Tuck: Rocks Beside the Road

I have been thinking a lot lately about one of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite books, Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt.  Yes, it's young adult literature, but it's also incredibly good, and really quite deep.  It explores concepts of eternity, of seasons and circles, of change and growth. In one poiniant chapter Pa Tuck has a conversation with our young protagonist, Winnie, in which he explains why living forever and never ageing or changing is actually not a good thing.  His words, rocks beside the road have echoed in my mind for many years.  It's a long quote here, to give you the context,but hang with me. It's that good. 

"Know what that is, all around us, Winnie?" said Tuck, his voice low. "Life. Moving, growing, changing, never the same two minutes together. This water, you look out at it every morning, and it looks the same, but it ain't. All night long it's been moving, coming in through the stream back there to the west, slipping out through the stream down east here, always quiet, always new, moving on...

It's a wheel, Winnie. Everything's a wheel, turning and turning, never stopping. The frogs is part of it, and the bugs, and the fish, and the wood thrush too. And people. But never the same ones. Always coming in new, always growing and changing, and always moving on. That's the way it's supposed to be. That's the way it is...

But dying's part of the wheel, right there next to being born. You can't pick out the pieces you like and leave the rest. Being part of the whole thing, that's the blessing. But it's passing us by, us Tucks. Living's heavy work, but off to one side, the way we are, it's useless too. It don't make sense. If I knowed how to climb back on the wheel, I'd do it in a minute. You can't have living without dying. So you can't call it living, what we got. We just are, we just be, like rocks beside the road. 

Now, Pa Tuck focuses on the dying part of living, but for me, it's more the changing part of living that I don't like. I don't even like changing shampoo much less anything actually important. Or big. But Tuck's words remind me time and time again that if I'm not changing, not growing, than I'm not really living. If I don't allow those around me to change and grow, than I'm not allowing them to live either. 

This wheel of change is not easy. Living's heavy work says Tuck. My friends move into town, which means they go to a different church, which means I lose my Sunday lunch buddies and friends at church. We all move on from different things at different times. Kids back home grow and change and I miss major phases and stages. Even my little people that I see all the time- they change faster than you can blink. People come and go, they move, or yes, sometimes they die. We feel the weight of the wheel as it turns and we run to catch up with it, to move on, always new. And somedays when that strain feels too much I remember the alternative, a rock beside the road, and I sigh, and pick up, and keep turning. 

Dreams

This Langston Hughes poem has been running through my mind a lot lately. One of my biggest childhood dreams slowly died a few years ago and it has taken awhile for the loss to really sink in. But as it has, and the tears have fallen, I have been reminded that I have to keep dreaming, even if it opens me up to the possibility of more hurt. That one dream has passed and died, which I guess just means it is time to replace it with a new one, and hold fast. 

Dreams

Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.

Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow. 

Langston Hughes

More or Less

While Up North this summer I wandered into a bookstore and stumbled into a book titled More or Less, which deals with the question, What is enough? And, how much is enough? It was a book about generosity and generous living, about what we do with the bit we have that is more than enough, the excess. It reminded me a lot of a verse I read earlier this summer that really struck me: The world and all its wanting, wanting, wanting is on the way out- but whoever does what God wants is set for eternity (1 John 2:17).

One advantage of living overseas, that I have stated before, is that each summer I have the chance to completely step away from my regular life, my day to day life, which gives me a unique perspective and chance to evaluate how I live. This book gave me lots of think about in that regard, without being judgmental or condescending. It has caused me to look again at the words need and want and how I confuse them in my life. It has caused me to look at my wardrobe and wonder just how many shirts and shoes a person can actually wear. It has caused me to look at how I spend my time, and who I am spending it on- myself or others. 

Our More, our Excess, does not always come in physical material ways. It also comes in time or connections or opportunities. And while I have certainly thought before about how I can be generous with my time, I had never before considered how I can be generous with my connections or opportunities.  I have long craved a simpler life (I am sure in no part because I somehow think it will also be less stressful) and this book encouraged me to do so in ways that would not just be for the goal of simplicity, but generosity.  

And it's not all about downsizing, which I like. For example, it might be a 'simpler life' if I moved back into my studio apartment and didn't keep a guest room (where in addition to guests I also store a lot of stuff). But if I moved, I would also lose a lot of opportunities for generosity and hospitality. It's not about how big your house is, it's about what you do with the space you have. 

