What I'm learning outside of class...

Okay. So here’s some straight-talk — the vulnerable, confessional kind that I’ll feel itchy about when I hit “post” :)…

I’ve been here for almost a month already! How very good these weeks have been, so full of joy, new ideas to consider, digest, and operate from, but whelming in task-volume, weighty in function, and wearying in sheer speed.

The first two weeks of classes found me ecstatic with learning but drowning in spite of my efforts to juggle everything… I’d underestimated the combination of these two dense courses, an on-campus job every evening, and my work with Wycliffe to be in touch with and update partners and generally prepare for my future work on the field in all the non-academic ways... My mind had been repeatedly boxing with the time-limitations I’d come crashing into, and the four hours of sleep a night were spiraling quickly into frazzlement (surely, this is a word!)!

By the end of the first week, God had my undivided attention, as I pushed to seek Him on “how to do all of this—how to prepare well, with devotion and gusto, and still be sane?!”  How odd that I wasn’t prepared for the answer, still…..

               —This missionary thing… my goodness, it takes so much getting used to, so much rewriting of our ingrained American culture and instincts. As I sought God’s wisdom in my frustration, He began to reiterate the shift He’s been executing in my life – absolute plate tectonics – voluntary No Man’s Land…  His whispered reply was:

“I brought you here to study, to learn from community and to prepare academically. You added work, dearone, you wanted to plan for every grocery and display financial wisdom in advance, but you are no longer living that life. This new life of yours involves trusting you will be fed, praying when you have a need, and learning to ask; not striving on the side in something I haven’t appointed for you to focus on right now… It is time, Little One.”

This correction is difficult.

It moves me from something I know to be good (working to provide for ourselves) to something unknown, invisible, something that feels dangling to us “responsible folk”… And I’ve been stepping into living on the support of the Church and the community, family, and friends that are permitting and enabling me to be one of their ambassadors of Christ, but with training wheels until now. I hadn’t even realized that I hadn’t fully let go; that I was clutching a little at my part-time work that made this “a little less scary”.

And then, Messiah turns up the heat of preparation, mercifully allows me to come to the place of abandon with my stubborn heart on its own, and in my shaky exertion, once again shows me where I’ve been holding on to things that are good, but are just not for now.

And the exceptional part is this——immediately after bringing me to this realization, and after I wrote to my supervisors to discuss stepping down from this job (though no one else was told of my need or struggle!), I received, in incremental notifications, the announcement that two of my current financial partners were increasing their support, and that there were two new one-time gifts coming in from others this month… This support equaled the amount of income needed for the rest of June that I would be walking away from by leaving the job!…  His goodness—ahh!!—how silly that we worry at all! But I am learning…

SO, if you think of it, keep praying for this journey for me, and I for you, that we might be so wrapped up in Him that what’s for now can be nimbly redirected at a moment as He keeps us engulfed in His voice, His presence, and His perfectly unhurried unfoldings, as we wait to see how He will provide each next time…

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Mmm,.. So this song and video are beautiful and I wanted to share it, whether this is ever seen by anyone or not.

...And then, of course, there is the hot-coals part of my heart that is simmering and wants to update here so badly... to be able to write about this last year and where I am right now, but knows that this is a loaded, large task... So pray that I can, and know that I will try in the next bit of time to fill in some of the loveliness and turbulence of these anchored, frenzied, quiet months.

Until then, may this tidbit remind you that I love you, family and friends that still peek here~
with all my heart,
mon

October 6, 2008 - Compost piles, goose flesh, and wanting

Putzing about and listening to William Fitzsimmons…somber, almost painfully candid singer/songwriter, and there is a lingering feeling of something that I can’t put my finger on..

And that seems to happen a lot lately… I find that I undulate between 1) grappling with not being conscious enough of what I feel and 2) feeling everything, but differently than I used to. I find that lately little things wreck me,.. that I can be sitting in a coffee shop catching up on my friend’s blog, and tears just drip out for things I’m reading, I brush past cloth that was given to me in a country I love deeply or I drive and listen to something that simply raises bumps all over the surface of my skin…makes them ripple out of nothing—ex-ni-he-lo—like they were always there… I’m not used to responses being so visceral, so wordless, unnamable…

I’ve been moving, and something about packing one place to turn it into another… undoing, deconstructing one era to build a new one; and maybe that’s a dramatic way of putting it, but somehow this time I don’t think it is. I was pulling apart a lovely apartment, a hobbit-home abode, ridiculous arched walls, where the bedroom was the living room was the foyer, and where the kitchen was the closet was the bathroom :), and everything I’d bought was designed to contain something else. Years of me bloomed there and some of me retracted there, and then there was the knowing that it was time to go. And now as I have been unpacking, I find I’m pulling out remnants and pieces of everything, and I am filled with nostalgia for things that are larger than me and that I may not have experienced yet.

One of my new roommates and I were talking this afternoon, and she mentioned the Creation… how first, for several days of the-seven-day-beginning-of-everything, God separated things: earth from water, darkness from light, one kind of expanse from another—stretching long and ruddy—bursting out blackness that couldn’t know itself yet. And then he filled it. Birds, trees, men, LIFE for the pulled matter-from-matter. But after. After separation, after movement. Then filling with all the things that are supposed to be there, in that place, then.

May it be so.


Posted on 6 October 2008 at 12:05 AM Comments (0)