May 1, 2007

I can't eat, sleep, drive, or move a finger without seeing their faces. They fill my thoughts and dreams; they haunt me. Their gaunt figures, their dirty hands and feet, their eyes crying out "Do you see me?". Potbelly children run the streets with no shoes or shirt. Men and women and children lay dying in their beds from AIDS and malaria. Maybe they'll eat today, maybe not. No one really knows for certain. The women that are able wake up very early in the morning to be the first to draw water so that its cleaner. Once everyone starts getting their water, the filth will be stirred up and it won't be as clean. She will then walk around 2 miles back home, carrying a 20 gallon jug on her head. She may do this as many as six times a day. The children are taught to fetch water when they are as young as five years old. When they turn six, they are taken into the fields and taught to farm. When they are seven, they are able to work on their own, perfectly capable of farming and drawing water. You may ask why? People in Africa do not know who will die first or when they will die. The children cannot be dependent on their parents to keep them alive when the parents aren't able to keep themselves alive. Because of the high rate of deaths, each person must be able to take care of themselves, no matter if they are 5 or 50.

Thoughts From Years Past

Pre-Kenya 2007

Lonliness has been a lifelong companion in some form or fashion, some times worse than others, and sometimes I've strangely prefered it to being surrounded by people. I think now is one of those times. Getting ready to leave has been incredibly difficult and had I known how hard the road would have been before ever getting out of the country, I don't know if I would have chosen to go this way.

I have never been so scared in my life of what tomorrow holds as I am now. And the thing is that there's no one around to talk to. Summer sends people in every opposite direction and its like we all temporarily lose contact with eachother. Not my favorite thing in the world. And so here I am, homeless, working a part time job that doesn't cover what I need it to, and an unearthly desire to just pack it up and leave.

I tried explaining to a friend of mine the other day why I don't want to be here in the States, and he just could not understand. It's like something engrained in the very fiber of who I am... this great country may be my country, my home, ..but its not where I belong. Truth be told, I belong in heaven, so I forsee a constant battle between this land and me. But the only thing that has eased the ache to go home is when I get to give up thinking about myself and all that entails to spend my time in service of another.

Surrender

Thursday, February 17, 2011

My roommate asked me the other day why I didn't keep up with my blog, and so I find myself logging in tonight to check where I left off. This is what I found saved in the drafts folder from november 2010.

"I'm not gonna lie... I've had a time of it lately. Let's just say that life at 29 years of age is not what I had hoped it would be, and it's left me somewhat resentful. I have a feeling everybody at some point has a moment of clarity when they realize that they're exactly where they want to be or they aren't. And I'm not. Don't get me wrong, there are so many things that I have to be thankful for. I just find myself forgetting to be thankful.

See, I always imagined I'd be back overseas by now, doing work with street children or the poor... not working at a bakery. A few months ago, my expectations, hopes, dreams, etc. all came crashing down around me. I keep poking at them with my toe, hoping there's still some life there, but I know I cannot revive them on my own. And instead of hoping that the Lord is working things out in His own time and way, I question Him. I think this is the first time I've really, truly had difficulty with God. I mean, there are always ups and downs, but I am struggling to believe He has my best interests at heart and I feel resentful. Didn't He call me so long ago to do mission work? If so, then why am I still here? It's too easy for me to get stuck here. It's too easy to let it sit and fester, too easy to ignore the truths I know about God."

I find that so many things change in the course of 4 months. What once used to be a festering resentfulness for not being back oversees has turned into a sort of clarity about what I really want to do with my life. At some point during these past 4 months, I have come to realize that my life's mission is truly to serve victims of human trafficking. I even have begun to wonder if the whole purpose of my family going to Latin America so many years ago was to introduce me to the horror that is child prostitution. Those experiences from 10 years ago have formed and shaped my life in a way I never knew possible. Now here I am in the middle of applying to grad school and hoping to study social work so that I can be of some real use to these victims. And for the first time in over 10 years, I have realized that if I can spend my life working with victims of human trafficking, then I will be okay living in the states. That's a huge deal for me. HUGE. I don't fit this culture. I don't long for the American Dream of the cute house with the white picket fence, etc... I've seen too much poverty to be able to live the typical American life. I hate the materialism of our society and wish that we as a culture realized how important it is to live in community with others. Oh, the list goes on and on.

