2012 - In Memoriam

Just a handful, not even a full-fingered hand, of posts punctuated 2012, and yet it has been one of the most remarkable of my life... The last few hours of 2012 tip-toed out last night, but I was left with gratitude as I listened to the patter. I stand baffled at the sheer speed of this last year, but more by the things I don't know how to explain about it.

A year ago in December, God set a tumble of miraculous movement in motion (explained HERE, if you missed it), and in that post I mentioned the impression I had that 2012's name for me was The Year of the Lord's Favor. This might have sounded pretentious in so many ways, but my goodness this past year spilled over with kindness and generosity that I have earned in no way. Over and over and over again, there has been a constant stream of things my soul couldn't have thought to ask for, and a joy-rush towards the work God formed me for. Where pain and waiting were my strong, patient teachers for the last few, warmth and unmerited awesomeness have guided this year. And so, though it is less conventional than listing things at Thanksgiving time, here is my heart's attempt—a typed register of a few things that should not stay unsaid, an account of goodness that must be spoken.

I am thankful:

• For my parents and siblings!—My parents and my sister and brother-in-law have a Masters in sacrifice with a Concentration in making you feel loved instead of needy. They have all made room in their homes for me, as we're all adjusting to the nearness of my move to Papua New Guinea (12 months!), and it has had such an impact on me.  Beyond this, I am so very blessed by the friendship of my siblings... how all three of them are truthful mirrors, verbal, kind, honest, and playful. They chip the edges off my too-serious, and comfort me in my too-sensitive. I am surrounded by love, and have never felt the weight of it as keenly as I do now that there is a timeline until I'm on the other side of the world for a few years.
• For getting to use my passport this year! I was blessed to spend time globe-trotting with Krissy and Chris, to hop into Canadian life for three months, and to take a train down the West Coast when I left Canada to spend time with dearones in San Francisco! 

• For a church family I am always blessed to be near, where there are artists that give of themselves, where worship is born of what God is doing among these people, where community is valued above 'having everything figured out', and where I'm challenged 

• For the many new babies in my life this year, and friends that welcome me into Auntishness with their children!!!
• For getting to go to Wycliffe's headquarters last February, and again in October for training. Both of these trips shifted and impacted huge decisions, and were such a submersion tank of prayer, preparation, and counsel

  

• For time this summer (while I was at school in Vancouver) with my uncle that lives there. We got to know each other as adults now, and I am moved by his tender heart and funny stories
• For all the students, friends, and soon-to-be-colleagues that I spent the whole summer with at CanIL! It was an incredible experience, to be surrounded by people that are passionate about Linguistics, Christ, and the need for Bible Translation, (not to mention the part where British Columbia took my breath away!) Lord willing, I will see them again in 2013 for one more class~

• For Allison and the Thursday Girls—You are friends of the highest caliber, and I will always, always, always be grateful for these years in Alli's dining room, one night a week, unmasking the world, laughing, baring our hearts, and eating delectables. 
• For a job that has been more than a job and people that have been more than co-workers

• For the interest, care and concern that I have been shown as I step into this role of missionary.. for the encouragement and prayer warriors in my life, and the prayer and financial team that is beginning to form.
• For good health(!!)--I have been in a pretty steady remission from Ulcerative Colitis for more than 2 years, and despite symptoms being a little rockier during grad. school this summer, I have been allowed to begin lowering doses of maintenance meds. This was something I dreamed of getting to do before heading to PNG next year!
  
  And most impactful to me,

• the overwhelming grace that I have been treated with this year. In so many ways, I have had nothing to offer. In the past, desert places were utilized to plant me firmly in the understanding that all I have sometimes is the will to choose obedience——when sickness comes, when hardship shakes what our culture tells us we're entitled to, all we have are the ways we respond, and this can bring God glory even when we have or are nothing else. But being stripped down in this way (in strength, health, time, finances), and needing to depend on others, has also at times left me feeling utterly indebted to kindnesses I can never repay (or has made me respond as an awkward recipient). But God is turning this on its head for me—reminding me that it's all His, and that He will do what He wants with it, that He delights to surprise us, and that His methods of getting us to where He wants us (and ultimately, of redeeming  e v e r y t h i n g) are unpredictable, joyous, and almost always communal and relational. He has been revealing pride for what it really is in me, and showing me that this will need to go; that His plan has always been about interdependence and goodness that we can't earn.
  This grace and generosity took many forms this year, (a spontaneously provided airplane ticket to visit my potential school last January, a vacation with 2 of my siblings gifted to me with a loving desire to spend time together in the face of us finding out I have 1 year left before moving to Papua New Guinea, an extension on a paper that came with so much more encouragement and edification than I could have guessed, dear friends providing the funds for Wycliffe's Equip Training and others paying the full conclusion of school loans that were keeping me from the mission field).. and this has sprung fertile humility. I have been shown so much faith by others in what God has been working out in me, and that faith and the active support of it moves my heart beyond words that I will ever have access to.

