Double-edged swords are dangerous...

This semester, I’ve been much more deliberate about reading the scriptures than I was last fall.  It’s a dangerous thing, this scripture-reading business.  It shakes the very foundation of your being, of your desires and aspirations, and it demands a response: obedience or rebellion (which may take the form of apathy or attempts to justify the status quo).  Last night I was explaining the story of Josiah to a friend. For anyone needing a summary, Josiah became king when he was only eight years old.  Eighteen years later, he ordered that the money offered at the temple be used to rebuild and restore it to a state befitting its role as the house of the Living God.  During the cleanup process, a book of the law was found. They brought it and read it to Josiah.  Upon hearing the words of God found in that scripture, Josiah broke. He recognized that despite his best and most reverent intentions, he and all of Israel were not living as God had commanded.  And Josiah believed that God meant what He said.

So he fixed it.

And so there’s a part of me that gets a little nervous when I open scripture, when I pray that God grant me the ability to look at life and this world and the people in it through His eyes, to love them as He loves them—for I too suspect that He meant what He said.

Christ’s love cost Him everything. Christ’s love is exemplified by the cross. Think for a moment what that means. Think about what that life looked like.  He commands—this is not optional—us to pick up our crosses daily and follow Him.  What does that look like? I don’t know for sure.  I do know that there’s no possible way that I personally can carry a cross if I’m clutching other things in my hands.

I’m going to ride on some Bonhoeffer theology for a moment, so bear with me.

The gospel demands a blank check.  Anything less is potentially more dangerous than offering nothing at all, for if you have offered nothing, then Christ’s call to give at least has a sounding board in your heart.  If you’ve given a little bit, then you just flip to a different song, because you reason that you’re covered.  We’ve partitioned Christianity into two nice little layers.  There are Christians, and then there are radical Christians.  There is a minimum level of service that we find acceptable. Sure, some people go beyond that to a state of reckless abandon and radical faith, and we venerate that as good, but not as necessary.  Bonhoeffer suggested that maybe the latter is the minimum after all, and the former is an inadequate and dangerous label.

And if Jesus meant what He said, then I think maybe Bonhoeffer was onto something.

Because the disciples were told to drop their nets and follow.  Some left their father standing there, net in hand.  They were sent out without savings accounts or bullet-proof vests or even an extra cloak. Paul was called to step out of an influential authority position, out of comfort and prestige into obscurity and derision.  Moses, the prince of the greatest empire of his time, had to fall to nothing and become a nomadic refugee to fulfill the role God had for him.

What if lukewarm Christianity isn’t really Christianity at all? If our inaction (or half-action) is just as wrong as deliberately sinful action? If like the rich young ruler, we have kept all the commandments since childhood, but when we were asked to give back, we refuse.  Or we just give enough to make us feel good about giving, because let’s face it: that’s a big motivator for why we give.  We like the nice warm fuzzy feeling we get afterwards. But there’s the difference between giving because it makes us feel good, makes us feel like we’re doing the right thing… and giving until it hurts.

That story is such a hard one to wrap my head around. The man was, overall, “doing the right thing.”  The problem wasn’t that he wasn’t doing enough (for could we ever really do enough?); the problem was the underlying spiritual condition that caused him to “not do enough.” 

This is all so convoluted.  The popular Western line of reasoning is “safe evangelism.” You give within your means, because after all, you want to feed the homeless, but you don’t want to be homeless. You reach out as much as you can without putting yourself in any danger.  Moving into a community where the light of Christ is missing isn’t really feasible, because no one wants to hear gunshots on their street at night, and how could you justify sending your kid to that school?  The safety of a steady income allows us to “give generously” whenever the need slaps us in the face, or even to deliberately go find a hungry person once in a while, and we feel good because we had the money to do it.  We go to college and spend years paying off the debt because society says you need those letters behind your name in order to have the influence to make a difference, and we bought into that.  We justify our climb on the social ladder as a necessary means to an end, and as long as we make sure that end is something admirable—“Christian,” even—then we’re golden.

Further convolution: I don’t know what this looks like in everyone’s life. I know that it won’t look exactly the same, because we are all different parts of one body; we have different purposes and different skills.  That being said, if anyone reads that statement and sees it as a disclaimer, as justification to avoid some component of the call of costly discipleship because “that’s not what it looks like for them,” then may God forgive me for perpetuating such an excuse.

Forgive me also, dear reader, if this sounds at all condemning.  If I am condemning anyone, it is only myself.

That’s the danger of scripture:  once you’ve heard it, you can’t pretend you don’t know. 

