A Fine Line

Friday morning I realized that we had no water in our kitchen. I assumed that there was a notice at the bottom of my building warning me of this inconvenience, but they tend to post them above my hobbit eye level, so I didn't see it. And also, they're in Chinese so I can only read a fraction of them. Regardless, it was frustrating for the next 24 hours until they turned it back on.

Recently a friend of mine took an online stress test, and part of it required her to answer questions about this kind of thing. It gave a list of potential stressors from living cross-culturally, and asked her, "On a scale of 'not at all' to 'crazy', how much does this affect you?" (ok, maybe I took some liberty with the scale, but you get the idea). It was things that seem simple like, "I can't get X product here" or "I have to deal with government red tape" or "my water or electricity is unreliable." My friend realized that while few of them affected her greatly, the fact that most of the affected her in small ways added up to a lot.

So what do we do with these things? I've been wondering about this lately. And not just the inconveniences, but the other things we've given up living here. I don't often dwell on them, but we have missed a lot being here - birthdays, holidays, experiences.

We're told to look on the bright side, count our blessings, not complain, say "oh but it could be so much worse," compare our lot with others less fortunate and then close the box on the hard things.

I feel like I'm realizing that there's a fine line in dealing with these things. True, it's important to be thankful and full of faith, to realize that in spite of loss there has been great gain, that the difficulties have proven fodder for growth. All true.

But what about acknowledging what these things are doing to our hearts? Where is the place for saying, "This is really hard. It wears on me. I miss this. I long for that." Where is the place for our hearts to express the pain, the drain? Not so that we wallow and have little pity parties, but that we are honest and honor what we feel. To give ourselves the space to feel the reality and let God meet us there.

I think about Jesus in the garden. His was an honest, raw heart that said, "I'd really rather not." Was he complaining? No. He was just being real. He gave Himself the space to acknowledge his true feelings. And then he went and did what was needed.

So I guess my challenge is to be like Jesus - to go before God with my whole heart, not one that is ignorant or blind to the difficulties of life. I can lay all my heart before Him and know that in Him I can find comfort, peace, and strength.

What Does Faith Look Like?

This house hunting process is brutal. It may be a good time to buy in Orlando, but the houses for sale that are easy to buy are few and far between. Erik is currently there for a conference and had a couple days to look again. We prayed and hoped for two things - first, that God would make it incredibly clear if we should take a particular house (that kind of feeling where you walk in and just know) and that He would provide a house while he's on this trip.

So far the first one hasn't happened. Erik leaves Orlando on Saturday for Vancouver, and then our next available window in which to look at houses in person will not be until September (or when someone gives us $2000 for an emergency trip to Orlando. That seems, well, unlikely).

Several times in the last few days Erik and I have both been in tears over Skype, talking about these house possibilities, or lack thereof. We question if our criteria are too high. We wonder if God is trying to provide houses for us but we pass them by because we want something we think is better. We hear the voices in our heads that say, "God is going to provide for you" and we know that's true, but we don't know what that will look like, and that's what's difficult.

What does faith look like? Does it mean that we hold tenaciously to some idea we have in our heads about our ideal house? The word "die" has come up in our conversations several times, as in "die to a dream" or "I die a little when I look at that." Does having faith mean believing God will give us something that doesn't involve us having to die to things that we feel are important to us?

I really don't know. I know that the Christian life constantly involves death. Dying to self. But then where do God's promises to prosper us, to give us the desires of our hearts, come in? The biggest struggle for me is that I know God can give us exactly what we hope for and more. I just don't know if he will. What if what we need more than anything is something that isn't what we want?

So I find myself in a constant state of confusion and crying out to Him. I keep looking through verses on faith and on waiting. I know that the testing of our faith produces perseverance. I know that those who wait on the Lord will see His goodness. I just wish it were an easier and faster process!

Timing

"For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven. . . He has made everything beautiful in its time." Ecclesiastes 3:1, 11


This morning I contemplated these verses, and they took me back to a moment in high school. It was probably one of my lowest points - I was feeling extremely lonely, so much so that I wrote a poem about it during English class one day. That was 2nd hour. During 3rd hour Psychology class, the vice principal came to our classroom and pulled me out into the hallway. He had a girl with him named Emily Novak. He told me she was new to the school and had essentially the same schedule as me. She quickly became one of my best friends, and from that day everything changed.

I look back on that story and think, "God, your time is impeccable." He knew exactly how I would be feeling that morning in 2nd hour, and brought Emily and her family to me at just that moment. I shake my head in amazement.

I could go on and on about moments when God stepped at just the right time in my life. It's like He delights in swooping in to save the day, to show His glory, to prove once again that we are not alone, that we are seen, that we are heard, that He is good.

When I think of the moments when God's timing demonstrated His goodness, His tenderness, His power to provide, it gives me hope. Because I'll be honest and say that there have been times when His timing wasn't what I would have chosen. Yet even those times, He has used for good, for our growth, for His glory. Always, He is working to make everything beautiful.

