Your missionaries probably send out a newsletter email regularly to give you updates on their work and lives. Because there’s so much to communicate (and sometimes the details are too personal to send to a large mailing list), you may have seen phrases like the ones below. If you’ve ever wondered what the “rest of the story” behind phrases like these could be, here are a few possibilities!

What they say: “We’ve had some health issues.”

• It sometimes takes a missionary a while to figure out their new normal.
• What they mean: “Our stomachs are constantly just a little off and we’re used to that now. But it might be a little gross to talk about all the illnesses we’ve had in the past six months: malaria, typhoid, chikungunya and amoebas. Also, our whole family just finished our second routine round of deworming of the year just in case. Before we became missionaries, we thought deworming was only for pets!”
• With different foods, questionable water quality, disease-carrying mosquitoes and new germs they’ve never been exposed to before, it sometimes takes a missionary a while to figure out their new normal.

You must read the rest of this article. It is going to bless you. Thank you so much to  Stacy Cawley and Wycliffe Bible Translators for writing this.