[Tim]
Dear Friend,
It's not 100% certain, but it's looking more and more as if ...
The Chases are returning to live in Vietnam!
We'll miss seeing your faces and playing tabletop board games with you in Bend, but I have to tell you that my heart is bubbly with anticipation and it's a delight to look forward into this transition back to Asia.
One thing I think I never told you was that when we lived in China in the 90s we kept up an email correspondence with many people who loved and supported us, and we sent out pretty frequent "Dear Mom" emails. The idea was that if we wrote to an unnamed audience, our writing wouldn't have the same resonant voice that it has when we write to a specific recipient. So we wrote to our Moms (we were just kids, then, not even into our mid-twenties) and let the rest of our friends and family "eavesdrop" on the conversation. They were the Dear Mom Letters from our three years in China.
The Frequent updates. Small happenings. Recently I had a chance to re-read some of that correspondence and I liked it better than the blog we wrote when we lived in Vietnam 2015-16, so it made me want to try something closer to that when we return to Vietnam next year.
This time, though, I'm writing to my one-time neighbor in Bend. (If you're reading this, you're not him.) We shared conversations both shallow and deep, we worked together on a couple of projects while he lived in Bend, and I like him still, even though we're out of communication nowadays. But he's the one in my To: field on these emails/blog-posts, and if you subscribe and see Dear Friend as the first words, you can know that you're reading over his shoulder as I tell about the happenings in Vietnam. I'm not sure yet who Janet will choose as her recipient--she might even revert to writing to her mom again rather than writing to "a friend" or it may vary from letter to letter.
One more paragraph on the WHY for me. I'm not writing to my mom this time because the blog is such a public forum. Vietnam is fantastic, but it's still a closed political system where you should never write about politics or religion, even in private (dubious privacy, even when encrypted) and definitely not on Facebook. So I'll steer well clear of those topics in my blogposts. My own mom is pretty likely to go live in Guatemala to assist with a Christian ministry sometime during the next couple years, and so she and I will want to talk about religion (in "private-but-assumed-to-be-read" emails, and we'll be using careful language) and how relationship-with-God is going for her and for me. So it won't work so well for me to write to her, whereas the FRIEND who is my blog-post-recipient is not interested in politics or religion, so that will help my posts stay on the right side of the line.
Oh! I'm SO giddy with excitement. I'm ready to write. This year I'll bring you along as we're planning to go, and by the time we go we'll all be ready. I'm not worried about boring you--you're far away but we had some good times together and I trust that you're eager for me and glad to hear from me.
And we do still love you and your family. I hope one day our lives intersect again, this side of eternity. All my best,
~Tim
