Easter

As anyone who has spent any extended time overseas will tell you, holidays here look different.  Not good, not bad, just different (well, sometimes good/bad).  Holidays can be hard and amidst the daily cultural grind of live overseas, they are those once every few month reminders that you're no place like home.

And while it sounds like I'm complaining or having a cultural moment, I'm really not.  It is always hard to have distance from friends, family and the familiar; however holidays tend to magnify those things.  It takes time and energy, not unlike what you go through a newly married couple, to establish traditions of your own and find a rhythm to holidays.

Over the years I've celebrated some hard holidays.  I remember back when I was single and living in China.  On my first Christmas there I woke up to an empty apartment and everything outside was business as usual.  I celebrated by riding my bike to the school (still in session) to check to see if I had any mail (I thankfully did).  Or our first Thanksgiving here where we celebrated by taking a drive to a waterfall so that we wouldn't have to spend the entire day at home alone.  There have also been some good holidays.  There have been Fourth of July's celebrated with cookouts and fireworks with friends that are more like family.  And just last year we had a fun and spontaneous Easter cookout with an egg hunt for toddlers.

This year we continued the tradition of our Easter cookout, although we moved it to Saturday night because it wouldn't be as hot as Sunday afternoon.  We invited many of our expat friends and ended up having over 45 people (including 15 crazy kids) crammed into our house.  It was a great time to celebrate together and enjoy some of the familiar, especially since we are all so far from our families.

On Sunday morning we traveled over an hour to the village where we grow coffee and celebrated Easter Sunday with the house church.  Throughout this year, this small community of believers has become more and more of our church family here.  Easter Sunday in the village definitely looks different than the Superbowl Service that is Easter in America.  Children's church was led by me and consisted of chasing cows and throwing rocks in the pond.  No one came in their new Easter dresses (although because of a cold front, one lady did wear a bath towel as a shawl).  The sermon maybe lasted ten minutes.  However many things were also familiar.  We sang songs of the death and resurrection, heard a message about Christ rising from the dead, and also took communion.  And while so many things like distance and culture can separate us, we were able to celebrate the one things that truly unites us: Christ's resurrection.

So it was a great Easter, albeit definitely different.

Why our Bags Look Different

So we have lots of changes coming up here at Underground Coffee International.  One that most people will notice is that over the next couple weeks we will start shipping coffee in different bags.  And while this seems like a small change, it is actually very big.

Our plan has always been to use coffee that we can source though a roaster in America until we get to the point where we can bring coffee in from our local farmers in Asia.  We knew this would take several years and figuring out some not so small logistical problems.  In the past we have used a great little Mom & Pop roaster out of Little Rock, AR.  We loved working with them and they loved that we were using their coffee to support missions and spread the Gospel.  Everything was great until about eight months ago when their company was bought by a much larger company.  The new company was less than ideal to work with (sorry, no more Coconut Creme and you have to pull our labels off of your bags) and for the past few months we've been praying for either a new way to get coffee stateside or for God to speed up the plan so that we could get coffee from our farmers to the US.  And I believe that God decided to answer both of those prayers.

About a week before we left to come back to Asia, a friend told me that he was going to meet with a coffee supplier and asked if I wanted to tag along.  What makes these guys special is that they exclusively use overseas missionaries like us to source their coffee.  We have many of the same friends and they came highly recommended.  As we talked further, we talked about the possibility of working together to import coffee from our farmers to the US, which allows them to take care of the big logistical hurdles like shipping and warehousing so that we can continue to focus on ministry with the farmers.  As we talked, we decided to start phasing in their roasted coffee instead of using our old roaster.

Our new partners also have flavors (and I'm on them to get Coconut Creme in the mix).  So over the next few months some flavors may change, however we spent a solid day blending coffee so that the taste is consistent with what you have come to expect from Underground Coffee.  Hopefully in the next year our coffee's taste will change slightly as we bring in coffee from our local farmers, which has been the plan all along.  And until that time our coffee is still missions sourced, which is what we're about anyway.  So if you've got a couple extra minutes, go and check out our new partners at Kingdom Growers.  And let them know that they should get some of our coffee imported so that you can drink it.

Christmas

One of the things I enjoy most about Christmas is seeing how it is observed around the world.  And although we have different traditions, the celebration is always for the same reason.  In our country in South East Asia, we have a tradition that I wish we could carry over to America (although, honestly, we are too busy as Americans to pull it off).  All of the small churches in a community get together and plan out a schedule for Christmas parties.  One village church will take one day, another the day after, and so on. Then all of the churches go and visit the others' parties.  The parties involve the usual things of singing, reading the Christmas story and sharing a meal together.  In the village (where life can be pretty slow) this is a big thing and many times the entire village will come out.  Also, because there are so many small house churches, this means that the Christmas season goes on for about a month and parties can sometimes happen after Christmas.

Last year we were able to partner with the house church in the village where our coffee farm is.  They provided the food, work and planning and we helped them rent a tent so that people sat underneath it and out of the sunshine.  The party was a huge hit and everyone from the village came, including the village leader.  The village leader, who is not a Christian, saw what was going on and enjoyed himself so much that he said that the church could operate under his protection in the village, and if they wanted to pursue becoming legalized he would try to help.  It was a huge moment for the Christians in that village.

Fast forward to this year and the church is in the process of that legalization.  Hopefully all of the paperwork will be finished by the time we return and we will be able to help our friends in the village build a church building where a new church is planted.  Please be in prayer for this year's Christmas party in our village.  It will happen on January 1st (I told you they sometimes happen after Christmas).  Please pray that it will be another time where people can hear the Gospel and that it will open doors in that village.