This is what I do know (courtesy due partly to Katie Davis).  If you compare the number of self-professing Christians in the world to the number of orphans, it becomes apparent that if only 7% of all Christians… SEVEN out of every ONE HUNDRED… would care for just one more child, then there wouldn’t be any more orphan statistics.  And I know that God tells us in (that dangerous) scripture that the purest form of religion is to care for orphans and widows in their distress.  Something is just not computing there…

I know that I am to love my neighbor as myself.  Myself doesn’t want to be hungry, or cold, or homeless.  Myself doesn’t want to be sick or ignored because it happened to be born in a poor country instead of a privileged one, because coming to me is too inconvenient, too costly.

And so it would be nice to be a nurse at Vanderbilt or St. Jude’s.  There is nothing wrong with that.  Some parts of His body are called to that.  I am not.  It would be so easy to justify. It would still be “good.” The selfish and proud part of me would like it because it seems the best use of my intelligence and skill.  I could work alongside the best and the brightest.  And I could do it in relative comfort, in proximity to my family and friends, and I could build a little house on a big hill with a big east-facing bay window and a big backyard with four little boys playing football and two dogs trying to eat said football. That’s what is expected of me. That’s what success looks like. Safe evangelism allows for that.

So what’s the difference, then, if I take those skills and use them in the poorest corners of the planet?  I’m still using the same skills.  I’m reaching an even more desperate humanity.  I’m still a nurse.

The difference is the prestige, the honor, the self-glory, and the opportunity to be “heard” and listened to, to be respected because I’ve “earned it.”  The difference is the possibility that I’ll never have safety or that little house, that I’ll have to put down those dreams in order that my hands might be free to pick up my cross. I can put whatever label I want to on it, but at the end of the day, that’s what it is.

Oh…. that’s the difference?

Good riddance.

Because safe evangelism allows for that. But costly grace does not. Not for me.

The stories that light our hearts on fire are those of people like Moses, Paul, King David, the apostles…  And those stories are still told.  They are stories of life, love, and triumph that God placed into the Grand Narrative, and so even thousands of years after these men walked the earth, their stories are still heard.

But they are heard because GOD’S power made them heard, because HIS glory and ability was proclaimed.  Scripture (that most dangerous of things…) tells us that His power is made perfect in weakness.  Sometimes I read that as a means of comfort, that when I am weakest and the most incapable, He will be strong.  I think that’s true.  I think it’s more than an insurance policy though.  It is also an admonition and a reminder that any grasp towards power on our part is essentially us placing a limit on how much we will let God do through us—not how much will be done overall, but how much will be done by the power and might of God.  We say, “No worries, God.  Your servant has got your back. I can take care of this. It’s under control. I don’t need your power just yet; my own is quite sufficient. I’m a prince of Egypt/king of Israel/teacher of the law. I have the authority and ability to do this.” 

We are fools and children.

So…

What if God meant what He said?

Just for Today

Today, I miss them. I miss them terribly. Of course I always miss them, but today the ache is more particular.  Just for today, I wish I could hop on a plane and be with them.  There's no special reason why, really-- no inciting incident that released a floodgate of memories.  And there's really no reason why it should be those kids. Heaven knows I have been blessed with a myriad of Stateside angels as well-- lots of little cousins and a niece. And I miss them too. I suppose one difference is that if I really wanted or needed to get to the kids here, I could. They're less than a tank of gas away.  But Kazembe...

I want to open the door of my room and be met with a half dozen cries of "Auntie Meghan! Play with me!" It is the sweetest sound I have ever heard.  I want to feel that familiar dull ache in between my shoulders that never really goes away because Henry keeps launching himself up and fastening his skinny arms around my neck.  I want Jennifer to ask permission to do something that she knows she really shouldn't do, and then I want to give it to her because she smiled at me, and there's really no resisting that smile.  And then I want to run after her screaming, "Wait! No, Jennifer, that's not a good idea!" 

Some of the things I want are long past, taken by time or eternity.  I want to race across the courtyard towards Jack and get to him before he crawls from the nursery to the steps, because once he has seen me, he'll crawl towards me with reckless abandon. His eyes fix to mine and he will crawl right off the edge of the steps without a moment's hesitation.   I want to see Denny making his way towards the kitchen with his furrowed little brow and unsteady Frankenstein waddle. Then I want to step into his line of vision and hold my arms out, and when those little eyes light up and the corner of his mouth starts to curl, I want to rush out to meet him and throw him into the air as his peals of laughter ring out into the fading day.  I want to sort through laundry in search of clothing small enough to fit a tiny 4lb 12oz doll of an angel.  Then I want to pick through the trunk full of shoes in an effort to find a pair to fit Lizzie's comically short but ridiculously wide feet. The kid basically has flippers.

But Jack is walking now, and Denny is probably outgrowing his waddle.  Angels don't need clothes made by man, and Lizzie's feet are surely growing along with the rest of her.

