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Yielding in an Unyielding Culture

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100-0031_IMGI’m astounded by the risks pedestrians and bikers take on their road back home or to work.  The shortest distance between two points consists of a straight line.  Conservation of energy reigns supreme to most foot and bicycle traffic so hoe-bearing old farmers tramp across eight-lane highways looking neither right nor left.  On a rainy night people invisibly weave in and out of cars on dark, soot covered bikes cloaked in black jackets.  Have I explained why I dislike driving in the rain?

From the comfort of my car, I remind myself of the days I rode bikes in driving rain.  The days I arrived home with mud spattered up my back into my hair and my hands turned to ice on the bars.  The early days when I achieved my personal challenge of keeping my feet on the pedals all the way to school to avoid sinking into piles of  mud.  So, now, stopping to allow a horde of pedestrians cross a busy street on a rainy day brings a wide smile to my face.

Yielding defies all local logic.  Most become paralyzed in disbelief when I give way.  I see the confusion on their face as they struggle to decode the situation and then discover the unbelievable.  Someone stopped….for me.  Often they spring forward when the idea dawns that the coast is clear, a new surge in their energy.  I especially like stopping for one person in this country who believe to the core of their beings they rank only one of “too many.”

Giving way.  Yielding.  Such a small thing to give way yet what a difference it makes to give away a few seconds, to not be first that time, to not claim my right according to the law, to surprise someone with a small kindness, to recognize an individual soul.

I do not always yield, believe me, but I like the state of my heart when I do.

What uncommon courtesy puts a spring in your step?  What uncommon courtesy do you like to gift others?

Climbing Past Restlessness

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Every so often I travel alone.  I pack my bag with only my things.  Anticipation takes over greater parts of the days leading to my departure.  The expectation of caring only for myself looms on the horizon.  No one to dress but myself.  No one to feed but myself.  No time to eat but when I hunger.  Before the horizon zooms into reality I stock the fridge and imagine what might bring my husband some comfort for the task of all three children, all day, all alone.

Then, I journey.  Traveling alone means stretches of silence interspersed with bursts of speech…to the check-in agent, to passport control, to buy food, to the one who sits beside me.  But more silence accompanies me than usual on journeys alone.  More silence than children talking over each other talking to me.  More than the constant communication that makes home life run, soothes hurt feelings, or delves into deep issues of the heart.

I welcome silence…for a time.  I open books, ponder deep thoughts, fill pages in journals, watch movies.  Then I approach the seeming end of my thoughts or stack of books and my heart grows restless.  Like a mountain to be tackled with the promise of rest on the opposite side, I climb increasingly anxious to summit.

Activity fills most of my days.  Preparing food, giving direction, teaching, answering, asking.  The abrupt halt throws me forward like a passenger into a taut seatbelt.  Responsibilities pause yet I keep moving.  I require longer to slow down.  The mounting rise of restlessness washes over me.  I now know to wait and be still.  God has more for me than restlessness.

Given long enough I overcome the peak and enter the meadow of rest.  True rest.  Allowing inactivity and not labeling it “lazy” or “selfish.”  I see life marching on without my voice when I call home.  I know He values my voice but the knowledge that God does not need me frees me somehow.

I observe more of nature and life around me.  New, quiet thoughts come to me.  I feel lighter.  He upholds all, maintains all, sustains all.  I sustain small pockets of valuable life as He permits and because He sustains me, but He sustains all.

Rest acknowledges God is God.  I am not.  True rest puts me in my place and God in His.  He is Father, I am child again.

What do you learn about God when you rest?  What do you learn about yourself?

Why Do I Blog?

~ eternalwaitofglory ~ 2 Comments

I write because choosing just the right word to describe my daily life in light of God’s grace energizes me.  I understand who I am and my life more deeply when I put words to it.  I crystallize those feelings, that insight, these experiences with words.  I digest God’s truth from the Bible when I write.

My journal pages fill up with private concerns.  Newsletters serve a different purpose.  Occasionally I receive a grade on a paper.  I longed for an outlet for the thoughts that rattled in my head.

I write on a blog because I write when I blog and a few people told me they wanted to hear my voice.

Why do you write?

