Mourning a path and gardening willingness

This is the week I was supposed to move to Papua New Guinea. ..Was supposed to get on a plane and leave everything behind but the relationships sending me, all my family and friends tethering me with love to this place. ..Was supposed to fly in multiple stages across datelines and timezones to a mountainous land throbbing from the ground with groans of longing for the Word in their languages...

I feel it pulse under my skin, everything put on hold, a twelve-year process prolonged into waiting once again.

And there is deep sadness in that, sorrow that some weakness in my physical body could explode into such severity now, and delay me from this work that I have felt my Lord tug at me about for more than half my years. Maybe it’s the steroids, but I find myself weeping often now, grasping to grieve for the scariness that November in the hospital was, for the confusion caused by getting so close to launching into Language Survey and then hearing God’s clear “No, still not yet.”

But that’s not quite it, maybe not quite true enough. I find myself grieving for the ifs. It’s too soon to know, but I find my soul reaching for answers about what things can be like once I’m in remission again——will it be possible to be a surveyor still, or will I need to do less physical roles in the Bible translation process? Will the Third World ever open up as an option again, or will these medicines (immuno-suppressants) be God’s tools of redirection, bringing me to work in a country I didn’t expect?  If it can no longer be Papua New Guinea, why did God spend all that time moving me in that direction, researching these people and their languages, investing in this Survey team, and creating a passion in me for the work He is doing there?——the questions can go on an on, but even they only scratch the surface, as it's more complicated than that. I can SEE God weaving together intricate stories that require more complexity, more ambiguity and waiting on Him than I'm comfortable with, but His results are always better than I can dream up, and the answers to those questions aren't the point..

Maybe more than this, then, I am grieving for how I can be so fully sold, so completely the property of my Jesus, and then still find willfulness in me that—in a tiny corner of my most honest and bare soul—hopes for my vision of things, my understanding, more than I fling myself at His feet to do whatever He pleases. Because He is most concerned with the conversation. There is no doubt that He will win. There is no doubt that all will hear, and He is mobilizing everyone who is willing to form the lines that will march forward with His healing, His breath, His salvation for every tribe and tongue. But more than just this end result, He uses every sorrow, every delay, every fog-enshrouded question mark, tear, and crumple to draw us and everyone around us into His lap, and to cultivate in us every good thing that cannot be there without whatever furnace He has brought us to. His sovereignty demands that I redefine everything—that if He allows it, that I should then call it Good, and open up my whole being to being drenched by that fire so we can continue on our way, refined and sharpened, and not consumed (Isaiah 43:2). He is fiercely committed to exacting every small rebirth of ferocious trust in us that will come from changing our plans, that will come from a million little deaths during our lifetimes, a million little lettings-go, even when He authored the direction of those plans in the first place (John 12:24). He loves me enough to forge an evermore iron-clad trust even when that process hurts.

So this week I grieve with my ribcage cracked open. I unlock that chamber so alter-flames can lick this heart with fiery tongues, can lap up disappointment and fear of loss, can dress every physical wound and every veins’ ache, can let in every EXTRAVAGANT joy that God has placed in my life in this season and every need that is before me right here, remembering that trusting Him is worth immeasurably more to Him than ministering for Him in any particular way. One will ALWAYS lead to the other (trust and love leading to ministry and worship), but He will zealously continue refining my trust until I am a closely-knit-to-Him shadow, turning on a dime, pouring Him out in the most unexpected ways and places, following His dancing Image more closely and with more abandon than I did before. Amen.

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.

The glistening new one

There was a day last year (early 2009) when I drove myself up to Berry for a visit. It was a glorious, sunny afternoon of traipsing all over campus… I chased deer, I careened down Stretch Road with abandon and elation in the crisp newly-spring weather, I stomped leaf-piles and inhaled Ford air, pool reflections, and picture-taking…
As the day wore on though, the clouds dripped down like watercolor gray running oddly over everything bright, and the sky began to tilt its melancholy chin. I was visiting with the new spring colts by this time, and suddenly heard sirens in the distance calling all of the wide expanse to attention. Ducks from around the pond had been scattering for a while, and I noticed that the last few photos I’d taken at the small waterfall had bleeding-droplet designs and an odd whirling effect to them..

