Change 17
Witnesses to Our Rebirths. For the Mudroom.
Now we see things imperfectly, like puzzling reflections in a mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely. -1 Corinthians 13:12, NLT
I don’t recognize her anymore. Her short hair swoops across her forehead and her smile looks easy. She appears certain about her place in the world, about what lies ahead.
In the photo taken a year ago, she blends into her family. Their matching black shirts and denim say they are a unit, one. She’s like a puzzle piece that has always fit in a certain place, next to them.
When I look in the mirror now I see a different picture. My short hair was too hard to manage in the South Asian humidity so it has been growing out, now twisted in a little bun at the base of my neck. A headband has become a permanent fixture over what is too unruly. My cheeks are less full, the more natural diet I eat these days and the miles I walk around this massive city erasing some of the pounds I put on in the past few years. Any clothes I brought with me in our move stay relegated to the early morning hours before anyone might visit our house. After that I wear local clothes, a scarf draped across my chest.
I stand alone with sad eyes, a piece without a puzzle. I’m only part of a picture that once existed. I’m not her anymore. I’ve been reborn as someone else in this place.
I don’t recognize her anymore. Her eyes were hard and her mind was closed. She saw the world in white. She didn’t know a world of diversity existed out there. She saw the world in black. There was the truth and everything else, and she was to convince others of the right way.
In the photo taken twenty years ago, she stood opposed to her family (and a lot of other people). Her heart was in the right place but her methods were all wrong. She wanted to love but she didn’t know how.
When I look in the mirror now I see a different picture....
do you notice the transformatins that have taken place in you, that are taking place every day? today i am over at the mudroom looking back (and forward) at the pictures that are the witnesses to my rebirths and how necessary change is to growth. join me?
Presence is the Goal
For a moment, as the sunlight filters through our red paisley curtains casting a warm glow across the tile floor, I forget. It’s just a split second though before the sounds of the city pierce the morning and I am plunged into the day ahead. I remember that I am simultaneously home and 8000 miles from home.
We’ve lived in South Asia four months now and our flat has a warmth to it that feels like a haven when we walk in from the crowded streets. It is home. But the teeming masses outside our door, the culture that surrounds us, and the language that engulfs us—it all still feels so far away. Our brains live on overdrive, trying to process all the newness and the words we know we have heard before but can’t place. Studying a complex and hauntingly beautiful language simply makes me tired…all the time.
For the first few months, I held onto everything I could because I’d let go of so much already—frequent calls to family and friends, TV, anything familiar. And I especially wanted to keep up my blog and writing commitments. It was my tie to home, to who I had been and wanted to still be. A couple months into full-time school there was a tugging at the back of my heart that I didn’t want to face. I was stress and overwhelmed. Instead of finding joy in what awaited me in the day ahead just managing normal life felt daunting. Writing deadlines on top of that felt like torture.
The tug wouldn’t go away. I knew what I needed to do. I needed to let go of something tethering me to a place that I wanted to be but was no longer. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I spent the last three years building my passion for writing into something that defined me. For a long time, I didn’t dare call myself a “real writer.” Each published piece gave me more confidence. Seeing my name on essays published in several books, I finally boldly claimed the title author, writer, editor. It is my writing that opened the doors for us to move to this particular job overseas and I will be working in communications down the road once we get some grasp on language. But it’s my personal writing, the places I show up every month and the communities I love (Mudroom, SheLoves, Ready Magazine, Redbud Writer’s Guild) that I didn’t want to loosen my grasp on.
In the middle of a particularly low week when I could barely lift my eyes to heaven, one of those online communities I love posted this blessing by Jan Richardson:
That each step
may be a shedding.
That you will let yourself
become lost.
That when it looks
like you’re going backwards
you may be making progress.
That progress is not the goal anyway,
but presence
to the feel of the path on your skin,
to the way it reshapes you
in each place it makes contact,
to the way you cannot see it
until the moment you have stepped out.
Each word was a knife to my heart and a salve to the same wound. Through the tears I typed an email to all my editors and told them I need to take a step back for right now. It feels like a little death, letting go of my writing even for a time. It may be for a couple months. It may need to be longer. It’s another thing that I worked hard to build that I am tearing back down, like the home we sold, the people we left behind. It makes me feel so lost.
But maybe being lost isn’t such a bad thing. Perhaps this shedding of parts of myself is exactly what I need right now, to be fully dependant on God for who I am and what gives me worth. Not deadlines. Not readers. Not even the joy I get from telling stories. For right now, I need to just be present where I am and being obedient to just this one day. Maybe I need to live the story for a while before I have the space to write it.
You may not see my words in the usual places over the next few months. It feels like going backward. I have to believe it isn’t though, that it is progress to wherever it is God wants to take me…and you next. So thank you for showing up, for reading my words. I hope you will stick around and this conversation will continue soon. It will shift and change. Life always does.
But when you are feeling lost, maybe these words that spoke to me will be a comfort to you too. Know that you may not feel like you are accomplishing anything. But if presence is the goal, then be where you are. Be fully there and believe that someday…maybe not soon, maybe not when you expect it…but someday, you’ll step out into something new to realize God was accomplishing something great in you.
Let It All In. For Sheloves Magazine.
Shut tight, it was closed against the outside world.