Reflections on a Fisherman’s Hands

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Rough, tan, scarred, mangled, tattooed. I imagine the followers hands. Working with nets and knives for a living does that to hands…I imagine.

I’ve fished a few times in my life. In lakes, in stock ponds, and in swift streams. That’s the fun part, the holding the pole and the waiting. The bite and the haul. But then comes the blood and the guts. The descaling. The cutting.

Fishing for men is much the same. It’s exciting and fun at first and then it gets messy. The task of the fishermen after the haul is dirty and requires skilled hands that want hard work. Hands that are willing to get messy, willing to get slashed by a sharp knife. I’m not sure I understood that part of fishing until late. It’s a messy job, this fishing. I’m a messy fish myself. Others have dirtied themselves in my life.

Hearts are sick…including mine…who can understand the twists and turns? Certainly not I but that is only my excuse to not get messy. Not a good reason to bow out of the battle. Not a good reason to jump out of the boat. Am I willing to reach into the net and grasp the fish? To wield the knife? To have it wielded on me?

And that tattoo. I love that tattoo. The mark of a life lived hard. A brand of one who understands the dark side of life. Here it means gang life or time in prison. I was branded for the other side til He fished for me. In many ways I still bear the marks for all to see.

I’d like to think they have to look hard…but I don’t think they do. But…isn’t that the beauty of grace?

Me and Marius

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I weep every time I see Les Miserables but the part I cry harder in than any other is when Marius remembers his fallen friends. He stands and sings of empty chairs and empty tables. Empty chairs. Empty tables. I’m choking up even as I recall the song.

Too many empty chairs and empty tables. Chairs and tables where friends once sat, where we talked, laughed, dreamed, ate, played games, argued, reconciled. My friends did not die, but many have moved which is a kind of death. It is death to daily life together. Death to easy conversation. Death to a kind of friendship even though the friendship itself is not dead. Death to seeing their faces practically whenever I felt like it.

I feel like Marius these days. A little war torn…the one left and not knowing why. So, so many people come and go in our lives. When I count them, I move from fingers, then to toes, and then I run out of digits to help me. Why us? Why are we left? I know it is not because we are better, more fluent, more adjusted, more spiritual, more capable. No, no, those are not the reason we are still here.

Going back to the café is so hard. Remembering my friends. Remembering the good times. Remembering even the hard times, those times when we did not get along as well as I wanted or they wanted. Times when we disappointed each other. The times we sinned against each other. And also the times when we did it good. When we stood by each other and offered a shoulder to cry on, a heartfelt word of encouragement, a meal, forgiveness, grace. My life is full because of my friendships forged in the heat of battle.  I wouldn’t give it up even as I cry the tears of missing them.

My tears begin to dry up when Marius comes to the part where he talks of the futility of his friends’ deaths. I gulp back my choking and depart from his line of thought. While futility is a part of life, it is not part of the battle I pursue. It is not in vain that we put our lives out there for the miserables of the world. We strived to look down and that is close to God’s heart. It is not futile even if my eye does not see as much progress as I hoped. The cause is worth it. I am not giving my life for nothing.

It is the season of departures and this year they start early and go late.  So, here, now I revisit the café of friendships and cry my tears as I remember times gone by with the hope, too, of good times yet to come.

Renovating

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Nomads move around. We are nomads. I think true nomads like moving. I do not. It’s not exciting like those international home buyers shows. We’ve pondered apartments with toilets in closets, bathroom sinks in dining rooms, and grime beyond belief. I’ve moved, pregnant with two small kids, into an apartment sight unseen.

The gold used to be an unfinished apartment. We looked for the apartment shell–concrete everywhere and holes in the walls and ground for piping. Then, we put in floors, cabinets, sinks, tubs, and toilets…just how we liked and not in the closet. Times changed and that’s out of our budget now. Now, gold is an apartment with everything but a kitchen. I like to do my kitchen my way.

The worst, though, is having to renovate an apartment. Renovate sound so exciting and new. Made to order. But first, the sledgehammers come in. The dust is kicked up and grunge never seen gets revealed. People traipse in and out. People I don’t know. Renovating is messy, loud, and if we never had to do it again, I’d not be sorry.