I want to play tag in the playground, a game that inevitably ends up with me flat on my face buried under the six kindergarteners, five preschoolers, and odd assortment of toddlers that tackled me to the ground.  I want to watch Johnny's eyes grow impossibly wide and almost pop out of his smart little head when he realizes that ice, steam, and water are all different forms of the same matter.  I want to watch Sandra and Janet play with each other, because even though both of them took such great care to hide and protect their hearts from me last summer, they seem to have found hope, trust, and genuine friendship in each other. And so I just watch, and I thank God that each of them was rescued, if only so they could be there for one another. 

And while I would never wish sickness upon any of these dear ones, if they do fall ill, I want to be there. I rather enjoy tracking vital signs, and I will do my best to cure them with the magical powers of hugs, kisses, cuddles, and bedtime stories.  I don't mind the long nights or frequent dosage schedules.  There's nothing to it, really... I walk from crib to crib, shaking each burning body gently awake. "Ima," I whisper. Get up. Moriah downs the medicine, licks the cup, and flashes me a tired smile.  "Laala. Nalikutemwa." Sleep. I love you.  I want to step into the nursery during naptime and scoop a screaming Ephraim up into my arms.  Then I'll stand there and rock him back and forth and whisper to him that he is loved.  And after just a few seconds, the shrieking  and flailing stops. Within a minute or two, he is fast asleep.  I lay him down and imagine the words that Ana's knowing look conveys: "Thanks for knocking him out. That kid is so obnoxiously loud while the rest of us are trying to sleep.  Brothers are a pain."  I smile back at her. She is such a joy-- my beautiful hosAna.

Basically, I just want to be with them. It's so strange to realize that so much of what I "want" are memories-- they were, and they always are in my heart, but they never will be again.  This year will be inevitably different. Different is neither good nor bad; it is simply different.  This year, two very dear friends will accompany me. They will live this story beside me.  They'll know the faces that go with these stories, and I fervently hope that they fall every bit as much in love with them as I have.  Nathan, Denny, and Theresa have pretty much been claimed.  I suppose I can share.

Oddly enough, I kind of want to.

Huh.

We Are Just the Same

I love kids. I love their inhibition.  If an adult acted this way, we would call it reckless and daring.  When a child does it, it’s simply purity and innocence.  Would that we could recognize that sometimes those are all the same thing.

Last night I babysat at an adult community group that meets just down the road from campus.  I take the kids upstairs and entertain them while their parents meet in the living room.  After about 45 minutes of being attacked by imaginary unicorns while the tiny toddler of the group played Godzilla and plowed through the intricate train set town that the two older girls had built (and rebuilt… and rebuilt… and rebuilt…),  one of them grabbed a book and curled up in my lap.  As I was reading the story, Ava, age 6, began examining my shirt.  I was wearing the T-shirt that one of the Texas team members gave me last summer (Gail, if you’re reading this, thank you—it’s one of my most treasured possessions).  I had traced each child’s hand onto the back.  Ava laid her hand on top of one of the handprints and said, “We are just the same.”

What beautiful truth spoken from the lips of a child!  Because in God’s eyes, we are.  They are.  There are so many differences between Ava and Queenie, whose handprint she picked out. Both are six-year-old girls, but that’s pretty much where the similarities end.  A sea of social class, language, education, opportunity, and resources separate these two princesses in the perspective of this world.  But to God, they are just the same.

There’s a video floating around facebook right now by Eric and Leslie Ludy.  Please take the time to watch this video.


For those of you with sketchy internet connections (or who just won’t take the time to click play… you know who you are…), I’m going to quote a portion of it.  Eric heard a story about a 4-year-old orphan in Liberia—a child with absolutely nothing and no one.

 “And God asked me a question: ‘What if that was Hudson?’—my 4-year-old. Oh man… You don’t mess with a Father’s heart.  If my boy was on the side of the road across the world from me, suffering, totally alone, not knowing what was happening… He’s not old enough to comprehend this! He’s abandoned! He has no one to fight for his cause, no one to give him a voice.  He doesn’t even know how to articulate his circumstances. He’s hungry, and no one is feeding him… If my son was in that situation, you could stick a concrete wall in front of me and I would claw through it with my bare hands.  This is my son we’re talking about! And if I couldn’t get there, I would call up every friend I have, and I would say, “I have a son, over in Liberia… and if you call yourself my friend, then I need you to get on a plane.  And I need you to get to him.  I’ll give you the coordinates, I’ll do whatever it takes, but I need you to get to my son, and be a father to him.

God’s response?
‘That’s my Hudson.’”

“We have a cause, but we don’t want to see it… We suffer from depraved indifference.”

And so we quote scriptures about God being a father to the fatherless and shelter to the homeless—we ask Him to feed the hungry and heal the sick.  How ironic that we do so while surrounded by our families, in well-heated homes, with a hot meal on the table and a hospital down the road.

Do we have the luxury of family?  Of defining who we would claw through a concrete wall for by whether we share the same blood with them?

“How great is the love the Father has lavished upon us, that we should be called sons and daughters of God!”