It wasn’t so much to keep out that which offended
though I would have said that was the intention back then.
The reason was much more that I didn’t trust myself,
didn’t know how to stay on the straight and narrow.
I was so afraid of making the wrong choice,
of not being enough to earn the acceptance I so desperately craved.
You’d yell and say I was close-minded,
that I couldn’t see anything outside of the safe little world I’d created.
It wasn’t my mind that snapped shut in those early years of faith though;
It was my heart.
I couldn’t open it to anything that threatened to destroy what I’d found.
If I just kept my head down and my eyes straight ahead,
maybe I’d earn this love I ran towards with all my striving.
The cracks were small at first, just tiny rays of light shining through.
It was moment stopping to cross myself at the altar with tentative hands.
Could I be contemplative and contemporary at the same time?
It was a piping hot cup of green tea and silence.
Was it okay for me to be here with you, learning about meditation?
Fissures followed, all I’d built being torn down around me.
The walls tumbled down and I could finally see…
Until We Are All Free. For Sheloves Magazine.
There’s been this growing sentiment in the world of social media and online writing over the past couple years. There is a feeling that whether we speak up or are silent, either way is losing. If we are vocal about an issue outside of our social context we risk being called out for a “white savoir complex” or jumping on the social justice bandwagon. If we are don’t speak up about a growing injustice in our country, then we are called careless and complicit in our silence.
Solidarity is a hard line to walk in today’s world. Do words on social media really mean we are standing with another anyway? They are just words, so easy to toss up on a screen without much effect to our lives. On the other hand, there are those that call us to speak up for them with the influence we have and there is a feeling we have to tread lightly, afraid to bring down ridicule, scared into silence. I think of a friend who has been the loving hands of Jesus to a local refugee community and who recently felt afraid to let her all-white community know of her passion.
Issues of justice weigh heavily on my heart and I’ve struggled to know how to use my words and my life to answer God’s call to be a peacemaker. Slavery, oppression of whole people groups, the needs of refugees—these things are more than token issues to me. I have lived in places where my neighbors live these realities, put myself in the way of these issues so that they had a face.
I have wrapped my arms around a beautiful South Asian child whose face beamed with joy despite his disability and homelessness. When I asked about him later I couldn’t even name the grief that washed over me when my friends told me he was missing, likely sold into slavery bringing a good price as a deaf beggar.
My heart has ached over the anxiety in my new friend’s eyes as I tried to teach her to make chocolate chip cookies. Everything in an American kitchen was foreign to her. She finally had to leave the room because, between the language barrier and not understanding anything in her new country, she was just too overwhelmed.
Yet I, too, have been afraid to speak out sometimes.
More and more I am convicted about the way solidarity is more than words, how we need to act on the needs we see. We can’t say we love if we hoard the cup of water we have access to while our neighbor goes thirsty. But we also can’t say we love if we don’t use our voices to speak truth into the dark places where justice is denied. Standing with someone means using our hands and our voices to support them. Solidarity means both speaking and acting.
One of my favorite quotes when I speak to groups about the slavery I have seen in South Asia and the ways we can stand in solidarity with those who are denied their basic human rights is, “We are none of us free if we are not all free.” An American poet named Emma Lazarus wrote these words. You’ve probably never heard her name though I guarantee almost all Americans, and many around the world know these words of her most famous sonnet, The New Colossus:
Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…
I hadn’t heard of her until, wanting to attribute the quote to the right person in a presentation I was making, I looked up who said it and started reading about Emma Lazarus. I couldn’t stop...
Plunging Into the Unknown. For Sheloves Magazine.
He fought the urge to close his eyes and shut out the fear rising up in his chest. The salty smell of the sea overtook his senses as the chill hit his waist. The growing sound of the waves drowned out the gasps of the people watching in amazement. His own heartbeat roared in his ears as the water reached his shoulders. He held onto the promise that was his lifeline.
They had come this far, seen the hand of God leading them at every step. He remembered the blood-red Nile, the cries in the night when they huddled in their homes holding their own firstborn sons like their very grips on them would protect them. He looked back one last time at the thousands on the banks, watching him with wide eyes. He couldn’t see a way through the sea yet but the Miracle Worker who brought them here said to go. So, Nashon breathed one last deep breath before plunging headlong into the unknown.
***
I’ve been submerging myself in the words of Exodus these days, after several gentle nudges from God. A friend would mention stepping into the Red Sea before it parted as encouragement to keep the faith that all of the unknown in our lives right now is leading to a chance at greater obedience. The haunting words of an old Sara Groves song kept coming up in the shuffle of my playlist … “I’m caught between the promise and the things I know.” So, I returned to the old familiar stories of the Children of Israel whose entire lives were changing with every step they took towards the sea and all that lay beyond it.
In searching for what God was trying to show me, I read about Nashon for the first time. His name is one of those I have glossed over a dozen times in the Bible, one in a long list of names that have a place in God’s story that we only glimpse in passing. Nashon was brother-in-law to Aaron, one of the leaders of the tribe of Judah that left Egypt for the promise of God waiting beyond the sea. Mentioned again in the genealogy of Jesus in the New Testament, we learn that he was exactly halfway in the direct line from Judah and King David.
It is in the Midrash, the ancient Jewish commentary on the Hebrew scriptures, that we find the rest of Nashon’s story...
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