By the time I’d run down the hill and back to my car, wild raindrops were the urgent metronome (metroGnome? :)), and I jumped into my front seat, retracing the miles of Stretch to their drumming.

I just made it off campus when the hail started.

First it was minute: small pin-pricks at the windshield as I giggled. Slowly it picked up speed and force: pebble-like wads flung like a bridge-troll’s trick.
I didn’t make it a whole two miles before the golf-ball sized ones came crashing down, and the giggles were completely gone by the time the pieces were as large as a small fist..
I remember finding a small Rome gas station, the only covering for miles, as the tears started down my cheeks. It was one of those small-town now-closed stations, so the old tanks stretched up into poles that only had a “roof” of about 4 feet across.. When I pulled in, I could see I was the third car trying to find succor in the thin covering.

I edged as close to the other cars as all of us could bear, and turned the Sentra off as it rocked under the weight of the blows. I had never sat with fear in the midst of nature, other than the time my college home was hit with lightning (this is a tale for another time though), but I couldn’t seem to help scrunching my eyes up each time that metallic crash would ripple through the frame of the car. I found myself balled up in the center of the car, envisioning the glass splaying sideways in jagged lines, and when I opened my eyes I saw a little girl in the car next to me, sitting in the very same position.. little arms wrapped around her knees that were pulled up to her chest, peering through her squinty eyes and jerking in little jumps each time the huge ice balls hit.

In a less dramatic way, this is what 2010 was like.

Like a sentence about sickness, punctuated with hopes holding their breath—cheeks full of air and lungs wondering when they’ll get some, dizzied by the lack.
Being sick again started in the fall of 2009… I got back from that most incredible semester of Linguistics classes and rolled right into my new assignment of teaching elementary school. But as a high school lit. teacher for going-on-four years, I s t r u g g l e d to figure out how to teach an all-in-one-classroom group of third, fourth, and fifth graders that desperately needed a literacy specialist. I was handed three stacks of books and told “you’ll do fine, they’re behind anyway”. And I tried, with every fiber in me, I stayed up nights and “did my homework”. I learned all the new terminology for third-grade math and studied-up on literacy strategies. I re-taught myself 5th grade social studies and lesson-planned for 7-preps daily, but within three weeks of the new school year I was very sick with an Ulcerative Colitis flare-up for the first time in years. Severe sickness, bleeding and weight-dropping, lasted the entire year, and for only the second or third time in my life I tasted the sad flavor of relinquishing something that feels like a failure even when you’ve given it your all.

Family was the best part of this year, and I was blessed with wave after crashing wave of support from my parents, sister, and brothers. They cut through the isolating nature of the ache of chronic illness, and loved on me.
But the year saw difficulties for them too, as my mother’s father became very ill and she left for Brazil (getting held there for a while because of issues with her papers!), and we had a few scares with her health too in these last few months.
I realized a few weeks ago that my emotions were brimming over with the most recent event: our church dealt with the weight of a young friend’s death. She was 28. We all gathered, some that we hadn’t seen in so long, to celebrate a life difficultly lived, boisterously hopeful and sorrowful at the same time, and it was utterly overwhelming.

Fist-like ice-balls on a windshield, ice in our stomachs and hope firmly in our cheeks, though our lungs felt deprived.

This long, meandery post is not about the details of sickness or sorrow however; nor the deeply beautiful lessons learned inside of God’s mercy-plan of suffering. It is instead about the second part of one of my favorite verses.
Proverbs 13:12 says, “Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.”
And so hope is a heavy seed. Whatever aches and hiccups-of-path, whatever struggle and revelation, whatever necessary dependence, whatever loneliness and waiting, whatever fog-filled hunger for what you feel is coming but is not yet, it is all just inside the comma in that verse. The tree afterwards is already growing.