My life is full of some ugly stuff. I’m not an unfinished apartment and I don’t like renovations on my heart either…at first. I don’t just put on Christ over a blank shell. There’s also this bad job I did on my own that needs to be ripped out.  The trying to be functional and pretty apart from Christ that needs to go. It doesn’t come out easily either.  I usually don’t even notice how ugly it is until someone walks into my life and points it out. Or, I see the job that Christ can do in someone else and then notice the grunge I’ve lived with so long.

Then comes the bashing, the knocking down, and the unsettling. Things are removed, but behold, there’s always more!  It comes down with a bang and a cloud of dust that chokes me and the people around me. Thankfully most of them see there’s a renovation going on and are excited about what’s happening even as they cough on my dust.

What is God tearing out of your life as He renovates you? How has someone come alongside you recently and shared in the joy of what God is doing?

When Boundaries Get Crossed

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Picture me standing in line for the lady’s room at a coffee shop with my daughter mentally pondering my spiritual growth.  Just a year before at the same shop I’d struggled with impatience.  Women in our host culture seem to take eons in the restroom. Eons.

Maybe its just that personal spaces are few and when privacy comes, it must be enjoyed…for awhile.  Now, look at me waiting patiently! I felt thankful to be in such a place and be able to recognize this growth. I mentally patted myself on the back.

A few minutes later, after stepping in to have our moment, an older women enters the restroom and waits about 2 seconds before she starts pounding on our doors.  Literally, pounding.  The locks rattled, the door shook.  It was a shocker!  She loudly complained of how long we are taking and asks us to get out so she can have her moment.  She continued to grumble and berate us loudly and did not cease to pound.

I know enough language to be sassy.  I can express things I wish I could not.  What proceeded to transpire still fills me with a mixture of pride and shame.  Pride at the fluency and shame at my use of my fluency.  We conversed…ok…spoke loudly…ok…argued.  I suggested she find other places to have her moment.  She asked me to show her one.  I replied I could not do that at this moment.  She continued to loudly complain and urge me to hurry up.  I offered to learn from her vast experience about how best to do that.  And it went on. It was a charged conversation.

Ten minutes later when the adrenaline dissipated in my veins, I doubled over in hysterical laughter at the absurdity of what transpired in that restroom. To have someone literally try their level best to evict you from a bathroom stall, well, it just crosses a boundary.  Apparently, it’s a boundary I did not want crossed.  Isn’t that how it is with boundaries?  We realize their importance to us when they are crossed.

I’ve heard it called “Hulking Out”, what I did.  It’s not pleasant, attractive, or in the slightest bit useful.  I had to explain and apologize to my daughter.  Actual repentance in my heart occurred later that day.  I realized just how short my fuse can be…so very short…which humbled me.  All that pride of how I learned so much patience?  Gone. Back to square one, I stood there with a truer picture of who I was and it was not who I wanted to be!  I hulked out, tried to force my right and win by argument…by power. It’s not the first time in my life that I’ve hulked out.

A crossed boundary often kicks in my survival instincts. I try on being dangerous. But that’s not the dangerous God wants for me.  His power came in His laying aside His life and rights for others…not claiming them for Himself.  He gave everything.  Am I willing to forgo survival?  To pass on using my strength which is no strength at all?  To be truly dangerous God’s way is to be the right kind of dangerous.

I think being dangerous for God’s kingdom that day would have been using my 10 minutes of language ability on my captive audience toward a much different end than protecting my right to a bathroom stall!

How to Survive: Graceful Synchronize

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Beneath the hustle and bustle of Bangkok rests a wonderful aquarium.  Fish swim serenely through beautiful blue tanks as skytrains intersect and the world shops above.  God’s creatures beneath the world’s creations.

Darkness shrouds aquariums which means I’m constantly counting heads instead of gazing into tanks and reading signs.  But, yesterday, four signs caught my eye.  “How to Survive in the Ocean” they read.  They could easily have said “How to Survive in the Hustle and Bustle of the World.”

I’ll go first…Graceful Synchronize.  I get this one.  This is the one I do more than all others.  Go with the flow, blend in, be careful, don’t offend.  Synchronize.  Don’t stand out too much.  And do so gracefully so no one notices either. That’s my method I’m learning to put aside…graceful synchronize.