And so yes, we do have the luxury and the blessing of family—just not an exclusive one.  Not if we’re going to call ourselves the hands and feet of Christ. Not if we call ourselves His friends, His servants, His followers.

I leave you with words written by a friend.  The topic he was writing about was a very different one, but the heart of the matter is the same.

“As St. Paul wrote, ‘When we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us’ (Rom 5: 6-8). Let us be like Christ and be willing to die that others may live. That while they may still be sinners, we should die for their sake in His name. And if that means I must adopt a child before this night is through, then let me do so for the glory of God.”


Amen and amen.

John 14:8—“I will not leave you as orphans. I will come to you.”
Isaiah 6:8—“ Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, "Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?" And I said, "Here am I. Send me!"

Scrambled Thoughts & Scrambled Eggs

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.

"Do you believe in magic?"

There are a billion things I should be doing right now instead of sitting here under an electric blanket eating a Three Musketeers for dinner and writing about nothing.  I need to pack.  I need to draft about fifty emails, plan out a budget for the semester, and brainstorm ideas to plump up my currently empty Africa fundraising account. I also need to get to sleep at a decent time so I can stay awake on the ride back to Nashville tomorrow.

A cozy warm nest of blankets and a candybar sounds like much more fun though.

I had a good week.  I spent Tuesday with my mom, Wednesday with my jr. high Sunday school teacher/high school boss/very dear friend, and Thursday with an assortment of people that I had not seen in entirely too long. I thought I would share the highlights with you.

During one of my ventures, I was riding the escalator in Barnes & Noble.  I was there to pick up a book to replace one I had borrowed from a friend.  The borrowed book met a rather unfortunate ending, and I felt pretty terrible about it. In front of me on the escalator was a little sandy-haired boy, probably about eight years old.  He was holding the hand of a little girl who was maybe six.  Her dark curly hair was pulled back in pigtails, and she was tapping her little black patent shoe impatiently. "Do you believe in magic, Chloe?" the boy asked. Chloe raised one eyebrow and smirked. "No," she scoffed. "I've never seen it." The boy just smiled. "Of course not.  If you had seen it, you wouldn't have to believe in it, because you would know..."

I wanted to tell him that I do.  I believe in magic-- in the Aslan kind, anyway... the kind of magic that melts away Christmas-less winters and wakes up hearts that were turned to stone.  When we grow up, we give it different names, like Grace, Forgiveness, and Redemption.  But when we're little-- when our hearts are still innocent and adventurous enough to believe in something bigger than itself without doubt or inhibition-- we call it magic.

My two-year-old niece and two-year-old cousin both stayed then night one evening.  We spent a couple hours chasing each other through the house, growling and pouncing and screaming like banshees. As Ryleigh was falling asleep, I went to check on her.  She smiled that beautiful dimpled grin and brushed her golden curls off her face.  Then she closed her little blue eyes, sighed deeply, and said, "Goodnight, mommy. I love you so much."

Yes, I know she was half asleep and delirious. It doesn't matter. My heart grew three sizes anyway.

On Thursday I went north to Olney to meet a girl I had worked with at camp a couple of summers ago.  She's going to spend a few weeks in Kenya next summer, and it was great to catch up with her and hear what's going on in her life.  Then I kept on going north to have a late lunch with a couple of friends that I haven't seen since high school.  I really enjoyed meeting the rest of their family.  The food was absolutely amazing.  We sat at the table for hours exchanging stories, and this family definitely has some stories to tell.  They also listened-- really listened-- to my past experiences and my dreams for the future.  I really appreciated and needed that more than they could possibly have known.  Evening came far too soon, and I bid them a fond farewell as I slipped in my car to make the long drive home.  I left their house thoroughly refreshed and encouraged. They are truly wonderful people, and I hope it's not another three years before I see them again.  It was a good day; it had been a long time since I had found a good excuse to ramble on about Kazembe for hours.

I've found myself missing Kazembe more than usual this week.  I always miss it, but these past few days the faces of last summer have visited my thoughts and dreams a bit more frequently.  New Year's day will be my halfway point between the time I came back to the States last August and when I can go back to my kids in May.  While the rest of the world counts down to the dawning of a new year, I'll be counting down to my own milestone.  I should have a plane ticket within the next week or two.

Tomorrow morning I'll head back to Nashville.  As much as I've enjoyed my time in Illinois, I'm absolutely pining to get home.  I miss my friends, and I'm ready to get back into the rhythm of work, school, and coffee-shop-hopping.  I have a sneaking suspicion that it is going to be a really, really great new year.  Because I believe in Magic.

Gladys

I don't want to write this post.

You see, I started to write it weeks ago. I had written about Johnny and Elias, and a dear friend that sits next to me in one of my classes suggested that I write about Gladys next.  But Amy had just told me that Gladys was not doing well, and I didn't want to write about her under those circumstances. I didn't want to feel like I was frantically clinging to the only memories I would ever have of her. I decided I would wait until she got better.

