Depression 4
Noticing Where God is Showing Up
When we first moved I intended the "Life in South Asia" section of this website to be more of a fun section where I would write about culture or what I was learning, how I was listening for God in this new place. But life happened. Transition happened. I didn't write as much at first because—well, uprooting a whole family to the other side of the world takes a lot of time. Then I felt I needed to lay down my writing for a while. Then intense depression happened and my writing became much more serious. I felt the freedom to pick my writing back up and a responsibility to share what I was going through. I have had some incredible connections with people that have said, "Thank you! I know I'm not alone because of what you have written."
When I first experienced anxiety 12 years ago, (well, I am coming to see I have always had tendencies towards anxiety but didn't have a name for it until I was 25 years old) I thought it was just circumstantial. Life changed and my anxiety or depression dissipated for me. But then it reared it's head again during our move to the Middle East, again two years ago, and most intensely in the last year. I now know that like Lauren Winer says in Still:
"As far back as I can remember, anxiety has been my close companion, having long ago taken up residence in the small, second-floor bedroom of the house that is my body. Sometimes my anxiety takes long naps. Sometimes it throws parties. But I don't imagine it will ever tire of this neighborhood and move out for good."
I feel like I'm past the worst of it this time around. I want to say I'm "all better," that I see fruit and new life everywhere. Not yet. Grace P. Cho put the perfect words to the season I am currently in today:
"He is never annoyed with the slowness of transformation but always delights in the intricate care of redeeming burned things. And He is not done with us in the midst of fallow seasons...He burns away the old with fire and cultivates the land for the new things He is doing in our lives, allowing light and water to reach down deep, awakening and breaking open the seeds that have laid dormant before to thrive in the soil He has made good. What will come is a mystery, and we gain nothing when we rush into seasons we’re not ready for. So sit with Him, rest with Him, watch Him do His good and holy work while the land still lies fallow."
I am learning to be okay with this fallow season, trusting I've gone through the fire and that new life will come but that I am still in process. I'm asking for help. I am spending more time reading and seeking silence, working my muscles until they ache and feeling stronger on my mat every day. Playing. Praying. Working. Waiting. I am looking at my kids. Stopping and really seeing them. I see such beauty in my children, see God at work so much in them and in me as I mother them. They are helping me find my way back to joy.
For a while, I said I lost prayer during this season of fire and wilderness. I am realizing I didn't after all. It just didn't look like a daily examen or a war room or a prayer list, however you've come to expect prayer to look. As I read over my journals over the past few months, I see them as prayer. As I walk down the street to the market and notice the unfurling of the Krishnachura leaves and take a deep breath and thank God, I know it is prayer too (more about that one later this week). I am seeing God in things I haven't in a long time. I am noticing. As I walked slowly to the market today I stopped to take several photos. I heard Him speaking. I listened. I prayed "God, give me eyes to see what you want me to see and show me what you want me to share with others." I felt a long still stirring in my soul to write it all down...
So, I am finally getting around to writing here in a way that is less structured (as opposed to my essays for places like SheLoves Magazine and The Mudroom). I'll post pictures of things that speak to me and moments of finding God in the noise of this crazy city. In everyday beauty. I may notice five things a week and write about them. I may not see anything that inspires me for a while. I'll just take it as it comes. I am asking God to open my eyes to see Him in this season. There are ways I can see Him in South Asia that I couldn't anywhere else on earth. And I don't want to miss them.
So, from the land that is the contradiction and meeting place of 700 river deltas and also the most crowded city on earth - I am listening with you. This is where God is showing up for me in South Asia.
Where is God showing up for you?
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Remembering I Can Overcome. For Sheloves Magazine.
In the middle of that moment with the cold seeping into joint and marrow, in what felt like an endless night, we couldn’t imagine being warm ever again. We had been hiking down the mountainside all day. The expansive view of the Ozarks still fresh in our memories, we descended into the absolute opposite landscape. My family and eight others had been hiking for four days already. Bone weary, hungry, and exhausted we stood in front of the mouth of a wild cave with our hearts beating loudly in our ears.
We walked into absolute darkness and total silence, overwhelmed with the experiences of the past few days and all the emotions they stirred inside of us. That stillness was harshly broken the moment we stepped out of the cave to find a downpour had begun in the valley. We quickly got to work, easily falling into the teamwork we had built. Those best at building shelters set to work with the tarps, finding the few places of flat ground to stay for the night. As soon as one shelter was set up just high enough for us to crouch under, those who had gathered whatever wood they could began stacking it for those of us with knives. Quick but methodical, we shaved off the soaked bark until we reached something inside that was dry enough to burn.
Hours later we stood huddled near the fire, arms around each other as much for warmth as to keep ourselves standing. Together we’d succeeded in building a fire in the least ideal conditions. We devoured the food prepared over it, grateful for both the warmth and the sustenance the flames had provided. We coughed as smoke gathered in our tiny shelter. We alternated between keeping warm and turning our faces outward to gasp for clean air.