I bid 2010 Adieu with a strange mixture of feelings tonight, because so much has occurred—so much that hasn’t even been broached in these paragraphs. So much has been fashioned in me that I don’t even know how to explain yet, and so much rambunctious, stubborn good and needling bad has passed this way. But TRUST, the likes of which I hadn’t known before has lit up, and now comes a new year…

With love, fiery hope, pungent prayer, and a glad heart, I usher this one in quietly with you. And grin at the glistening new one~

January 11, 2010 - Hope Like Egrets

Now there is only stillness
This very day it is only calm, only gray and waiting.
Blue droplets gathering silver,
Dross transformed, and hoping

Straight lines like clavicles
That start off at the center—bold—
Have tapered off behind narrow sinews
Disappearing into the greater structure
Absolved and absorbed
And it is good.
That clarity waits to shoulder the curves—
The weight of everything not yet made straight:

Hiccupping impasses,
Whorled, woolly declarations,
Cloaked eyes and hurtling hearts—

All will bear down on this road
And not, not, not snap the fiber that came first.
It is in that grace that they exhale.


There was another day with a shallower stillness that came before.
The dam held back the flow of everything behind,
November crisped out of everything that lay ahead—
Like small gasps under small steps,
Fallow things snapped out the rhythm of vacuous deaths beneath my boots and the season

Then one white bird on thin, long legs.
Stark, cut curves poised over foam-scraped sand
Tall and sharp like elegant rejection
Beautiful like grief and steel.

Everything shudders to a halt.
Months of chaos and isolation stare back, drip off a beak; made still in rigid eyes
One white-draped spot in a haze of yellowed green-gray, and the world makes sudden sense as an egg.
Every bit of now is the groaning—
Unhatched but incubating hope, joy just beneath a shell.
Lean-lined life that looks beige, too delicate, until it breaks through and isn’t.
So much life held in with paper-thin birthing barricades
But it will be born. It will all be borne.
It is in that grace that we exhale.

And hope is a swirling thing that grows from one to many—
Letting go is like the steps that came after; braver from seeing the one bird, but prepared for it to be enough—
Despair and Peace will both hear you coming, and sometimes still waters can go either way
That lake met me with undulations—Soul-holes whistling with the static charge of wind where barbs had just been pulled out—my acceptance, my approach set the sky in a flipped-white blaze
Wings everywhere
Fifty birds swirled around us, twisty circles, swift oscillation
Green-gray lines swallowed entirely by ribboned white, now flapping, now dropping
Hope like egrets, folding; feathered origami blossoms in the trees
Small and white like elegant redemption
Beautiful like thorns and tears

It was like the first snow of winter, and it has caused the thaw.


Posted on 11 January 2010 at 11:27 PM Comments (1)

Nov. 21, 2008 - Reflections on an odd day, without reflecting on the day at all, but rather adding some small part of it to this place..

So today was a lot.
In a lot of different ways.
But as I was lying down to close it, I smiled at the way the class-part of my day went.. Fun students, and a room full of people trying to turn their memories into metaphors!~ Maybe only a scene an english-nerd could love.. but it was enjoyable.

Today was "I Am" Poem day;.. something I've done since my second semester of teaching with the first co-teacher I ever really clicked with...It's a very structured poem. Only now we were tying it to The House on Mango Street.. how Esperanze (hope!) is told that she cannot erase her memories... "you are Mango Street".. The concept that you are, in some powerful ways, the sum of all your history; all your vivid memories--good or bad--combining to form someone made of dust and sunny days and kinship and cold.

So from a list of topics, each student had to take notes on the most vivid memory they had for each of the categories we gave them. These range from "a pet memory" to "a time you were scared" and "your first crush".. Then we read our examples--To give them an idea of how to re-present their memories as quick images, small sentences, packed polaroids, so much memory pushed into a corner with the hope that there the squeaze-out may be something interesting.. So as an offering to the pillow before me, here's mine (written back the first time we taught the assignment though):


I AM
I am the growing shout of “go-----oal!” husking from my father’s otherwise gentle voice
I am letters written to the love I haven’t met yet I am shove, tear, fight through feeling rawness and weariness, to resplendent joy
I am the single thunder lamp lighting literacy lessons for the Ghanaian village
I am the silly first story written without any expectations
I am glinting Christmas lights squinted at from the base of 20 feet of green
I am the cracking concussion of a head on a swing as I slump to the grass after the fall
I am the apple orchard, bending wide my arms to gather in cousins, juice-pith, and seeds
I am a red-haired chow-chow, dashing at the first glimpse of an accidentally-open door
I am drenched boots and dramatic conclusions cracking through the ice on lake Jenushka
I am whispers to my sister between the bunk bed and wall until stars are yawning, gape-mouthed
I am the summer of 2002, ill, feeling like death and puddles
I am the daughter of Brazilian rhythm laced between the oompa-pa’s
I am the lead foot on the accelerator, trembling for 1,000 miles to see the scars on his wrists
I am red sleds pitched around snowy gutters, playing house with my kindred sis
I am struggling eye sight, blinking, staring, longing for what’s next