My brothers and sister and I! - Christmas 2012

Repairing the ruin in the year of favor

I finally know “what this year is to be called”…
A beautiful friend of mine has been whispering for months, “ask God what this year is about for you… He will give you a word to focus it in, a name to call it. He wants to narrow in and teach you, show you something specific.”

Already, just the 2^nd month in, and this has been an incredible year of blessing, of vision being sharpened and light spilling all over it. I feel God undergirding it—undergirding me—with Isaiah 61, which my ESV titles “The Year of the Lord’s Favor”… and so it is.

I want to come in the next few days and fill you in on a whole bunch of monumental boulder-movings that have occurred in the last few weeks for me, but in case you read this blog and you aren’t at my church where this was already circulated, I wanted to post this initial update and then go from there:


Notes from a Glad Ledge

I can almost feel my toes curling tight over the edge of the precipice; a jumpy anticipation poised in my spirit’s heels, it’s tummy full of butterflies, and elation burst-fisting its way out of the fortress of waiting I’ve lived in for years… 

I wish I could show you the million little moments that have led to this cliff, but this is the story of some of them, so that you will understand the beauty behind it when you see me hurtle off its height—

Ten years ago I “accidentally” took a Linguistics class.
God had begun nipping and tugging at small fibers of my heart, telling me I wasn’t for this place and that he was fashioning my compassion and preparing it to pour out into other cultures all the days of the rest of my life. As I went through college I felt the conflict of “wisdom” to choose studies that would lead to a job, and a job that would be a livelihood, but as I kept trying to choose ways to do this, God would wreck my heart with images of orphans, cultures I’d learn of that were flanked by oppression, and blatant demonstrations of the fact that He’d wired me to find no joy in things but to hunger to reach into people’s stories and do life with them.

At the same time that He slowly revealed this burning call to missions, I stumbled into this most-odd class that had its students playing scrabble with the International Phonetic Alphabet and learning concepts about how languages all over the world work. Almost every student with me found it to be the most boring, absurd class they’d ever taken, but I was lit up and intrigued! Over the course of the next year, I began looking into ways to combine these passions, which eventually led me to Bible Translation… As I started to research how God could use something like linguistics on the mission field, I found out that there are still about 340 million people that have no portion of the Bible accessible to them in their mother tongue—that’s more than 2,000 possible languages left.

I found this utterly overwhelming.

I have since witnessed deep caverns of darkness in people’s lives, footholds, sorrows, staggering lack where God’s heart longs to fill in and heal—but to imagine these millions of people with no Living Word, with no access to the Words, Spirit, and Breath that swoop in to redeem all brokenness—this felt like too much. I knew that whatever manner of loneliness I have ever felt in this life, I have always had a book of shelter—Words that save me, have loved me, have torn me out of sorrow and into a Kingdom that seeks to rescue. But so many don’t have it. This knowledge licked at all the tugged fibers like whipping flames, and I felt God’s purpose in me solidify: you are to fight for Me this way.

So I set to it—I took a trip to Ghana in ’04 with Wycliffe Bible Translators, and spent a summer exploring how one approaches the idea of translating God’s Word and how many different roles there are in that process. I met the most incredible missionaries, witnessed moonlight literacy meetings in the mountain village of Gekrong, and watched God expand my heart and shatter my worldview. In the weeks that I spent observing the work and seeking God’s voice on these new hopes, Christ spoke such confirmation and assurance into my being that I came home fiercely excited. I thought that I would just quickly work off my undergrad school loans and then launch into the 1-2 years of Linguistic training I would need to be ready to head to the mission field—

Eight fascinating years have plodded past instead, though.
I look back on that time and the care God put into planting certainty into my heart and can’t help but laugh at how much He knew I’d need that! I tumbled into working several jobs, took certification classes and became a teacher, walked with my family through some heartbreaking crises, and wrestled through a long, sharp season of sickness. Journal after journal from the last few years were slowly filled with passionate out-cries, scribbled reminders of what God told me ‘on the mountain top’, and jotted down prophecies and prayers that I received from the Body and the people in my homegroups.