Although I didn't know it at the time, my crumbled world took a change for the better when my old roommate found me sobbing in my bedroom last September. I was in the middle of, at the time, the most critical decision I had to make, and I did not want to make it. Anna called me out in the most gentle yet no b.s. way possible. She said I had spent so long wanting to be back overseas that I wasn't living the life right in front of me. She said that I longed so much to be back with my friends overseas that I wasn't connecting or communing with the ones right here. ......Bottom line? I was wasting my life away wishing for something that was out of my control. I made my decision right then and there, and although it broke my heart and took months to come back from, healing did come. Peace did come. And along with that came a renewed purpose to seek out people and life right here in front of me.

There's an old poem that I heard about a long time ago that I think just about sums it up:

A Peace that Cometh after Sorrow

Jessie Rose Gates

There is a peace that cometh after sorrow,

Of hope surrendered, not of hope fulfilled;

A peace that looketh not upon tomorrow,

But calmly on a tempest that it stilled.

A peace that lives not now in joy's excesses,

Nor in the happy life of love secure;

But in the unerring strength the heart possesses,

Of conflicts won while learning to endure.

A peace there is, in sacrifice secluded,

A life subdued, from will and passion free;

Tis not the peace that over Eden brooded,

But that which triumphed in Gethsemane.

So I guess the thing I'm slowly, oh so very slowly, learning right now is to surrender my desires over and over.... and over and over and over again to the Lord. Because when it comes down to it, I wouldn't be happy overseas saving the world if its not where He has for me to be. And if its His plan for me to stay here in this land that I wish I loved more, then okay. I surrender. Someone once made the analogy of what a "living sacrifice" looks like... When we place ourselves onto the altar of God, it hurts. Bad. So we crawl back off. But then we realize what we have to do and crawl back on.... its this idea of crawling back and placing ourselves back on the altar over and over and over again that struck me. Continual sacrifice. Continual surrender.

Not my will, but Yours, oh Lord.

Learning to Say I'm Sorry

Tuesday, March 9, 2010

I got into a fight with my roommate the other day (love you, Anna) and have since found myself lost in thought about what it really means to be sorry. I remember thinking about this when I was in Kenya back in 2007, and this fight just brought old thoughts up again. Living in such close quarters like we did in Sang'alo with a rat burrowing in random nooks, no running water, no electricity and donkeys and pigeons for alarm clocks tended to bring out the worst in us, things in us we didn't know were there. Some days anything could send us over the edge. Simple misunderstandings would escalate into huge fights. I remember a couple times thinking and worrying that my friendship with one of the girls would never be the same after we got home.

There's something in me, and I think in all of us, that feels justified, almost entitled, in our "rightness" or reasons. It's one thing to apologize if the other person knows their also in the wrong and also says they're sorry... but what if they don't? Or worse yet, what if they do know they're wrong but still don't apologize? The pride in me swells up and I feel that pride, that entitlement and justification saying "well, if they don't apologize, I'm not going to." But at the end of the day, its my heart at risk of growing bitter by my unwillingness.

See, I think that if I can learn to say I'm sorry whether I'm right or not, whether the other person is right or not, not only will that put my pride in its place, but it does some sort of "soul stretching" that is much needed. What good does it do to sit there and stew inside and just let the problem fester? There was one specific instance in Kenya that I remember feeling extremely justified in my behavior and feeling very hurt by this other person's attitude towards me. I was so upset that I was willing to leave for Nairobi, sooner than intended, on a bus by myself (which would have been complete lunacy on my part). But after a good talking-to by my dear friend, I realized that right or not, justified or not, I had to apologize for the good of the team. I couldn't go to Nairobi by myself during election season, and I couldn't leave the situation like that, especially because it would have brought a sort of dishonor on the tribe we stayed with for having let me go in that manner. I learned that my actions (or in-actions) affect everybody around me, even if they're not directly involved.

Donald Miller put it so beautifully in Blue Like Jazz when he said,  


"I think every conscious person, every person that is awake to the functioning principles within his reality, has      a moment where he stops blaming the problems in the world on group think, on humanity and authority, and starts to face himself. I hate this more than anything. This is the hardest principle within Christian spirituality for me to deal with. The problem is not out there; the problem is the needy beast of a thing that lives in my chest."  