She didn't get better. She passed away early Friday morning.

And so tonight, I will tell you about Gladys.  The order of events is probably way off, but the heart doesn't always tell stories in order.  I've written some of this before. I'm going to write it again.

It was just a normal morning.  I had cooked breakfast already and came into the living room. Timmy said good morning and casually mentioned that he thought there might be a new baby, but he wasn't sure.  I bee-lined it to the nursery, running barefoot over the dry grass, dust flying with every step.  I skidded into the room and nearly bowled Nathan over.  Honestly, I didn't know the babies well enough at this point to recognize a new face, so I just counted them. There were the right number of heads.  I went to good-naturedly berate Timmy for his mistake, only to eat my words a few minutes later when one of the nannies confirmed that there was indeed a new baby.  She said she was five months old, but she seemed a few months older than that.  I don't remember which nanny it was.  It didn't matter. All I could see was this beautiful, cranky, fat little baby, sullenly curled up in a bouncer, whimpering quietly, and glaring at me with all the mistrust that one little being could muster.  I got lost in those eyes.  It was like she knew how heavy the world was, like she knew so much more than any child should ever have to know.  She was wearing a pink and yellow dress. The body and sleeves were a silky material, and the skirt was sort of lacey.  It was faded and torn, but it was clean. 

I reached toward her.  I could feel the heat before my hands even touched her.  She was raging with fever.  My heart jumped into my throat, and I breathed a silent prayer. Sweet Lord, not another one. Not another sick baby that I didn't know how to save.  I scooped her up and held her against me. She smelled like rancid sweat and dirt.  I didn't care.

Her steady whimper turned into a full-out cry almost as soon as I got her in the main house.  Something about it made her anxious, but she calmed down if I took her outside.  I fixed her a bottle, and she refused to take it.  I tried every nipple I could find.  It was like she didn't know how to suck, or just didn't want to.  She finally struggled herself to sleep, and I laid her feverish body down in defeat.  By now I had stripped her to try and cool her off.

Her family was coming to sign the papers.  I asked Tom if I could sit in on the process, and he said that was fine.  Her mother had died from something really random-- "stomach pains," I think. Her father was someone from the Congo who had basically just been passing through.  They had fed her nothing but a few spoonfuls of "porridge" a day since her mother died.  Her unwillingness to take a bottle made more sense now.  There was so much more to the process, but eventually, the papers were signed, and the orphanage was her home.

At some point the medical officer came.  He gave her a malaria test, and it came back positive immediately.  He said to start her on Coartem, an antimalarial.  Her family had brought her medical records, but they didn't appear to actually be real.  For starters, the recorded weights for the last few months could not possibly have been right.  All of the entries were written in the same handwriting and the same pen, as if someone had hastily scrawled it down before turning the corner and handing it to us.  It was like this little girl had no past at all.

I was desperate to get her to eat.  She would sleep fitfully for a few minutes, then wake up terrified and wail until I picked her up and cradled her against me.  She instantly calmed a bit if I took her outside.  I spent so much time walking in slow circles in the shade of the big tree outside the house, singing softly to her of "dancing bears, painted wings," my own tears falling to mingle with hers, because I just couldn't make her believe that she was safe.  And still, the fever raged, despite dose after systematic dose of baby tylenol.  I worried the medicine would be too much for her system to handle-- malaria is  is vicious on the liver and spleen.  I would lay a cold cloth on her sweaty forehead, and it would literally be hot to the touch seconds later.  I sat with her on the stone wall of the courtyard that evening and bounced her from knee to knee, promising over and over again that it was all going to be okay.  I'm not sure which one of us I was trying to convince.  Majory, one of the nannies, came and sat with us.  She cooed to Gladys and stroked her bald little head.  "My child died of malaria," she said.  I didn't know what to say, so I said nothing.  Then she hugged her and gave her back to me.  I think it was the only time I saw Majory really hug one of the kids.

I made a cereal/milk mixture that was thick enough to make spooning it a little easier, and I cradled her in my lap.  Her head lolled back over my arm, and her mouth hung slack.  Her eyes stared up at me.  They weren't accusatory anymore.  They were just desperate, and tired.  I brought half a spoonful of milk to her mouth and dripped it into her cheek. She swallowed. And then she took another spoonful. And then another. And after an hour of painstakingly dripping it into her mouth, she had taken it all down.  It wasn't much-- less than 75ml, I think-- but it was something, and for the first time, I let myself believe that maybe, just maybe, we might be able to fight through this together.