So when I anxiously check each morning for new houses that might have come on the market, I'm tempted to think, "God, come on! We need a house!" But I know that He is really good at doing things like that at just the right time. I know it will come, and I know it will be good.

Good Grief

Grief is one of the obvious downsides of transition. It's always tempting, when I leave a place, to avoid grief. I can do it by staying busy or staying focused on what's to come, or I can diminish my heart by telling myself that I'm not as attached as I am.

I've learned though that none of those are good options because grief is a friend. It helps us feel deeply and see how much our hearts have been opened to others, to love. To deny it is not only to be untruthful about the impact a place or person has had on me, but it closes my heart to the future. Denial of grief does not make the pain go away. It simply shames it and hides it away for another time.

I've noticed this all around me, not only in people who are going through a transition like ours. We don't like to deal with grief, and we don't like others to deal with it either. So we avoid it by staying busy, or focusing on only the positive things in life, or we tell ourselves it's not that big of a deal. Worse still, as believers we spiritualize grief with platitudes like, "Oh but God will use this" or "This is His will." Those things, albeit true, stifle our hearts and our ability to process the hurt.

Dan Allender said it well this week in our video, "We live in a community that does not know how to grieve, and won't allow grief. And we live in a community, therefore, that silences those who know shame, because if you cannot grieve then shame must stay silent." 

The other night at dinner, we were talking about our move. Ethan became very emotional and said, "I don't want to talk about it! Whenever I start to think about it, I just avoid it!" We talked about how instead it might be better to give ourselves times when we DO let ourselves think about it, and let ourselves feel the depth of the loss of leaving, and weep over it. We don't need to cry constantly between now and when we leave, but we do need to honor our hearts and allow ourselves space to feel. 


Grief is good. It allows us to purge the pain and wrestle with God in the darkest places, only to see that He is there as well. He is as good in the darkness as He is in the light, but we can't see that unless we allows ourselves to go there. Grief brings healing. It keeps our hearts open. I hope I can remember all this through the process!

Parenting is Hard

A few weeks ago at church, an elderly gentleman visiting from the States was our guest preacher. He has been a child psychiatrist for decades and has 5 kids of his own. Given his background, I was hopeful that his message about parenting would be full of wisdom and encouragement. The two main points were, "Parenting isn't hard," and "The goal is not to give your kids a happy childhood. It's to raise them to be good people."

I wanted to throw things at him.

His reasoning was that God has made it abundantly clear in scripture how we should raise our children, so if we just do what the Bible says they'll turn out fine. It reduces the Bible to a guidebook, and parents to people who either follow the guidelines or not. If your kids don't turn out well in this reasoning, you have no one to blame but yourself. This reasoning doesn't account for the fact that we are sinners raising sinners in a fallen world, with an enemy focused on our demise. This reasoning is both naive and discouraging. If I pretend these realities don't exist, I will berate myself when I find that parenting isn't easy. Now I'm not denying the other great reality which is that God is on our side, and He will fight for us. But I don't think it does us any good to minimize the truth of the battle. Parenting is hard. It's crazy hard. It's "what have I gotten myself into?" kind of hard. Even with God on my side. I can't imagine doing it without Him.

And then there's his second point. Now I agree that the goal is not to give our kids a happy childhood. But my goal is far beyond making my kids "good people." As Ravi Zacharias said, "Christianity is not about making bad people good. It's about making dead things alive." I have come to believe that the greatest thing I do for my kids is not to teach them rules for living, but to show them how desperately we all need Jesus, and how abundant is His salvation for our need.

Doing that means we have days like today when it's hard. Hard with a capital H. Days when our sin natures clash like in some epic battle, swords clanging, over things as seemingly trivial as Latin homework and piano practice. I could be discouraged and wonder, "Why is this so hard? What am I doing wrong?" Or I could remind myself that this is where we learn. This is when we grow. This is where we recognize that we sin, and we confess, and we receive forgiveness from Him and each other. This is when we have the opportunity to become not good people but dependent people, who are not learning a list of rules but learning how to live by the Spirit.

Poem

If thou could`st empty all thyself of self
by Sir Thomas Browne

If thou could`st empty all thyself of self,
Like to a shell dishabited,
Then might He find thee on the ocean shelf,
And say, `This is not dead`,
And fill thee with Himself instead.

But thou art all replete with very thou
And hast such shrewd activity,
That when He comes, He says, `This is enow
Unto itself - `twere better let it be,
It is so small and full, there is no room for me.`

Oh that I would be the former!

