there i am free

It's difficult to put this week into words. Though I've wanted to. Every evening I have opened my computer, but my fingers lay still against the keys. The words are stuck somewhere between my throat and my heart. Or somewhere deeper still, where they are the unformed substance that makes blood flow through veins, where they blow on the delicate wings of butterflies in bellies.

Now, I write from the room I've been staying in this week. Across the hall, a college student. Downstairs, a family with two young children, one of whom knows my name and keeps asking how long I'll stay. Outside, about a mile to the south, the university I attended more than a decade ago, and further on, miles of farms and trees and open land. The bed in this room has borrowed sheets and an unzipped green nylon sleeping bag for a comforter, which keeps me warm enough. I have a key to the house, and a living room and kitchen at my disposal at the big house next door, which houses international students. No car, and a half mile walk to a grocery store if I need anything.

After our first day, I watched out the window as one of our trainers -- a woman my age -- drove away. Done with work, headed home to her husband and her normal evening routine. I started crying because I wanted my car and my apartment and my normal evening routine. I did not want the dinner of chicken thighs and peas and salad that had been prepared for me to eat with the international college students. I did not want to feel so lost and limited to this room and the company of the students in the big house.

The next morning, I walked over to the big house at 7am. Inside, a young man was playing piano loudly (I had been hoping for some quiet), and I drank Folger's coffee and ate a banana. It is moments like these that I am not too sure what I've gotten myself into.

We drove twenty minutes in an old van with the interior falling apart to a small office building to start our second day of training. As Christians do, we started with worship. I held a second cup of coffee in one hand and closed my eyes and opened my heart. Where you are, there I am free, we sang. Free -- I wanted that. I paid more attention.

That's what I needed, that freedom that comes wherever I am. Or, wherever Jesus is. At a house in the middle of farmland with no car and a bed covered in a green nylon sleeping bag. In Nairobi, where it will take me some time to learn how to get around and who my friends will be. At my sisters', where I will be tomorrow when this training ends, and where kids are waiting for me to play Star Wars with them. In Pasadena, where my car and apartment are waiting for me to establish normal evening routines again (though who knows...).

words like these

Jon walked over to where Jen and I sat on the couch with three spoons fanned in his hand. Each spoon held a stiff mound of chocolate icing from the cake their daughter baked and iced a few hours earlier. He handed one to Jen, then one to me, and the three of us sat and licked the sweet chocolate. I felt like a child who had just been given a treat. We continued to catch each other up on our lives. Jon used phrases like, "I heard the Spirit say" and shared about shifting in his spirit that started more than a year ago and was now taking shape in job interviews. Outside, out the glass doors that held our view as we talked, light held as a gray covering over the damp day. Evening would come soon.

We sat here again the next afternoon after church. This time, Jon brought us coffee and omelets folded in fours with spinach and melted cheese in its creases. This time, Jen used words like "dream big" and "surprised" as she described conversations she'd been hoping for over the past few years that finally felt like they were taking shape. After we talked, I changed out of my church clothes, put on slippers, kept a warm blanket over my lap and looked again out the glass windows at the light that was still gray.

Later, another friend came by and sat with us on the couch. I told my story, tentative, because it has become more fragile, as if anxiety has made tiny cracks that could spider web without warning. She held it as if she knew the cracks were there, and could be healed with a new telling. She used words like "not easily categorized" to reassure me that it's ok to live a life that doesn't look familiar to my parents or to health insurance companies. She used words like "gifts" to describe transactions she thinks will take place once I move to Kenya.

The gray light stayed all weekend. I walked in it as it set that second night. I was free to wander, guessing I'd know how to find my way back to their house.

those who know they thirst

You see, I want a lot.
Maybe I want it all:
the darkness of each endless fall,
the shimmering light of each ascent.

So many are alive who don't seem to care.
Casual, easy, the move in the world
as though untouched.

But you take pleasure in the faces
of those who know they thirst.
You cherish those
who grip you for survival.

You are not dead yet, it's not too late
to open your depths by plunging into them
and drink in the life
that reveals itself quietly there.