...This needy beast of a thing that lives in my chest...  I see it and I feel it so acutely sometimes and I'm embarrassed to know that its there. Aren't I supposed to be able to tame it and keep it in its cage by now? You'd think that after so long we'd learn how to manage that part of our nature.  But I think the real pain comes from the truth that it makes me see about myself. I have a needy beast living in my chest and no matter how old I am or how much life I've lived or how many lessons I learn about communication, that beast at some point or another will find a way to growl its complaints and be ungrateful or angry. I can learn how to keep it in check, but after living in Kenya for 4 months I saw that there are some things that will happen just because the world doesn't revolve around me and I'll find that my reaction may not be up to par.


So maybe its about recognizing when I need to say I'm sorry, to shove, kick, drag that thing back into its cage, tell it to shut up, and say what needs to be said. I'm sorry. Don't expect an apology, don't expect to be justified, just let go of the pride swelling in my chest and be wrong. I might see the anger or pride flare up a few times before its completely quelled, but a very smart person once said that its easier to act our way into feelings than feel our way into actions. I have a feeling maybe he or she had to say they were sorry quite a bit...

Awkwardly Innapropriate

Friday, February 26, 2010

Awkwardly Inappropriate

Sometimes I think I'm the only one that attracts the kind of person that doesn't know what a filter is. For example, the other day at work I was spot cleaning the glass cases and tables, etc. and a man walks by me to refill his coffee. I'd seen him around before with is 3 kids, the oldest of which comes in all the time on her own. (I'm guessing they're mid-teens, 8 or 9, and 7-ish..?) As he walks past me, he makes a comment about how he likes my nose piercing. (I have one of those tiny studs that's so small it looks like a spec of glitter.)  He asks the usual questions any middle age, married man with 3 children asks: "Did it hurt?", "Do guys ever get their noses pierced?", "Is that part of your nose cartilage?", etc.  So I try to politely carry on an awkward conversation about nose piercing with this middle age, married man with 3 children, and soon his 2 younger kids come up. He turns to them and asks nonchalantly, "Hey, how do you think I'd look with my nose pierced? Maybe a hoop or something?" to which the kids immediately and vehemently shake their heads and discourage the outrageous idea. The dad then presses the issue further by asking the youngest if he thought he should get a tattoo. The little boy very candidly replies, "No way! Mom would kill you!" The dad replies, without hesitation "What does it matter? She's divorcing me anyway." My jaw drops and eyes widen... He turns to me to confirm, "Well, she is!"

(And on that note... looks like there's a smudge on that table ...way over there...  that I've got to clean. Right now.)

Just Breathe

In an effort to consolidate, I'm getting rid of a blog I started at the end of last year and will be keeping this one going. I have reposted the posts from the other blog onto this one. They are old, but hopefully still relevant.

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Sunday, January 10, 2010

It's a new year, people say, and a new me... Although I learned a long time ago that any resolution worth making and not breaking is probably something I should be doing anyway.

I brought in the new year asleep in my bed with my dog as fireworks mixed with gunshots (not to fear - I don't) and I rolled over on my other side moaning about how long people would shoot off firecrackers and how early I had to wake up the next morning.

I very rarely wake up early enough to really see and appreciate the sunrise, but when I do, I'm thankful for it. There's something about the stillness of the early morning and the crisp coolness of the dawn that makes me shiver with excitement and hope and, in a sense, peace. The world is still dreary and hasn't had a chance to taint the day.  I wish we could live in serene moments like that. I think the world would be a much kinder place, much more patient, if we all learned to appreciate the sunrise. I think if we all stopped for just three minutes, long enough to take a deep breath, long enough to realize that if the sun can keep rising and setting despite our cynicism, despite our irritability, impatience, deadlines, meetings and our lists of somewhat managed mass chaos... maybe then we might realize that the world does not revolve around us, despite what it may sometimes feel, and that our problems really aren't as big as they seem, and that for better or worse, tomorrow will come and we will have a chance to begin again.

I, for one, rather love the idea of a clean slate.