Anyway, it's a good book and quick read and I highly recommend it. I am excited to get back into life and clean out my closet and make dinner for people and live more intentionally in many areas. 

God Wins: thoughts on genocide

I'm not a huge movie person.  There are essentially two kinds of movies I like: based on a true story and based on a Jane Austen novel.  This evening I watched one of the former, Hotel Rwanda.  On Friday I borrowed a copy from a friend and after a hot day at Nak Suu today I decided to relax in the AC and watch it.  Several years ago I read Left to Tell  by Immaculée Ilibaguza (which I believe is currently in the Collins library) and it left a deep impression on me.  So on my flights here in January I read We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families by Philip Gourevitch (which I will return to the Collins library in June).  Both books deal with the horrific events of 1994 which are the root cause of horrific events in the Democratic Republic of the Congo today.  When I was job searching a little over a year ago Kigali was one of the cities receiving serious consideration.  All this to say, this is a movie I've been wanting to see for a long time. 

If you haven't seen the film, I highly recommend it.  Tears flowed freely at several points as I watched the grief and loss of families torn apart not just by war, but by genocide.  What strikes me the most when I read about what happened in Rwanda, or in Cambodia or any other number of places, is that the rest of the world knew what was going on- and did nothing- even after the lessons from the Holocaust (did we really learn anything from that?). As Edmund Burke famously said, "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."  But even as I type that I realize how complicated that is for foreign governments, and how frequently UN peacekeepers are quite useless.

Sometimes I wonder, what is going on in the world today that we know about, yet are doing nothing?  Several places come to mind that are in the midst of terrible conflict, some with spokespeople or intervention and some without, but it all makes me so grateful that God is a God of justice.  No matter how many tears I cry- at the atrocities in memoirs or movies or in the news or in my own city- they are nothing compared to the tears that he cries.  Honestly, if I didn't know that God wins, that he knows and sees all things and that he will come for judgement, than I don't think I could live in this world.

Everywhere you look there is suffering- it crosses the boundaries of race and nationality and class and religion.  I see heartbreak and poverty every day on the streets of Bangkok.  I saw it on the streets of Detroit.  Every church, temple, mosque, or synagogue on planet earth if full of hurting broken people.  And yet, God offers us hope, and that is why I can learn about all this stuff and still get out of bed in the morning.  God wins.  That's the bottom line.  God brings justice to Rwanda, to Cambodia, to the streets of Syria and Egypt.  I need to do all I can to fight and stand for justice now, but rest assured, what we cannot see, God can.  What we cannot avenge, he will.  On the last page of the book, when the last word of the story has been written, God wins.

One Month

I leave one month from today.  This fact has little to do with this blog post, but it is nonetheless, monumental in my mind and deserves mention. 

I spent the last week Up North at Long Lake and, amongst other things, read two books.  One of them was a nice light beach read.  The other was the kind of book that can change your life, challenge how you live it, and stick with you forever.  The Hole in our Gospel by Richard Stearns is not a heavy theological read.  I wish I could quote the whole thing to you right here, but I know I would lose my handful of readers.   Rich Stearns is the President of World Vision US and his book paints a picture of poverty around the world and what we are called to do about it.  I love the way he weaves quotes throughout the book- both verses from the Bible and quote from religious leaders and many others.  He starts by telling the story of how he came to World Vision from his CEO position and how seeing poverty close up has changed him and his family.  It's not preachy or judgmental, even as he shows how little effort it would actually take from the world's wealthy to make a significant impact on the world's poor.  For me, it changes how I pack for Thailand, how I plan to use my salary there, and my free time.  It changes what I do with many of the items I won't take with me, and I hope, how I will live when I am there.  I am quite willing, even eager, to loan out my copy of The Hole in our Gospel; let me know if you'd like to borrow it. 


So I won't bore you with long quotes from the book, but I will give you just this one.  When you see poverty in the world and are overwhelmed and feel useless in the fight, remember this African saying: If you think you are too small to make a difference, try spending the night in a closed room with a mosquito.  

Words, palabras, kam

I love words. I think maybe on some level, I have always known this, but it has certainly become more apparent to me in recent days. I love language. I love reading and writing and speaking and listening. I love Spanish and the mystery of translation and communication. I love learning Thai and being able to utter even the most basic sentences. I love how words carry so much meaning, how they paint pictures, how they connect people, how they heal.

