Hello kids. It’s been a while. Heaven knows this rambling heart has had plenty to write about in the past month, but a combination of fear, pure elation, stress, and my propensity to try and micro-manage everything that comes in contact with my life has kept the words safely locked away. I write when my emotions are in extremes. Sometimes those are good emotions. Sometimes they are not. Sometimes there are so many emotions that I can’t seem to hold onto just one long enough to examine it, understand it, and release it onto paper. When that happens, it takes an inciting incident to bring those emotions into perspective, weave them together, and create a single literary expression. More often than not, such an incident consists of a déjà vu moment in which my heart syncs up to the beating of an African drum, and no matter where I’m at, I can feel the dirt on my bare feet as a distant cry from the nursery or laugh from the courtyard finds its way to me…
A couple nights ago, I diced up some potatoes and fried them with some scrambled eggs, sliced onions, and a little bit of cheese for dinner. My clumsy hands, so terribly inept in the kitchen, fumbled with the knife for an obscenely long amount of time. Dinner was forever in the making, but in my defense, it was a lot of potatoes, and people kept coming in the door unexpectedly, prompting the addition of a little bit more food to the preparation pile. One of the guys watching me nervously advised me not to cut the end of my finger off, and I remembered when I had done just that while slicing up carrots with Jasmine last summer. It bled for hours. It’s no great secret that, despite my best efforts, I can’t cook to save my life. I can handle potatoes and eggs though. One of my greatest joys last summer, when it was just the Morrow kids and I, was to get up before them and make breakfast for them all. Breakfast was almost always scrambled eggs… sometimes with some diced potatoes and onions… and a little bit of cheese.
Yesterday morning, I spent several hours at a Public Health Department in a low-income, refugee populated part of the city. While I was there, heaven granted me the privilege and the honor of playing with a three-year-old Ethiopian girl while her parents and newborn baby sister sat through a nutrition counseling session. She was beautiful. This child was bright, vivacious, and precocious. She explored everything she could get her hands on, including my face and hair. Before long, she had decided I was her new best friend. She would spin and spin in the middle of the room until she was so dizzy that she could not possibly remain upright any longer, and then throw herself in my general direction. I caught her, tickled her, tossed her in the air, then sat her upright to do it all again. She buried her little face in my legs and played peek-a-boo around her tiny hands. She didn’t speak a word of English. It didn’t matter. Not to be terribly cliché, but love knows no language.
The woman conducting the nutrition counseling session is from Ghana. I don’t know her story, but she certainly brightened my day. One of the other nurses introduced us and told her I had spent some time in Zambia and was planning on returning. Generally when folks hear that, the reactions I get are a combination of admiration (which makes me sick. This. Is. Not. About. Me. I have done nothing extraordinary or admirable; I simply acted in obedience to what I believed with all of my heart my King had asked me to do. Should a worker be praised for (barely) doing his job? Don’t praise me—praise Him. But I digress…), confusion, and curiosity. All three were present yesterday.
Someone had mentioned the possibility of the office gathering supplies to send with me and asked if I would have room in my suitcase. I told them I would have a few free suitcases to fill with supplies since everything I needed for personal use would fit in a carry-on, a statement that carried some unintended shock value. I suppose our definitions of what one “needs” for a summer are a bit different. The nutritionist from Ghana noted that people in “this country” don’t realize what they have, that in other places, people have one pair of shoes (if they’re lucky), and even those they only wear on special occasions. Again, I don’t know her story. But as she hugged me and whispered “God bless you,” I had one of those rare moments where I felt that she could see in her heart the same images that are carved into mine.
Heaven continued to shower down little blessings as the day progressed. That afternoon I went with a couple other nursing majors to spend time with the refugee family we’ve been paired with through a class. They are a young Bhutanese couple whose families fled to Nepal when they were toddlers. They came to the States on refugee status a few months ago with their four-year-old son. This week, we brought some food to share with them (Krispy Kreme donuts, popcorn, and Coca-Cola…). The mother made traditional Nepali food for us. While she was preparing it, I took some play-doh that one of the other girls had brought and sat in the floor with their son and the neighbor girl. I made several animals. The husband’s mother, who was there visiting, came and sat next to me. Every time I would make something, she would tell me the Nepali word for it. I would respond with the English word. We had a good time laughing at each others’ butcherings of the two languages. I learned several words. The word for “bird” sounds like “Chola.” Then we sat down to eat the rice, beef, and dahl that the wife had prepared. To eat it, you pour the dahl on the rice, use your right hand to make a ball out of the sticky mixture, and then use that to pick up a piece of beef or whatever else is on you plate. As we threw around vocabulary words and ate with our hands, I had to be careful to remember that I was at a rickety table in a sparsely furnished apartment next to an American highway instead of a staff kitchen out in the Zambian bush eating Nshima with the orphanage workers. It didn’t really matter, though. It was the same humanity-- the same appreciation over a meal shared; the same gratitude that someone was taking the time to eat like they eat, learn their language and their customs, and listen to their stories.