The Power of Story in Community

"All children mythologize their birth. It is a universal trait. You want to know someone? Heart, mind and soul? Ask him to tell you about when he was born. What you get won't be the truth; it will be a story. And nothing is more telling than a story."
- The Thirteenth Tale, by Diane Setterfield

In the last few years, I've thought a lot more about my story. Partly this is from coaching others to know their stories, partly it is through reading To Be Told by Dan Allender, partly it's just the way God is leading me. Many people think the past is just the past - over and done, let's move on. But we are a composite of our stories and how they shaped us. We are our past and the messages we write on our hearts from every moment we live. And I'm coming to believe that it's unlikely we will change those messages (and some of them are lies) unless we really examine the stories that told them to us.

And more importantly, I'm coming to also believe that we can't really know our stories on our own. Lately, we've started to look at our stories in community. A group of us in town have started meeting every other week to watch a video series by Dan Allender about writing our stories. Afterward we break into three groups and reflect on what we saw. In the process, we've started telling our stories to each other.

It's interesting, when you tell a story from your life to someone else. You think you know it, you understand it, but I think until you tell it to someone else, you don't see the truth in it. I've had people tell me incredible sad stories, but they laugh while they tell them, not realizing that it is their laughter that helps them avoid the terrible pain of what happened in those stories. I have told others stories and heard them say, "That must have been so hard," and until that moment, I haven't realized it myself. When we tell our stories, others can ask questions and help us connect the dots to who we are in the present because of our past. And I feel like one of the greatest gifts is when someone listens to your story and feels it with you, and loves you in it. It's a powerful thing.

Messy

I hate messes. I can tolerate them for awhile, but then something in me snaps and I go into a flurry of cleaning. I have even, at times, thought I would enjoy being a cleaning lady for someone. I find great satisfaction in tidy, sanitized spaces.

Right now my heart feels like a mess, and I'm at a loss to know how to tidy it up. For the last few months I feel like God has come in and stirred things up and opened doors and pulled back the covers and generally left everything in disarray. So I'm left standing in the middle of it, looking around at the chaos thinking, "That's the last time I invite that guy over."

The mess has a lot to do with seeing deeper levels of my depravity, the ways I look for life apart from God. It's also seeing the hurt I cause and the hurt done to me, and how rather than letting myself acknowledge the hurt I find other ways to medicate or distract or numb myself. It's feeling as Paul said, "For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep doing."

On the one hand, it's discouraging to see things I thought had died, places where I thought I had grown, still alive and well. On the other hand, I have grown, and God has changed the way I see myself and Him in seismic ways. It's not that haven't grown, it's that I'm not done. This is His doing, His way of moving into a deeper experience of Him.

This mess feels like realizing that what satisfied my heart in the shallow end of the pool doesn't work as well when God picks me up and throws me into deeper waters. So while I know that God deeply loves and accepts my mess, and part of the issue is that I don't, just to tell myself that and move on won't cut it this time. To do so would be like me throwing all the mess in a closet and shutting the door.

So what do I do with this mess? I keep asking God that. And I think He smiles gently and says, "Wait" because maybe instead of getting through the mess I need to learn to be in it. Maybe staying here means taking a harder look at what's behind it, why I do what I do. Maybe it's making me feel the depth of my nothingness before Him and the corresponding depths of His unrelenting love. Maybe it's so that I can show people my mess a little, like I did last night with some good friends, and feel the strength and comfort and love that we can give each other when we say, as they did, "I love you in your mess."

Little Miss Something

When I was little, I was a big fan of the Little Miss books, so I was happy when someone tapped into this market and started making Little Miss t-shirts. The first one I bought was this one:

 I bought it somewhat ironically, or maybe just by faith, because I am not always the most cheerful person on the block. I also bought this one:

 

 Which is maybe a little more true. Ok a lot more true. I have realized lately that what I really need is one that says, "Little Miss Control Freak." I don't like the fact that I try so hard to control my world. In fact, I used to think that I was more of a recovering controlaholic, because there are ways I have learned to unclench, but God has made it clear to me that at a deeper level, the desire to control is still alive and well in me.

I think in some way we all like control. Because what is control but trying to be the gods of our own little worlds? And isn't that what sin is - a rage against God and His Lordship over us? We are born into war against God, and laying down our weapons in complete surrender is a long and continual process.

I saw this clearly with the playground bully. In Gina's world, other children wouldn't beat on mine. I saw this when, on vacation, our friend's daughter tripped and fell on some rocks, requiring 7 stitches, while under my care. In my world, that wouldn't happen. I see this when my dog continues to pee in the house, even though the self-proclaimed god of the house is displeased. Each time, I have had to wrestle with God, and He reminds me, "Ah, but I am God, and you are not, Gina."

I like what Anne Lamott says about this, "It helps to resign as the controller of your fate. All that energy we expend to keep things running right is not what keep things running right."

True words, but not so easy to do. Yet I'm encouraged by the very real truth that He is patient and gracious to show me these things in order that I could become a woman who truly has surrendered all in childlike trust. So when He gently reminds me that I am stomping around my world demanding my way, I hope to listen and confess and let Him have a little more of me.

And also, I need to find a "Little Miss Trusting" shirt.