Each year I would ask and pray “is this the one?”, and always He would whisper that the Kingdom is here, and the Kingdom is coming—now/not yet, my love—You are already on the mission field, and every bit of now is the training. I, Myself, am cultivating in you what you will need for this task.

 As the years wore on, and especially inside the one of sickness, people began to suggest other goals, saying that I would need to stay where doctor’s were easily accessible, and that surely I would be happier accepting that circumstances were different now and that maybe I’d misunderstood God’s will. Medical bills were added onto the stack, and although the determined fire for what God had written on me wouldn’t wane, I shoved up my sleeves, understanding that it would be years more than the eight that have already passed before I would work the last of the debt down now.
Carefully, painstakingly, God ushered dependence into me, humility that has bent wide His vision for the impossible to be completed. Slowly I submitted my expectations and timeline and begged that God teach me to be where He has me well, and to trust that He would make it bullhorn-clear when it was time to move forward.

This past year, in August, the “Deeper into Community” series broke my heart again, and I found God stirring my waiting up with the “Your Calling Takes Us Deeper” sermon. In September, I sat in the sanctuary afterwards and shivered as I felt God whisper “it’s coming”, and then grabbed at my journal so I would keep that moment, writing it down as the physical goose-bumps dissolved back into normal skin.  In October God asked me to give up the sickened sorrow that I was carrying from my hope deferred, and November poked at my held-breath when we tumbled into speaking of Rescue each week and mingled our post-it notes together on the curved sanctuary wall—all our dreams stated beside one another, interconnected.

By the end of the year, I sent a long email to the Wycliffe recruiter that I’ve spoken with for years. I updated her on the debt again and explained that I was in another one of those weeks where my soul tingled and God was keeping me up at night with dreams—She sent a note back with a prayer and signed off with “LORD MOVE THE BLOCKADE”. Three days later I got a phone call.

One of my dearest friends was on the other end of the line saying, “Monica, are you sitting? We have something to tell you.”

And this brings me back to that cliff that I mentioned—

Through the obedience and sheer generosity of other believers, God is moving the blockade. With a single swipe—out of my hands, more than I could ask for, more than I can swallow without fits of joyful laughter—God has suddenly led a couple to completely wipe out the last of my school debt!
In quick gusts of the last month, so many miracle-nudges have been set in motion, and now it looks like I may be moving this summer to one of the three training-program locations to get equipped for this mission.

So I dance on this brink with you, beside you, sweetly terrified, our whole souls thrumming to the shift God’s calling our Body of believers to—church planting, adoption, foster care, feeding the poor—His fingers, His ears, His arms brought to His waiting people, and also His mouth in their language to feed their hearts. And as we all hurtle off these peaks, I hear Him comforting me… every one of these cliffs is in the vast Land called Married (Isaiah 62); none of you are hurtling alone, and whatever distance is coming, for a long or short time, you belong to one another—I am making you into each others’ netting.

June 6, 2009 - News~ [North Dakota!]

Precious, precious family and friends~

Please forgive any presumptuousness of a mass-email, but time has slipped by me again, and as I find myself on the brink of something I’m really excited about, the loudest emotion cutting its way through my busyness keeps being a throbbing sense of wanting to tell you all about it—So, if you’re reading this, please know you’re special to me; that you’re either a part of my family by blood and beautiful inheritance, or part of my Body at Vineyard, or one of the dear friends I’ve made as a student or as a teacher or as a traveler—all journeys anyway—and it is for all of these reasons that you’re on this list. Also, I am so sorry I didn’t get this out sooner, and if you’ve already been told some or all of this by me, be patient with my impulsive enthusiasm :)~

Two major events are beginning/changing for me, and I have longed to have you “in on it” for the few weeks that I’ve known:

Five years ago I spent a summer in Ghana, West Africa with Wycliffe Bible Translators, praying and testing out a burning heart. It was a sweet time of confirmations, joy-heat and heart-spurs, and all the time since then has been a meandering journey of soul sifting, patience, and preparation. In these years, God has had to realign my compassion to first identify with Him before any personal will to help another, and has deepened the ardor I’d grown for the concept of bringing His words to cultures of people that have no access to it in the language they most understand [in 2008, there were still 2,393 languages without any part of the Bible]. For many of these cultures, their language is still only oral, and there is a thirst for the development of an alphabet in their tongue and literacy in their village. This vision tugs my compassion, my knowledge (of the darkness I experience without Christ’s words as my haven and tower), and my hope (in God’s use of our silly gifts and hobbies to further His Kingdom).