The past few days have been the chocolate icing on the double fudge cake of the last few weeks. If you’ve managed to read this far down this unreasonably long post, you deserve to know that I have now in my possession a plane ticket to Zambia. Sit back and buckle your seatbelts, kids. This one is quite a story…
A few weeks ago, my best friend responded to a burden and a calling that has been visibly growing on his heart for months. As Aslan reminded Shasta that each person’s story is his own, so also I will omit the details here. It is not my story to tell. Suffice it to say that after much prayer from and for all parties involved, I had the joy of informing my travel agent that I now needed two round-trip tickets to Lusaka.
However, coordinating tickets for a group of six (four others will meet us in Lusaka) who are all flying from different corners of the States and trying to land in Africa relatively close to the same time is an absolute nightmare. This is not a story I care to retell in detail at the moment, but in summation, we ended up with two (very reasonably priced) tickets reserved for us—but we only had ten days to pay for them. And we were a full $1000 short.
My initial reaction would have been to panic, try and take control of the situation, and figure out a very practical and rational solution to the impossible problem. Thank God I wasn’t left to my own devices. We discussed the situation together and both came to the conclusion that if God was in this—and we believed He was—then it would come to pass. That absolutely did not abdicate us from the responsibility to try and do everything within our power, but there was no panic. No fear. In fact, there was a rather ridiculous amount of peace.
Within 24 hours, HALF of the needed money was in our possession, and the other half was feasible—that is, we could sit down and write out very probable places that it would come from. Strange things happened. I found an envelope with $132 in the back of a drawer in my room. I’ve had it since I came back to the States in August and had completely forgotten about it. What a “convenient” time to purposelessly open a drawer full of junk and stumble upon it. People who had previously promised support (as in, MONTHS previously) chose that day to send their money. I sold bracelets like an embroidery-thread fiend while I worked the front desk of my hall. Some people bought bracelets, others just left donations, and still others did both and then drug their friends over to do the same. I made several bank runs over the course of a few days, each time depositing literally every penny I had been able to scrape up. The poor man at the counter would count out the change, look at me sideways, and say, “Well, I suppose every cent helps…” If only he knew. Payroll contacted me to let me know that a paycheck from last semester had come back to them marked “return to sender.” Some of my residents stuffed an envelope full of money under my door the night before we were going to deposit everything we had and try to buy the tickets. That morning, as I was leaving my room, I noticed something sticking out from under the rug in my room. It was a five-dollar bill. At this point, I figured heaven was just screwing with me, so I picked it up and added it to the pile with a chuckle.
I ran a quick mental calculation as we walked into the bank that morning. We needed $3711.12 in order to claim those tickets. Each of us clutched a fistful of cash, and to the casual observer we probably looked like we had just sold a few truckbeds full of crack. We counted it out, filled out a deposit slip, and gave it to the nice man behind the counter. He printed out a balance statement.
Total: $3.712.51
God is good. All the time.
Then we went back home and called the travel agent to book the tickets. She wasn’t in that day, so they transferred me to another one, who I just happened to work with a little bit last year. He told us our ticket price had gone up, but he would see what he could do. He called back a couple hours later with a similar ticket that was actually a little bit cheaper than the original. It did include an overnight in D.C., but neither of us were opposed to sleeping on an airport bench, so we took it. The next day, he contacted us again to let us know that he had managed to get us a free hotel room through Ethiopian Air.
God is good. All the time.
So basically, there was no real cohesive point to this post. This isn’t even close to all of the things that are bouncing around in my head, but it’s a start. Here are my parting thoughts: If you ever are traveling for missionary purposes, use Golden Rule travel as your travel agents. They are truly wonderful people. If you are ever in a situation that feels both God ordained and impossible at the same time, hold on—you’re in for a ride. If you are ever given the chance to interact with a 3-year-old Ethiopian princess or a 4-year-old Bhutanese refugee, do it. Bring plenty of play-doh and be prepared to surrender all concept of personal space. And if your heart is full to bursting with gratitude and joy over the happenings of the past few weeks, sift carefully through those little gems. Some just need to be treasured and held close to your heart. Others need to be shared with the world. But for heaven’s sake, don’t wait a full month to do the sorting, or you’ll end up filling four full pages of a Word document with truly pointless blog ramblings when you should be doing your homework instead.
“Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.”
~Ephesians 3:20-21
Amen.
A couple nights ago, I diced up some potatoes and fried them with some scrambled eggs, sliced onions, and a little bit of cheese for dinner. My clumsy hands, so terribly inept in the kitchen, fumbled with the knife for an obscenely long amount of time. Dinner was forever in the making, but in my defense, it was a lot of potatoes, and people kept coming in the door unexpectedly, prompting the addition of a little bit more food to the preparation pile. One of the guys watching me nervously advised me not to cut the end of my finger off, and I remembered when I had done just that while slicing up carrots with Jasmine last summer. It bled for hours. It’s no great secret that, despite my best efforts, I can’t cook to save my life. I can handle potatoes and eggs though. One of my greatest joys last summer, when it was just the Morrow kids and I, was to get up before them and make breakfast for them all. Breakfast was almost always scrambled eggs… sometimes with some diced potatoes and onions… and a little bit of cheese.
Yesterday morning, I spent several hours at a Public Health Department in a low-income, refugee populated part of the city. While I was there, heaven granted me the privilege and the honor of playing with a three-year-old Ethiopian girl while her parents and newborn baby sister sat through a nutrition counseling session. She was beautiful. This child was bright, vivacious, and precocious. She explored everything she could get her hands on, including my face and hair. Before long, she had decided I was her new best friend. She would spin and spin in the middle of the room until she was so dizzy that she could not possibly remain upright any longer, and then throw herself in my general direction. I caught her, tickled her, tossed her in the air, then sat her upright to do it all again. She buried her little face in my legs and played peek-a-boo around her tiny hands. She didn’t speak a word of English. It didn’t matter. Not to be terribly cliché, but love knows no language.
The woman conducting the nutrition counseling session is from Ghana. I don’t know her story, but she certainly brightened my day. One of the other nurses introduced us and told her I had spent some time in Zambia and was planning on returning. Generally when folks hear that, the reactions I get are a combination of admiration (which makes me sick. This. Is. Not. About. Me. I have done nothing extraordinary or admirable; I simply acted in obedience to what I believed with all of my heart my King had asked me to do. Should a worker be praised for (barely) doing his job? Don’t praise me—praise Him. But I digress…), confusion, and curiosity. All three were present yesterday.
Someone had mentioned the possibility of the office gathering supplies to send with me and asked if I would have room in my suitcase. I told them I would have a few free suitcases to fill with supplies since everything I needed for personal use would fit in a carry-on, a statement that carried some unintended shock value. I suppose our definitions of what one “needs” for a summer are a bit different. The nutritionist from Ghana noted that people in “this country” don’t realize what they have, that in other places, people have one pair of shoes (if they’re lucky), and even those they only wear on special occasions. Again, I don’t know her story. But as she hugged me and whispered “God bless you,” I had one of those rare moments where I felt that she could see in her heart the same images that are carved into mine.
Heaven continued to shower down little blessings as the day progressed. That afternoon I went with a couple other nursing majors to spend time with the refugee family we’ve been paired with through a class. They are a young Bhutanese couple whose families fled to Nepal when they were toddlers. They came to the States on refugee status a few months ago with their four-year-old son. This week, we brought some food to share with them (Krispy Kreme donuts, popcorn, and Coca-Cola…). The mother made traditional Nepali food for us. While she was preparing it, I took some play-doh that one of the other girls had brought and sat in the floor with their son and the neighbor girl. I made several animals. The husband’s mother, who was there visiting, came and sat next to me. Every time I would make something, she would tell me the Nepali word for it. I would respond with the English word. We had a good time laughing at each others’ butcherings of the two languages. I learned several words. The word for “bird” sounds like “Chola.” Then we sat down to eat the rice, beef, and dahl that the wife had prepared. To eat it, you pour the dahl on the rice, use your right hand to make a ball out of the sticky mixture, and then use that to pick up a piece of beef or whatever else is on you plate. As we threw around vocabulary words and ate with our hands, I had to be careful to remember that I was at a rickety table in a sparsely furnished apartment next to an American highway instead of a staff kitchen out in the Zambian bush eating Nshima with the orphanage workers. It didn’t really matter, though. It was the same humanity-- the same appreciation over a meal shared; the same gratitude that someone was taking the time to eat like they eat, learn their language and their customs, and listen to their stories.