Rilke, from Book of Hours

... a favorite, always

***
(photo: niece, who teaches me to want, new years eve)

preparing the day

I walked down the steps in the quiet house this morning. All the other bedroom doors were still closed. With the faint light of the Christmas tree in the living room, I made coffee and settled under a heated blanket, willing my mind and heart to wake up to these few minutes alone before the other bedroom doors opened and feet and legs carried more people downstairs.

My sister was the first of them to come down. Her husband followed soon after. We said good morning, and then they left me to my reading and praying in the dim light. In the next room, the kitchen lit up the day brighter than the hidden sun outside could, and I heard drawers and the fridge and little lunch bags opening and closing and filling and emptying. The two little ones upstairs slept until their dad went to stir them awake.

As I prayed, I wondered about how my Father had been preparing the day before me even while I still slept.

***

Years ago, during my first year out of college, this happened one night: I needed my dad, but he was asleep and wouldn't be wakened. I had called home, hoping he would listen and give me the advice I needed. My mother had answered and relayed that he wouldn't come to the phone. I hung up, feeling overwhelmed and afraid and, though becoming an adult, very much in need of a father. That night, I notched another disappointment on the long tally regarding my father I had started long ago.

And then this happened: I heard a voice remind me he who keeps you will neither slumber nor sleep. 

Somehow, this other Father I was still becoming acquainted with was so very different from my earthly one. Awake when I needed him, attentive to my cry, able to meet my needs.

***

I will not leave you orphaned. I read this in the morning as I pray by the dim light of the Christmas tree and think of it as little feet pad down the steps, eyes still heavy with deep sleep. They pull cereal from the shelf and load their arms with milk, bowl, spoon. They pour and eat as their mother sits next to them -- awake and ready -- her presence and questions meant to convey love and protection and preparation for this new day.

***
(photo: sunlight in a coffee shop)

a new orientation

My  first trip to Kenya, I never knew where I was. I guess this often happens when you visit a new city, when you haven't walked or driven those streets, haven't seen that tree or billboard or building before. But this disorientation felt particular. There was a way of getting from one place to another that felt unfamiliar in a whole new way. On my first day there, we drove from Nairobi to a small Maasai village near the border of Tanzania, and the second half of the trip wasn't guided by a road that showed us the way forward. Our drivers made their own way (or, remembered the one from before) over dusty ground and through thorny acacia trees. Then, there it was: a building, seemingly in the middle of nowhere.

I thought of that feeling of disorientation, then sudden arrival, as I read The Bright Continent. A book about a new way of looking at Africa, its author opens by using maps and orientation as an illustration for how we would journey together through this book and its stories. Expect a Google map of the continent and you'll miss the important landmarks that are really the way to get from A to B. Be guided by those on the ground, and you'll find your way.

This book is well-written and well-researched. And, as someone who is Nigerian and has lived in the West as well, the author is able to straddle the continental culture divide and pull you along with her to explore stories of people and organizations in Africa and help you see them in a new light. Her main point is that, if we look from a formality-bias -- expecting Africa to conform to formal institutions and ways of doing things in the West -- we will miss the informal and customary traditions and innovations that are helping communities and individuals thrive.

I found this book at a used bookstore earlier this fall, and oh how I needed it. It started taking me apart, in the smallest ways, and readied me to be completely disoriented when I arrive in Kenya in a little over a month. I like maps, I like plans, I formality. But, now, I'm a little more ready to look in new ways.

Friends -- this is it. My last book completed this year, my last blog post on books I've read in 2016. Phew.

***
(photo: Nairobi streets)

these winter rains

Today, the temperature is cold enough to chill, just warm enough to keep things from freezing. It is raining. From where I sit in my parents' den, I can hear car tires sloshing water aside as they drive by, drops dancing on the box air conditioner that chills this room in the summer. Out the window behind me, everything is shades of gray and brown. Tree branches are silhouettes against the barely-lit sky. It is the kind of day that makes you want to hide under a heavy blanket.