What I mean to share though is that I get to begin training this summer!~ Where there were only 3 schools I could find that offer both the Linguistics and Biblical Exegesis parts together, each of these schools’ schedules require me to quit my job and to move across country—both things that are not yet financially wise for me, if I am to take responsibility for my school debt and to pay everything off before my leaving and needing support ever enter this missions-equation. In fear and twisty hope, I started applying to programs for this fall anyway, and asked God to reveal how I could make this work—ha!—my foolish forcing~ Instead, spring break brought me time to speak to people from Wycliffe and the schools, and opened a new door to begin my first semester of courses now, in an intensive 2-month semester at a school in North Dakota…then return in the fall to teach another year. As everything has fallen in place swiftly, my parents, too, have been the most gracious encouragers, and came alongside me to pray and figure out the practical side—Four weeks ago, I moved back in to their home, and with this gift, I can be done with all college and car debt within a little over a year and truly free to finish training and be assigned to a language project (!!).

The other change I will come home to is that my county has had to shift around a lot of their teachers due to budget changes and a hiring freeze, and I am one of the surplussed teachers, so I will be teaching at an elementary school for next year instead of Sprayberry~ This will be a new adventure for me as well, and I figured with all of the paragraphs I was sending your way, I could throw this in as well :). I have no experience with Elementary Special Ed. yet, but have also come to know that I finally trust God, and will not resist this change, but please pray for my capacity to learn to teach and love these new kids well. SO much new learning for me…

I know this is long now; but I think this is the catch-up :). I get on a plane in just a few hours now…

I love you and so deeply appreciate that no matter how verbose and lengthy this is, or even whether we share the beliefs that are catalyst to my going, there was enough confidence in me of your care and place in my life that I knew I could send it… So PLEASE, keep me this summer (by email or facebook, or blog since I don’t know that each of you want blubbering emails from me often :), I won’t inundate you, but rather, will post here) Hope you sleep so well, and that I hear from you soon, truly.
With love, Monica

Posted on 6 June 2009 at 2:14 AM Comments (0)

March 6, 2009 - Another Experiment

So.. it's one in the morning, and I have just finished an "assignment" that is technically an assignment for my students, but as I think I've mentioned on here before, with creative writing that we ask them to read aloud to the class, my co-teacher and I have promised that we will always write on the topic as well, and come prepared to share what we've written, so it is not just them under a spot-light that's ravaging their confidence, but also us in all our nerdy, adult vulnerability..

It is once again during our unit on the novel The House on Mango Street; just a wonderful little book to teach lyrical/poetic prose with, and to give freshmen a heaving dose of literary devices... So we ask them to write a few vignettes in the style of the author (Sandra Cisneros) and this week's needed to be a treatise on or vivid memory of music in their life.

And here is the bleary teacher's-edition of the mimic-assignment:


There is a silken web that winds itself in and around and under me—shot up my veins like an internal tree running roots down my arms through my throat—the glue between a million little polaroids. It is notes, songs, snatches of harmonies that wind gnarly vines around soul and set it free from body. If travel has been the demolisher of my walls, music was what kept me in one piece during the glorious fall-out. It is the haze that my breath blew on the windows of a boxcar as the train whirred onward to somewhere new; dissonant chords rolling off Thom Yorke's tongue, sent to light the fire in my belly—baby’s got the bends—and so did I… pressurized, and about to burst.

It is the hours spent on a piece of carpet, with a long-adored brother, eyes closed, listening while eternity drips slow to the layers in an album—Innocence Mission—and my heart on fire—O happy, O happy, the end, the end, the end—she says. Because music is like water, whirling around in ringlets of change, lilting through and welding together chapters of life to form a whole. Because it is only music, and light, and water and God that transcend the gaps and gutters that the rest of life digs deep.

It is the wild-hearted drum-circle, spontaneously combusting after the Easter service at my church, and docks that shook with the voices of youth camp kids, cluttered together to join and surpass the worshiping toads. It is the funereal dance around the blazing fire, one white-hot whisper, so much life found in that Ghanaian celebration at another man’s death.

And maybe then we are like notes. Each bobbing along, suspended at times, meeting others to form chords—some combinations disastrous, clashing gongs, but unrelentingly powerful—and others the sweet tilt of harmony, trills in form of relationship. Our own music that breaks wide the marching lines of time and leaves something wispy on a page to mark the crescendo.

Posted on 6 March 2009 at 1:06 AM Comments (1)