The cat adopted her.  At first, I put her in the cradle to sleep, but she was really too big for it, and she slept so lightly that if she moved at all and touched the cold metal bars, she would wake up screaming.  Chai did her best to help.  That first night, I curled up on the couch with the cradle next to me so I could reach out and check on her if I needed to.  Chai slept pretty much on my face, with her tail draped lazily over my shoulder.  If Gladys moved at all, Chai would hop into the cradle.  I woke up more than once to find her snuggled up next to her, and each time I wondered if angels came in feline form.

The fever came in waves, like it does with malaria.  I struggled to keep the Coartem down her.  She spit up an awful lot for a child who was barely taking down calories at all, and she was pretty much guaranteed to spit up if I gave her the medicine. 

One morning one of the nannies and I took several of the babies, including Gladys and Jessie, down to the clinic.  There was a group of women sitting a few feet away.  The nanny translated for me.  They had commented on each of the children in turn. Referring to Gladys, they said, "She is very dark. But also beautiful."

And she was. She was easily the blackest kid at the orphanage, to the point that she looks almost comical in the pictures I have of her next to the other babies.  She had a heavy brow and a flat nose with big round nostrils.  Her full pink lips were dreadfully difficult to coax into one of her rare grins, but when she did smile, you knew she meant it.  She would blow spit bubbles sometimes to amuse herself.  She wasn't "pretty" maybe in the way that the world defines it, but I thought she was absolutely drop-dead gorgeous, even if she could produce more snot than any child I have ever laid eyes on. 

With only two doses of Coartem left, her fever was still going strong. The medical officer gave me a baggie of Quinine to give her.  He cut the pills into quarters and left me dosing instructions (which, many weeks later, I discovered were actually way wrong).  The quinine was so bitter that she wouldn't swallow it at all.  I swear this kid could throw up just on impulse.  I tried it for a day and a half, but it just wasn't working.  We switched to injection.  I don't remember how much they were giving her per injection, but I remember it was an awfully large amount.  A baby can only handle about 0.5mL a shot. I think she was getting about 4 times that. Her hip would swell as the fluid was injected, and she would cry in pain if I accidentally put any pressure on the area.  After a day and a half of going to the clinic three times a day and waiting around for someone to show up and give her the shot, they finally sent the medicine home with me to give her.  Three times a day, I walked down to the nursery to give it to her. I hated doing it.  I know how nasty that medicine is, and I could see the physical pain it put her in.  It can cause terrible hallucinations as well as permanent deafness and muscle damage, among other things. 

Then one morning, the fever broke, and it didn't come back. That was also the first morning that she smiled at me without some major prompting.  I just walked in the room, and she smiled.

Eventually, she got to the point that she was trying to gum the spoon to death every time I dropped some formula in her mouth.  I tried a bottle again, but she didn't seem to know how to suck.  I found a nipple that was split at the end so that the milk came out in a fairly steady stream.  She took it.  I had to be careful not to give it to her for more than a few seconds because she couldn't quite swallow fast enough to keep up if I did, but it helped her get the hang of a bottle.  Then we moved to a normal nipple, and finally she was drinking like any healthy baby would.

She moved to the nursery about halfway through this process because Jessie had come and was demanding pretty much every spare moment I had to give.  I just couldn't handle both of them at once.  I managed it for two nights, but but they were both eating every two hours, so by the time I fed one and got her to sleep and fed the other it was pretty much time to make a bottle for the first one again.  Timmy, Jazz, and Troy were great to take them of a morning so that I could go grab a few hours of solid sleep, but I figured the night nannies were there for a reason, and they could handle Gladys through the night.  I had her a lot through the day though, at least until Jessie got worse.  She was very, very clingy.  She had finally come to trust me, but it was that kind of fragile trust that comes at first, where every time I left the room or put her down she seemed to think I wasn't coming back to pick her up again.  Timmy often commented that she was a rather ugly baby (I think partly to annoy me...), but I think he kind of liked her.  Once I came into the living room to find him dancing with her to some terrible rock music.  She loved it.

She spent a lot of time in the dining room and kitchen with me.  One morning Essie scooped her up and comforted her.  Sometimes I would put her in the little chair that hooks onto the counter and let her play while I bustled around doing whatever.  One time someone gave her a piece of bread to play with, and she thoroughly enjoyed slobbering it into a mushy mess and rubbing it into the counter.

When I would walk into the nursery, whatever nanny was there would jump at the chance to hand her over to me.  Gladys was never an easy baby, even after the malaria was gone.  They would say, "Your baby is crying for you. Your baby wants you. Your baby, she cries too much."  She was kind of stubborn.  She wouldn't stretch both arms up for me, but she would hold one hand out when she saw me, as if to say, "Yeah, you can pick me up if you want..."

I loved to go in the nursery first thing in the morning as all the kids were getting dressed.  I was helping one of the toddlers into a pair of jeans and distractedly asked a couple of the kids to go rock Gladys in her bouncer, because she was crying and my hands were full.  I looked up five seconds later to see Moriah rocking the bouncer with every ounce of her toddler strength.  Glady's startled face, which was flying systematically up and down, made me laugh out loud.  Thankfully, she was strapped in, or else Moriah would have bounced her headfirst onto the stone floor.  I jumped up and grabbed her, and she gave me this scowl that clearly said, "Yeah, thanks..." before dropping her head solidly on my shoulder and sighing theatrically.

