Last week marked one year of living in Brazil. When we moved here a year ago, I had some pretty unrealistic expectations about what it would look like to live here. It’s both been harder than I imagined and better for me than I could have dreamed.  In some ways, my life hasn’t changed as much as I thought it might. I still take care of the kids for a chunk of the day. I still grocery shop and menu plan, cook and clean, do laundry and wash dishes, create family routines, plan activities to do together with the kids, and read them books before bedtime. 

In other ways, my life has changed in ways I didn’t even know it needed. It happened in slow layers — I’m sure due to God’s grace. I had to learn to drive here, cook here, and clean here. I had to learn a new language and a new culture that gave meaning to the new language. I had to learn to interact in new systems, a new church, a new school for the kids, a new group of neighbors. I've had to learn to parent in a new environment where I did not have the same resources and had less independence to find new ones. I’ve also had to learn the new guidelines in how to be careful according to this culture and this city when I walk somewhere.   

As a perfectionist, I just couldn’t keep up the illusion of perfection as I was invited (or forced) to step into so many new things. Because that is all perfection is: an illusion. I had to learn that if I was going to grow in the necessary areas here, that growth would come through a lot of mistakes and failures. I hate mistakes and failures so much I would rather avoid learning something new or trying something different than to make them. Here in Brazil, that was never even a possibility. I no longer have the luxury of being a perfectionist. I shudder when I think about how many blunders I have unknowingly made, but at the same time, there has been great freedom in that because is strips the constraints of perfectionism right off. There was a time when I finally realized instead of trying to pretend like I knew Portuguese well when I met people in the building, or at the kid’s school, I would just start the conversation by apologizing and saying I was still learning Portuguese. Why pretend? I probably wasn’t as great at pretending as I thought anyway, and once the pretense was gone, I spoke more Portuguese, which is what I need to do well here. I’ve had to depend on grace, the grace of God to get me through the day, and the grace of others as I awkwardly bungle my way through so many new things. My options — according to myself — used to be either I needed to do things perfectly or avoid them. Those are both no longer options in so many new areas, and that is freeing in and of itself.  

My days still may be filled with more things that I did in the States than what I thought a missionary’s life would hold. But this is true of my heart, and true of the hearts of those impacted by the ministry of Counseling for Brazil: God is at work, changing lives. God is at work, doing the better deeper work in our hearts that we sometimes avoid but so desperately need. I’m so grateful that this ridiculous notion that I need to be perfect is being loosened, one mistake at a time.