Posted on 21 November 2008 at 12:26 AM Comments (0)

November 3, 2008 - Thoughts on "lack" and a mall mishap :)

Tonight I walked into my house and felt overwhelmed. I had been shuffling in the mall, whose hallways and speakers have ALREADY been adorned with “Christmas”… the outward colors of it without any inward depth. I had to squinch my ears to tell if I really was hearing the instrumental song that I thought I was… but it became undeniably clear the moment I saw the most unhappy Santa I have ever seen. There was a photographer; enormous, red, shiny Christmas ornaments; rolls of carpet moving in various directions for lines that would wrap around and around.
But there were no lines; only a Santa who was more than likely musing about skeletons and pumpkins, and a Persian man that said I am going-k to change your li-fe today…this cream! We vill get all the pimps off your face, it will change your life. All the pimps. Yes, that’s what he said.

I returned home to my beautiful girls, but conversation quickly turned to the one that is part of my daily life right now: I seem to have been having long weeks of the same conversation, dropped by one person, continued with another in my life, taken on by several others, dwindled and taken up again by someone that has noticed the same thing my heart has. It began over dinner with my pastor’s family. We somehow got to speaking about men in their 20’s and 30’s, in and out of our church, and Pastor Tommy said we should pray. There is this struggle, this fight, this dropping away of the men I knew that were committed to Christ, and a dearth of ones that are freshly arriving to Him, heart in hands. So we spoke more of praying for the men that let commitment and the forward-fight dribble between their fingers’ grasp; for the boys that have no idea what being a man should look like, and for the women that haven’t seen an example of anything but settling for this.

Then Rachel un-paused a video-teaching they were about to watch and the first words out of the speaker’s mouth were about The Beginning, and he began by breaking down the name Elohim. Break to the only response to emotionally-charged-stimuli that I seem to currently have on tap—a spasmodic visceral reaction: I fled the room.

It felt involuntary, an instant response— I couldn’t stay. The man said Elohim, and jumped into parts of the word, the root, the meaning. And it hurt. Ache. Want. The feeling that my heart would gut itself if I listened just now, tied, I guess, to the study of words, and God, and Hebrew, and Greek. Then instant repulsion at the dramatic nature of those emotions (oy-ve!!), annoyance that the ache makes me hostile, anger that I don’t know what to do with my heart.

I think I’m just tired, but it ends up coming out as a garbled, toe-crunching “rawr”. I would so much rather embrace what I long for—or the waiting for it—and not rush out of the room because of something stinging and poignant. I just felt a little sad. And hated that it comes on the heels of others’ joy. It’s all the change again: my wonderful childhood best friend gets married in 6 days, and in moments of weakness it feeds into the questions of what I’ve screwed up that keeps me from having what God has given to others. What have I done or been that is so irreversible? I feel like I’ve been longing and seeking, and allowing necessary separation… and still ache, distance, faint mimicries of emptiness.
And none of this is fair questioning, and I know this. I hate feeling consumed with lack; lack that my spirit, without false filters and worldly schematics laid over it, knows is not there, or knows that the vessel part, the decaying, unlasting part of me insists on identifying…conjuring.

Bleh. There it is. But out where its sting, or shame at such emotions, can dissipate, and out where the seeming-truth of some of those statements can be illuminated, shown for the shadows they are.

And then replaced. Replaced by the truth of blessing. Blessing in the form of roommates that have been abundant sources of “laughter like breaking dishes”, wisdom, and commiseration. Blessing in the form of joy in welling-up moments spent in my car. Blessing in the view down the hill in the morning mist.
There are some beautiful events in the last few weeks that I need to come back and mention; sights and company that have made my heart burst!—only tonight the other feelings usurped my attention first, so here they sit. My apologies~ :)

Posted on 3 November 2008 at 10:53 PM Comments (1)