Even though she was probably about the same age as Ana and Ephraim, she wasn't nearly as developmentally advanced as they were.  She spent most of her playtime sitting on the mat, leaned up against whoever was closest to her, watching the world around her with those giant eyes.  She was a very low stimulus kid.  Antics that would make the other babies around her age laugh didn't phase her at all.  She wasn't particularly happy or unhappy; she was just sort of uninterested, or shy, like she was reserving judgment for now. 

The morning Jessie died, Amy reminded me, "You still have Gladys."  I needed to fill my empty arms with something, so I went and got her from the nursery and sat with her on that same spot on the wall where Majory had met us five weeks before.  I fed her the morning bottle and talked to the kinders, who had all gathered around me, as one by one the Texas group emerged from their rooms to be met by the news that we had lost Jessie.  I carried her around a lot that day, and in the days that followed.  The Quinine had left it's mark-- she cried in pain if I absentmindedly patted her on the bottom-- but her hearing appeared to be intact.  Amy took her at one point and was playing with her on the couch, and she made her giggle.  I played with her fat, round little toes and daydreamed about how strange it would be to come back the next summer and find her walking and talking. 

The morning we left, I didn't hug her goodbye. She was asleep, and I didn't want to wake her up. She sleeps so lightly, you see, and I hated to disturb her.

And that's how I'll always remember her.  She was asleep on her stomach, both arms wrapped up around her head.  Her mouth was partly open. Her head was facing away from me to the right.  She was wearing a tie-dye shirt and matching shorts that a friend of mine's aunt had sent as a donation.  Her long eyelashes curved down to meet those black, round cheeks, and she was peaceful.  I whispered to her that it wouldn't be long.  Just a few months.

Weeks passed, and school did its best to eat me alive. One morning Timmy chatted me on facebook to let me know that he had walked into the nursery to find Gladys struggling onto all-fours, trying to crawl.  I was so proud of her.

Timmy took some pictures of the kids and posted them on facebook for those of us who were stuck stateside.  Gladys' face had thinned out so much.  Of all the kids, it seemed like she had changed the most since I had left.  She was starting to look a bit more like a little girl and a bit less like a baby.

Time went on.  Amy told me one morning that Gladys was not doing well. My chest tightened.

I knew that Amy had taken her to the hospital.  My head expected the worst.  My heart wouldn't believe it, not even when the phone call came, and so I stared at the screen that said "Unknown ID" and willed it not to be.  Before I could make myself answer it, the call went to voicemail.  The message confirmed what my heart knew.  Gladys was gone.

It's hard to process it, really.  I'm not there.  I didn't see her get sick, and I wasn't with her when she finally gave up.  Part of me thinks it won't be completely real until I get back to that crib where I left her and see that she's not in it.  It's been an interesting thing to try and handle during the holidays.  Someone commented rather coldly that life didn't stop mattering just because one baby had died.  They're right. Quite to the contrary, in fact. The things in life that do matter become much clearer, and suddenly what's under the tree and whether that carol has been overplayed this year and all of the consumerist tradition that has grown up to be a holiday really doesn't matter at all.  It's all in perspective, I suppose.

These are the fleeting memories I have of her.  They're not much, but they are precious to me, as she is.  I've caught my self humming a lullaby for the past couple of days.  It's one I wanted to share with her when I saw her again.  Maybe she's listening now.

"Goodnight my angel, time to close your eyes
And save these questions for another day
I think I know what you've been asking me
I think you know what I've been trying to say
I promised I would never leave you
Then you should always know
Wherever you may go, no matter where you are
I never will be far away."

Deliver Us

Christmas is coming.  It is the season of Advent, and the promise of the “not yet” can be heard, barely a whisper, calling from the quietest corners of an earth begging silently for Deliverance. 

Prince of Egypt is one of my favorite movies.  It tells the story of Moses and the Exodus. The kids in Kazembe love it too, and we were sure to watch it at least once a week during video time.  There is so much more to the story than meets the eye.

It is, first and foremost, a story of Deliverance.  The Israelites are desperate.  They are carrying loads, both literal and spiritual, that are too much for them to bear, and their hope is breaking.  The first song is a hungry plea with an echoing refrain: “Deliver us!”

But there was no reply. Heaven was silent.

And then Pharaoh felt that his position was threatened by the growing number of Israelites, so he decreed that every baby boy be thrown into the Nile.  Israel cried over the blood of her innocents…

 and still, heaven was silent.

