Update: January-February, 2022

Bringing our Paraguayan puppy to Louisiana

In an unforeseen plot twist, the Zuber family will be making a transition that wasn’t even slightly on our radar as recently as November. We will be spending the year 2022 in Louisiana, in the United States.

It is very tempting to sugar-coat or talk indirectly around what happened, but we want to be clear and direct. The years since our commissioning have not been easy for our family, especially for our children. A few months after moving to Costa Rica, our son Simeon developed eosinophilic esophagitis, a chronic (more-or-less permanent) condition. The summary is that he was very sick for several months, sick for about a year, and unable to eat dairy or eggs for the foreseeable future. A few months after Simmy’s diagnosis, Covid hit. Everyone’s classes went online, and when it became clear that Covid wouldn’t blow over quickly we returned to the US for a few months to continue our online classes while getting medical treatment for Simmy. When the borders reopened at the beginning of 2021, we finally moved to Paraguay. During all this time the kids attended school online, with frequently changing systems and schedules. Paraguay is a wonderful country, but it is a new country for us and pandemic conditions have made it more difficult than usual for us to meet people, settle in, and create stability.

The kids were resilient and strong through all of the challenges for years, but finally hit their breaking points. This past August, Anna Belle began expressing physical symptoms arising from anxiety. Soon after, Simeon also developed different physical symptoms, also as a result of stress. We have sought out prayer, counseling, and medical assistance to help them, but at this moment they are still anxious and expressing physical symptoms. As could be expected, the stress of our kids is stressful to us as parents.

This past December we reached a natural “pivot” point in our ministry, in which we planned to pivot from ministry in the city of Asuncion to ministry in the city of Ciudad del Este. However, in consultation with C&MA member care and our children’s counselors, our ministry supervisors instead made the decision that we should transition back to the United States for 2022 in order to secure treatment and stability for our family. This year will be a combined medical leave/early home assignment (after 2.5 years instead of 4). It is our hope and plan to go on to Ciudad del Este in 2023, heavily contingent upon the entire family being healthy and fit to go.

Although this transition came very unexpectedly, we can see wisdom in the move. In the Bible God instructs us repeatedly—including through David (Psalm 103:13), Jesus (Mark 7:9-13), and Paul (1 Tim 5:8, Col 3:21)—that as Christians we have a responsibility to care for the physical, spiritual, and emotional needs of our immediate families. And God says (Hos 6:6-7) and demonstrates (1 Sam 13:8-14) repeatedly in the Bible that obedience to His clear instructions must always take priority over ministry and service. Although it is very hard for us, we therefore agree with the guidance we have received to obey God and take time to take care of our family.

This transition is not what we expected, but we continue to trust God. Reading through the Bible, it is hard to find a person through whom God worked, who did not experience moments where the events of their life did not seem to make sense. Almost everyone in the Bible, when you look at the story through their eyes, had good reasons to ask “Why?!?” Of course, knowing this truth doesn’t make it easy to live through Why moments, but it does give us encouragement to know that we are in good company, and that just because we don’t understand doesn’t mean God isn’t at work.

Thank you so much for your love and support during these past few years. Please continue to pray for our family. Pray for healing for us all. Pray for God to continue to guide and lead us forward, one step at a time. Pray for us to have peace in Christ as we walk forward without knowing with certainty the path beyond the next footstep. Pray for God to continue to use us now in the place where we are during the months to come. Thank you for your prayers!