I've been reading through many of my favorite books in recent months, books that never make the trip overseas with me. My latest book is The Dance of Life by one of my all-time favorite authors, Henri Nouwen. I was introduced to Nouwen in college and was immediately struck by his depth of writing. The Dance of Life is a collection of many of his writings and my copy is entirely dog-earred, underlined, and starred- though one passage struck me this week as especially applicable for where I am today. I've written before of the inner struggle between joy and sadness, about leaving Argentina, about being here, about going to Thailand. Here, Nouwen writes about such complex emotions:

Our life is a short time in expectation, a time in which sadness and joy kiss each other at every moment. There is a quality of sadness that pervades all the moments of our life. It seems that there is no such thing as clear-cut pure joy but that, even in the most happy moments of our existence, we sense a twinge of sadness. In every satisfaction, there is an awareness of its limitations. In every success, there is the fear of jealousy. Behind every smile, there is a tear. In every embrace, there is loneliness. In every friendship, distance. And in all forms of light, there is knowledge of surrounding darkness.

Joy and sadness are as close to each other as the splendid colored leaves of a New England fall to the soberness of the barren trees. When you touch the hand of a returning friend, you already know that he will have to leave you again. When you are moved by the quiet vastness of a sun-covered ocean, you miss the friend who cannot see the same. Joy and sadness are born at the same time, both arising from such deep places in your heart that you can't find words to capture your complex emotions.

I wonder that too...

A quote from my current read (God Grew Tired of Us, a memoir of the Lost Boys of Sudan, by John Bul Dau). Here's a passage where he describes his cultural orientation class as he was preparing to move from Kenya to Syracuse, New York:

"Then he said, "I will show you how cold it gets in American." He reached into a box and pulled out something that looked like a piece of glass, only rounded like a river rock.
"Feel this," he said, and he placed it in my hand. It felt so cold, yet it seemed to burn.
"Crush it," he said.
I tried to close my hand, but I could not crush it.
"That is water. It gets so cold in America that water sometimes turns hard. We call this an 'ice cube.' Feel it, and feel the cold in America."
I was amazed. How could people live in a land where water turned to stone?

Suffering

In Argentina, my friends and I had a phrase we would tell ourselves or one another when someone was complaining about life: "well, there is genocide in the world." Not meant to be taken lightly, it was our friendly and gentle way to reminder each other that we don't have anything to complain about in light of the suffering going on in the world around us.

That suffering, in its various forms, has been coming to my attention a lot lately. One reason is because of the books I've been reading. In August I read A Thousand Sisters, a memoir by Lisa Shannon. It highlights the violence in the Eastern Congo, and especially the sexual violence against women and girls. This past week I read The Enough Moment by John Prendergast and Don Cheadle (actor from Hotel Rwanda), which discusses the fight to end genocide (esp in Sudan), child soldiers (abducted by the Lord's Resistance Army), and rape as a weapon of war (esp in the Congo). One thing that I liked about both of these books is that they are both informative and hopeful. The Enough Moment especially highlights repeatedly the success stories of peace and rehabilitation in Africa, and how they can be used as frameworks for solving the current conflicts.

When we read these stories and hear the testimonials, the question becomes, what are we going to do about it? Luckily, organizations like The Enough Project and Run for Congo Women make it easy to get involved. You can sponsor a rape survivor in the Congo or support schools in refugee camps in Darfur. At the website for RAISE Hope For Congo you can send emails to electronics manufacturers asking for conflict-free products. It takes about 30 seconds. We can write or call our Senators and Congressmen encouraging them to raise awareness and support legislation that works towards peace, civilian protection, and the prosecution of the leaders involved.

But we don't have to go to Africa to see suffering either. I see it in communities all around me. And it's easy to get discouraged and feel small. But I've realized this week that it's not about feeling small. It's about taking small steps. We can all find ways to donate our resources: our goods or talents or money or time. You can google local aid organizations and find contact information to find ways to get involved. I don't have a lot of goods or money right now, but I do have time, and I have educational skills. I'm hoping to be able to do some tutoring or general volunteer work in the near future. I've just become too aware that the only thing separating me from those around me who are homeless or living in poverty is that I have a large and generous support network.