Why put it aside, though?  I’m surviving right?  But that is not what God calls me to…survival.  The Lord bids me come and die.  survival at any cost is not His goal.  He bids me to come out of the masses, to reveal myself even if it makes me a target…even if it means I don’t survive.

Maybe that is the truth…the I isn’t supposed to survive, not when it’s the I ridden with selfish desires for personal comfort, glory, safety.  That’s the reason I gracefully synchronize to the pulse of the moment–for myself.  That I must die.

Graceful in Christ is the synchronization my heart truly desires.  Survival at any cost is becoming a cost too high.  I do not die, but yet I die.  I die in that I do not flourish in the unique ways God makes His creation to flourish.

To truly live is to not try so hard to survive.  How am I doing?  Well…I still try to survive a lot, but sometimes I share what the Lord puts on my heart and make myself a potential target…uncomfortable and unsafe.

Next week…”How to Survive: Be Dangerous.”

Old Chickens

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My name in Chinese sounds like “I love you” in some dialects.  Imagine me standing in an apartment helping negotiate a rental contract and introducing myself.  Picture the surprised expression on the landlords face as he replies, startled, “you love me?”  Why didn’t I change my name at that point?  I have no idea.  I’d already picked it?  I knew how to write it in characters?  I’m stubborn.

Learning a new language means becoming a child again.  It means people laughing at you for the cute ways you say things, for the mistakes you make.  People don’t understand even when you’re sure you say it right.  I become a two-year old with a temper tantrum as I try to ask for food to feed myself and no one understands me.  I use my hands and face to express what I cannot with my words.  It’s humbling.

It’s also funny.  Fast forward 11 years and you have me now.  I hate sharing that I’ve lived here 11 years when people ask me.  The admiration for my language abilities fades into the truth that after 11 years I should be more fluent!  Sometimes I muddy the truth…ok, I mislead people…ok, I repent from my lying…and share only how long I’ve lived in this city to avoid the faded admiration.

But, recently I made a pretty funny foible and it brought a smile to a sad face.  I didn’t orchestrate it, I was asked if I understood something and I shared what I thought I’d heard, “something about old chickens” I said.  No, it was something totally not about old chickens but the damage, or the benefit, had already been done.  A sad face smiled and my foolish misunderstanding brought some heavy things into a little perspective.

The “Old Chickens Incident” reminded me afresh to embrace the childlike nature of being a continual learner.  To laugh at myself, to share what I don’t understand instead of giving the fluent impression, to be weak and let God be strong.

Fluency would be awesome but He sure does show me a lot in the areas I lack fluency.

How does God used your lack of “fluency” to show you more about Himself?

Second Fiddle

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I played second fiddle for almost 8 years of my life. Through junior high and high school I fell just short of being the best.  I was almost evenly matched, but not quite.  For a few weeks in there I played first fiddle but I can probably count them on one, maybe two hands.

Our rivalry lasted 8 years and was somewhat of a legend during our time in school.  8 years of dueling in front of the same 60 people does that.  8 years of sharing first stand in the viola section.  As time went on I began to lose more often.

Can I say I lost when losing still meant 2nd place?  Yes, I lost.  I began to lose my joy in playing.  I tried almost my best and slowly gave up.  My rival seemed to have to win.  I lacked that competitive drive or maybe I just got tired of trying my best and coming up short.  Or maybe I just wasn’t as talented?

In my adult life, I prided myself on not being competitive.  I didn’t have to win like some other people.  I enjoyed the activity more than the outcome.  But, every time I got upset during competitive situations I faced more of the truth.  I am competitive.

Being second fiddle is a place of longing.  Longing to be first, to be recognized, to be better than, yet knowing the judgement has come down.  I’d been found wanting. I consoled myself that I would’ve won if I’d tried harder but he wanted it more.  Second best?  It sure feels better to say I just didn’t try.

Unique.  One of a kind.  Valuable.  So much is competition and it seems so ingrained in my soul.  To not rank, to not measure, feels wholly bizarre at times!  The body passages gain more ground these days as I think about unique.  Unique functions, unique places, unique value and purpose but altogether important to each other to work properly.  More and more, unique is becoming the lens I desire to see others and myself through.

How do you uniquely contribute to the body of Christ?  How can you encourage the uniqueness of others?