The past few days have been the chocolate icing on the double fudge cake of the last few weeks. If you’ve managed to read this far down this unreasonably long post, you deserve to know that I have now in my possession a plane ticket to Zambia. Sit back and buckle your seatbelts, kids. This one is quite a story…
A few weeks ago, my best friend responded to a burden and a calling that has been visibly growing on his heart for months. As Aslan reminded Shasta that each person’s story is his own, so also I will omit the details here. It is not my story to tell. Suffice it to say that after much prayer from and for all parties involved, I had the joy of informing my travel agent that I now needed two round-trip tickets to Lusaka.
However, coordinating tickets for a group of six (four others will meet us in Lusaka) who are all flying from different corners of the States and trying to land in Africa relatively close to the same time is an absolute nightmare. This is not a story I care to retell in detail at the moment, but in summation, we ended up with two (very reasonably priced) tickets reserved for us—but we only had ten days to pay for them. And we were a full $1000 short.
My initial reaction would have been to panic, try and take control of the situation, and figure out a very practical and rational solution to the impossible problem. Thank God I wasn’t left to my own devices. We discussed the situation together and both came to the conclusion that if God was in this—and we believed He was—then it would come to pass. That absolutely did not abdicate us from the responsibility to try and do everything within our power, but there was no panic. No fear. In fact, there was a rather ridiculous amount of peace.
Within 24 hours, HALF of the needed money was in our possession, and the other half was feasible—that is, we could sit down and write out very probable places that it would come from. Strange things happened. I found an envelope with $132 in the back of a drawer in my room. I’ve had it since I came back to the States in August and had completely forgotten about it. What a “convenient” time to purposelessly open a drawer full of junk and stumble upon it. People who had previously promised support (as in, MONTHS previously) chose that day to send their money. I sold bracelets like an embroidery-thread fiend while I worked the front desk of my hall. Some people bought bracelets, others just left donations, and still others did both and then drug their friends over to do the same. I made several bank runs over the course of a few days, each time depositing literally every penny I had been able to scrape up. The poor man at the counter would count out the change, look at me sideways, and say, “Well, I suppose every cent helps…” If only he knew. Payroll contacted me to let me know that a paycheck from last semester had come back to them marked “return to sender.” Some of my residents stuffed an envelope full of money under my door the night before we were going to deposit everything we had and try to buy the tickets. That morning, as I was leaving my room, I noticed something sticking out from under the rug in my room. It was a five-dollar bill. At this point, I figured heaven was just screwing with me, so I picked it up and added it to the pile with a chuckle.
I ran a quick mental calculation as we walked into the bank that morning. We needed $3711.12 in order to claim those tickets. Each of us clutched a fistful of cash, and to the casual observer we probably looked like we had just sold a few truckbeds full of crack. We counted it out, filled out a deposit slip, and gave it to the nice man behind the counter. He printed out a balance statement.
Total: $3.712.51
God is good. All the time.
Then we went back home and called the travel agent to book the tickets. She wasn’t in that day, so they transferred me to another one, who I just happened to work with a little bit last year. He told us our ticket price had gone up, but he would see what he could do. He called back a couple hours later with a similar ticket that was actually a little bit cheaper than the original. It did include an overnight in D.C., but neither of us were opposed to sleeping on an airport bench, so we took it. The next day, he contacted us again to let us know that he had managed to get us a free hotel room through Ethiopian Air.
God is good. All the time.
So basically, there was no real cohesive point to this post. This isn’t even close to all of the things that are bouncing around in my head, but it’s a start. Here are my parting thoughts: If you ever are traveling for missionary purposes, use Golden Rule travel as your travel agents. They are truly wonderful people. If you are ever in a situation that feels both God ordained and impossible at the same time, hold on—you’re in for a ride. If you are ever given the chance to interact with a 3-year-old Ethiopian princess or a 4-year-old Bhutanese refugee, do it. Bring plenty of play-doh and be prepared to surrender all concept of personal space. And if your heart is full to bursting with gratitude and joy over the happenings of the past few weeks, sift carefully through those little gems. Some just need to be treasured and held close to your heart. Others need to be shared with the world. But for heaven’s sake, don’t wait a full month to do the sorting, or you’ll end up filling four full pages of a Word document with truly pointless blog ramblings when you should be doing your homework instead.
“Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.”
~Ephesians 3:20-21
Amen.