So, what do you want to do? Read a book (I got mine at the library) and raise your awareness? Send an email to electronics companies? Support a woman in the Congo? Write a letter to your representatives? Donate used goods that are still in good condition? Donate food, money, or warm clothes to someone in your community? Volunteer at a soup kitchen? At a tutoring program? Get involved in an even bigger way? I don't know what we will each do, but I know that as a child of the King, I can't do nothing. My God loves each one of them, each one of us, way too much for me to do nothing.

Master Plan

The sub job I have this week is a little slow, so it didn't take me long to read a short biography titled "It Is Well with My Soul: The Extraordinary Life of a 106-Year-Old Woman" by/about Ella Mae Cheeks Johnson. It's a quick read, but the kind of book that you want to slow down and savor at the same time.

Several quotes jumped out to me as I read and I thought, I have to remember that one. The first quote was, "I just wanted to see the wider world, and think about my place in it. When I look back over the course of my life, I realize I never had a master plan; I let the Master plan." This really struck me because so many times I can relate to that. I definitely don't have the life I thought I would when I was a child, and in the past 18 months I've done a lot of thinking about where my life is going and where I want it to go. And the truth is, even though I have goals, they remain vague, and I don't have a 'master plan' per se. I know that I want to honor and glorify God in all I do. I know that I want to be where he wants me, where I can use the gifts and talents that he has given me for his glory. I want the very best thing that is available: to know Christ- so I want to know him more deeply and more fully. And I want whatever leads me to those things. Which doesn't exactly answer a lot of the logistical questions in life... which is, I suppose, why I can rest, knowing that even without a master plan, the Master has a plan. What a comfort that is in this time of transition and wondering!

This is the other quote that really struck me: "The most important lesson I've learned over the course of a lifetime: not just surviving, or getting along, but being useful. Too often we remember, "Ask and ye shall receive; seek and ye shall find," and we believe all we have to do is ask. When we don't get the response we seek right away, we think our prayer has gone unanswered. Patience is essential. Heaven is always here, within us, if we have the patience to discover it. Sometimes we pray for things that we aren't, in fact, supposed to get- things that are bad for us. Maybe "no answer" means we need more time to discover that answer on our own, or to find out that another choice is possible. Not having a prayer answered right away doesn't mean He doesn't care; maybe He thinks this is just not the time. Maybe there's something else in the future that will help. Compassion is patience in its essence. As it says in Psalm 27, "Wait on the Lord: Be of good courage, and He shall strengthen thine heart."'

Kingdom Without Borders

I've been back in the US for 2 months now, and most surface things that once shocked me no longer do (save the gigantic "medium" beverage I had at Hardee's last week). It's amazing how small the world can be, meaning that no matter which country I'm in, I do spend most of my time in a very small geographic region, easily forgetting that the world continues to live and breathe across large expanses. I was in the library about 2 weeks ago, sifting through my favorite section: New Nonfiction. So many gems to be found there, and this trip was no exception. In addition to walking away with The Eastern Stars (the story of sugar and baseball in a small Dominican Republic town), I also picked up Kingdom Without Borders: The Untold Story of Global Christianity. Though still 70 pages from the end, I can't recommend it enough.

Throughout its pages, Miriam Adeney tells countless stories about believers across the world, primarily in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. I found her story telling scattered at first, and it took me a good bit to get into the book, but now I can't put it down. Reading the stories of what God is doing across his Kingdom encourages and inspires me as I hope and seek to return abroad for the 2011-2012 school year. I read about Chinese believers sending missionaries back west on the Silk Road, about native missionaries in India and Brazil, about Iranian Christians reaching out with the gospel despite the government. Adeney never implores her reader to get involved in global missions, never nudges towards giving- she simply tells the stories, and through them, one cannot help but want to get involved in either sending or going. And the truth is, the global church is growing at an astonishing rate. It makes me wonder if the traditional western church is going to be left behind.

I've never been a big reader of missions books or many of the modern fad-like Christian books out there, but this one I love. Simple, unpretentious, and compelling, it gets me excited about educational mission opportunities I might discover when the job search process begins. It gets me excited to learn another language, to observe and learn another culture, to teach kids from so many different backgrounds. And it reassures me that whether or not we personally can see the fruit, God is indeed doing a mighty work for his Kingdom in my generation.