At three in the morning, we wept together as we recalled the past few days. We had done things we never imagined ourselves capable of. We had seen such darkness in ourselves as we grappled for certainty in the wilderness. We glimpsed such light in each other as we banded together as family to carry one another when we didn’t believe we could make it. We felt the deepest cold imaginable as the rushing waters flooded the valley where we stood. We felt the warmth of peace as we sang hymns together and reminded each other that God gave us the strength to press on. Whenever I stare into the flickering glow of a fire, I remember that night. I remember what it feels like to know I can overcome.
In the middle of this moment with the numbness of depression sapping the energy from joint and marrow, in what feels like an endless night, I can’t imagine ever being warm again. I have been stumbling through the day and finally have a quiet house to myself. The expansive view of a new adventure on the horizon fills my memory. My family had been working towards our international move for years. Bone weary, alone, and exhausted I have descended into culture shock that I never saw coming. You prepare for it. You read about it. But you don’t think it won’t shake your whole world. Then it does...
Tiny Steps Towards Greatness. For the Mudroom.
"Therefore encourage one another and build one another up, just as you are doing." - 1 Thessalonians 1:5, ESV.
“You’re so brave,” she said admiringly as she slipped the receipt across the counter. I fought back the urge to laugh or cry, I wasn’t sure which. She saw me one side of me—the foreigner in her country, hopping onto the public buses that merely slowed a bit before one needed to jump off onto the cracking curb. In her eyes, there stood this NGO-worker leaving the familiar to serve the people of her country. It was something she didn’t dream she could do and she said as much.
She didn’t see me thirty minutes earlier, sitting in my quiet apartment before my family began to stir, fighting back the fear that was churning in my stomach like yesterday’s spicy fish curry refusing to go down quietly. She didn’t witness this formerly proudly independent woman trying to talk herself into just opening that door to face the world outside. She didn't see that version of me.
When I lived in my home country I had a weekly ritual. I would slip out of the house under the still dark sky and escape to a coffee shop to write. I wouldn’t emerge until the sun was rising high in the sky and I had explored the depths of my soul on the page. I would return home to my family just beginning their days while I was buzzing with caffeine and passion. I felt powerful, invincible.
When the sunlight hit my face that morning I sat straight up in bed reaching for my phone to check the time. I forgot how early the dawn comes here and I saw it is not yet six. I eased out of bed and got ready quickly only to then sit there staring at that menacing door. I’d barely left my house all week, hemmed in by culture shock and depression, a kind of fear and anxiety that were as unexplainable as they were unpredictable. After eight months in this South Asian Mega-city, I felt breakable, broken....
Are you in need of encouragement to take your next steps? Do you know someone who is? Join me at the mudroom as i share how the smallest steps lead us towards greatness.
The Messy Path to the Promised Land. For Sheloves Magazine.
People think life overseas is one big adventure. It’s not.
It’s still just life, lived out in an unfamiliar location. You quickly forget the exotic and get into mundane patterns of existence. The rains that flood the streets whenever there is a downpour aren’t interesting anymore, but just an obstacle that makes the kids’ bus two hours late coming home from school. You make the mistake once of trying to go out before Iftar and learn the hard way that you should stay home after four o’clock for the entire month of Ramadan to avoid the standstill traffic. You trudge down the same sidewalks and past the same half-erected buildings day in and day out because going much farther than your small section of the massive city drains the remaining energy that the sweltering heat hasn’t already taken from you.
Many days you stare at the same walls as you stay inside, too tired to battle it all. You look out over a sea of green you noticed as beautiful when you first came but the beauty is lost on you. You see the exotic looking banana trees but only to notice they have all grown down into cracking sidewalks, pushing their roots through the bricks constantly in need of repair. You may be able to see a small, luscious yard but it is behind the gated walls of one of the few verandas dotting the sea of high-rise apartments. Your territory has become concrete walls and barred windows, looking out over a section of the earth that feels very small despite its millions of inhabitants.
***
Maybe the view out your window looks very different than mine but I have the sneaking feeling you might have looked at it in the same way at some point. I have literally and figuratively felt trapped a lot in the last few months. Our tiny space inside the vast city we inhabit has felt like it is closing in on me. My legs long for spaces to stretch out, my heart yearns for a place to allow my children to run. My soul too longs for room, for wider prayers and for someone to hold space for me.
I’ve had the joy of a few intimate friendships that have deepened over time and which fueled my life and kept me going. In their absence, I feel like the grinch whose heart has shrunk a few sizes. My mood, energy level, and prayer life all are evidence of a heart and soul that feels only the restrictions on my life and doesn’t see the beauty anymore.
The counselor I have been talking to over email tells me I am right on schedule, a textbook case of culture shock and that these feelings are normal. They don’t feel normal. They feel stifling and overwhelming with a side of shame. I have always been a proponent of asking for help when you need it. But it still took me weeks after I received the counselors email address to actually reach out to her. Feeling completely exposed in front of a stranger is a new place for me, an uncomfortable and messy one. A necessary one...
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