They say home is where the heart is, and I guess they are right. I am always looking for ways to get back here, to the place where the roads swerve between old farm houses and trees sprouted up long ago beside tiny creeks. Like veins in the hand, these roads could tell you about my life: how I got from there to here, the places I traveled, they way my life was formed. And yet, once here, I find my heart is still restless. My heart isn't really here; this isn't really home anymore. Or, it is home, but this isn't what I'm really searching for. Because it is also where my heart grew around hurt. I imagine the roots of those same trees, thirsty for water, cut short when the roads were paved years ago. Necessary to keep life moving, but without regard for some of the precious growth still happening beneath the surface.

Still, the trees are rooted. Their trunks grow thick. They shoot leaves and bear their fruit. Grace.

I have been trying to figure this out, the way my heart yearns for family. Then, once I am here, I remember, even in my body, the old ways we all learned to accommodate or ignore or just get by. I slip into these old moves we learned together and feel unfamiliar to myself. Not that I have turned every old leaf into something new, but there is a dullness that comes over me, a decision to just let things be. That is how we learn to survive, and maybe that is fitting for some seasons. And yet. I am learning to ask, seek and knock, still learning to turn and live, so this settling feels unnatural. This, too, is grace. 

Spring is a long way off still, but the nights are getting shorter. These winter rains are watering the ready ground and making way for what has died to feed new life. May it be so.

***
(photo: childhood home backyard, old maple tree in a season without its leaves)

half, whole, made one

I am having trouble finding a starting place. But here is one: last night, after dinner, my sisters and their husbands and me sitting around the table, empty dessert plates, surrendered forks, pie crumbs. Phone in hand, I look for a photo to show one of them. I see one of me at a fancy event wearing a dress that stopped well above my knees. I hold it up for my mom, who moved around us to clear the table of dessert, and who, when I was young, always lectured me for wearing dresses and skirts that were too short. Now, it's a joke I perpetuate. I can't believe you called me a hussy! I say, remembering our fights.

I'd have a hard time bending over in that dress, my sister says.

I tell her you don't bend over, you bend down. And anyway, men should do things for you when you where that kind of dress.

That starts it -- a short, heated exchange between my brother-in-law and me about what I meant by that comment. Double standard, we both accuse the other of holding. Way to advance the feminist agenda, he says to me. I never claimed to be trying, I shoot back.

We both let it go, both go back to our phones or the other conversations happening around the table. I try to understand why I feel so frustrated and why I had a hard time communicating what it was I actually did mean. I also wonder why he responded so strongly, and how he's felt hurt or deceived or let down by women in his life. (Or, it's completely possible I read too deeply into his reaction.)

Earlier in the day, I had tried to start writing this post, so I was thinking a lot about to my response the book I'd just read. From a writerly perspective, Half the Church was just ok. The author is clear enough, but not necessarily very skilled or artful as a writer. She draws largely on her emotional response to reading another book, Half the Sky, which leads me to think she didn't do extensive research on the themes she attempts to address. My hunch is that the book is mostly ideas recycled from her past books and studies, compiled as a response to some global issues she is just beginning to think about.

But that aside, I deeply appreciated this book. Much of it is an exposition of the creation stories in Genesis -- her starting point for much of what she has to say about women and their relationship to men and to our world. I love thinking about those original intentions God had for man and woman when he created us, and reading this book now -- during a season when I've had many new questions and doubts about how our relationships can be redeemed in a very practical way -- gave me a newly grounded desire and hope.

I'm also grateful for the author's ability to see in scripture the dignity, love and purpose God gives to His people, so that more than commands to obey, the Word is read as messages and stories that are meant to empower and expand. She draws largely on Jesus's command to love the Lord with all of our hearts, souls, minds and strengths, and suggests it's an invitation to live more expansively than we'd previously imagined. It's also a call to all of us to make it possible for women all over the world to respond to the invitation.

She doesn't stop in Genesis. She writes that throughout, the Bible stretches our imaginations and calls for a complete paradigm shift. New Testament teachings expose the fact that the way of relating as male and female that we lost back in Eden looks nothing like anything we see in our world today. To help us see this, Jesus resurrects a form of higher math that originated in Eden. In Jesus, she writes, we see a new kind of relational one-ness (in the trinity) in action. In him, we also see God's original intentions for us as image-bearers. This reminder of Jesus also felt incredibly hope-giving to me.

***
(photo: just because i like it)