But one little boy was saved. He was hidden within Egypt itself, drawn from the river and protected by royalty.  And so Moses slept safe and warm in the palace of a people not his own.  He knew luxury and plenty, and he was protected.

Then something changed.  The Bible doesn’t tell us what prompted Moses’ curiosity, and the movie takes a bit of creative license, but it seems that Moses was drawn to the world outside the alabaster walls of the palace.  At least twice, he ventured out to peer upon the pain and desperation of his own people.  I wonder if he realized that it could have been him carrying that load.  He saw an Egyptian beating an Israelite, and Moses killed the Egyptian.  He then fled to avoid Pharaoh’s wrath.

Twice an exile-- and both times to save his life-- Moses then wandered to Midian.  He rescued some damsels in distress and got a wife out of the deal, and then he settled down to live a nice quiet life.

But heaven was listening after all.  And Moses’ life was about to be wrecked by Grace.

He found himself standing on Holy Ground surrounded by the glory of God, and then he was told to go.

And so he went. I bet he didn’t want to.  Not completely, anyway.  I’m sure he felt a fair amount of helpless compassion for the nation he had left behind, but he was just one man, and he was well aware of his weaknesses.  He had a nice, normal, comfortable life in Midian.  To return, to face the only “family” he had known growing up and demand from them something he felt sure they wouldn’t willingly give, must have been terrifying.  But he went.

In the movie, Moses’ father-in-law reminds him that he might not see the full picture.  A single thread in the tapestry can never know its role in the grand design, and so he must seek to look at his life through heaven’s eyes, as a part of a story so much bigger than himself.

I wonder if Moses felt brave, or if he just knew that he had to do it anyway and hoped that courage would come with the doing.  I kind of think it might have been the latter.

I wonder how it felt to look his “brother” in the eye (the movie holds that the Pharaoh whom Moses confronted was his adopted brother, and many Biblical scholars agree) and tell him that if he didn’t free Egypt’s workforce then terrible calamity would befall him.  I wonder if he felt a little silly saying it, because Pharaoh didn’t believe in the same God that Moses did, and Moses knew this.  You might as well threaten me with the wrath of Ra.

I wonder if Moses’ heart broke a little bit every time Pharaoh’s stubbornness brought the judgment of heaven raining down. And I wonder what he felt when his “nephew,” son of the Pharaoh, died the night of Passover because he had not been redeemed by the blood of the sacrificial lamb.

And finally, with the blood of that lamb, the cry for deliverance, lowercase “d,” was answered.  Moses and his people walked out of Egypt.  God saved them again at the Red Sea, and they knew, without a doubt, because they had seen it, that God was with them.

The movie ends there.  What it doesn’t tell you is that the next thing you know, all of those newly delivered people turned their back on their Deliverer and made a golden cow to worship instead. 

Moses’ story was a distant foreshadowing of something greater.  Many, many generations later, another child would be born.  Another king would try to kill Him, and Royalty would rescue Him, because He was Royalty.  He would be hidden in Egypt for a time, and when He grew up, He too would demand the Deliverance, capital “D,” of his people.  But the blood of animals can never really redeem anything, and so He became the Passover lamb Himself. 

And so it turns out that heaven was listening all along.

Sometimes I feel like the Israelites.  When materialism and selfish gain drown out the joy that should be Christmas, my heart cries, “Deliver us.”  When my dreams are visited by the faces of those I couldn’t save, “Deliver us.” As I fall to my knees, unable to choke out the words of a desperate prayer for a sick child that I can’t be there to hold, “Deliver us.”  When I wonder how I will ever be strong enough to board a plane and leave friends, family, relationships, and everything else I’ve accumulated here, while simultaneously knowing that I will never be strong enough not to, “Deliver us.”  When I fail to represent Him well (or at all), “Deliver us.”

But He has. He has delivered us. Christmas is coming.

The word “Hosanna” originally meant “Save us!” It is only used once in the Old Testament, in Psalm 118:25.  In the New Testament, it takes on a different meaning. It is a cry of exultation, a joyous declaration of “Salvation!”  John Piper explains it as the difference between fans who are screaming for a safety to catch the quarterback: the old hosanna screams, “Catch him!” The new hosanna declares, “You got him!”  As Piper says, “The word moved from plea to praise; from cry to confidence.”

My hosanna is somewhere in the middle tonight. I know Deliverance has come, but I see around me a world that seems to have forgotten it, or never knew it in the first place, or thinks it knows it but lives a life that screams to the contrary.  I repeat the same tired prayer for Gladys, terribly sick and so very far away, and I hope with everything I have that heaven will answer-- because even though it makes absolutely no sense at all to most of you reading this, I love that little girl with all of my heart, the same way you love your child, or your sister, or whoever it is that you dearly love. I don’t know where my thread fits into the tapestry, but it seems to be hopelessly interwoven with those of the children of Kazembe.

In this moment, I whisper, “Hosanna.”

Christmas is coming.