gospel this year.  Often, we do not get to see a harvest for all the planting we have done.  Continue to pray that the seeds of Truth will be planted in fruitful soil and that God will grow the seeds into a harvest of souls.

Please pray for our staff to stay healthy and full of energy as we enter into the last half of the year.  Pray for continued financial stability at the school.  Pray for wisdom for the administration and pray for new students.

As far as the Overbys are concerned, we are doing well.  Pray for our hearts to be dependent on the Lord and our strength and encouragement to come from Him.

We do have two financial needs: 1) plane tickets to the States this summer and 2) tuition for the kid's education this year.  The two together add up to around $20,000,  We have about 1/5th of that amount set aside right now but we need to look at purchasing tickets very soon.  If God leads you to help us in this area, please go to the RCE Website in order to donate.  It will give you instructions on how to donate by check, credit card or automatic bank draft.  The donations are tax deductible and greatly appreciated.

We are so thankful for all of you who continuously support us through you gifts and prayers.  You are part of sowing each seed of the Gospel that is planted at ICSV.  I hope I gave you some good news to encourage you today, too!