The Truth

I often had to recognize that the need to 'do something special' was born of a restless spirit.  Such  persons wanted to dedicate themselves to larger tasks because those that lay nearest did not satisfy them.

- Albert Schweitzer, Out of My Life and Thought

One can never see, or not till long afterwards, why anyone was selected for any job.  And when one does, it is usually some reason that leaves no room for vanity.

- C. S. Lewis, Perelandra

I came here without knowing what "being here" would look like.  I knew some things—I would live in a place where they resettle refugees, I would volunteer in the nearby refugee-ESL classes—but overall it was sort of vague.

Yes, when people asked "What will you be doing?" I could rattle off a list: "Well, I'll be living in the refugee community and loving on my neighbors.  I can do practical things like give people rides to appointments and help navigate social-services bureaucracy and make sure they have enough food and teach them things like how to use drugstores and buses.  I have training in language and culture acquisition and cross-cultural communication and adult literacy—I can help people learn English and understand our weird customs and explain words and situations they don't understand.  I can be a friend to people thrown into an inherently bewildering and intensely lonely life situation.  I can advocate on their behalf when people are taking advantage of them." 

Those are good things.  

The truth, though?  The reality I desperately try to disguise and am secretly terrified that you and my church here and people I meet will find out?

I really don't do any of those things very often.

The truth is, my life here is—at its core—exactly like my life was in Portland, and Baltimore, and Salem.  Yes, some of the superficial details are different—the sights, the smells, the languages—but overall it's the same: I work, I eat, I try to have a social life, I pay bills, I try to love God and people better.

And the truth is, I often fail at loving God and people better.

And the truth is—the big glaring truth is, to my shame—that I have made "being here" all about me.  Whatever I may have told myself and others, at the end of the day I expected to come here and get to be this amazingly useful person.  A hero of benevolence and self-sacrifice and evangelism.   A spiritual and cultural adventurer and guide.

And the truth is, I'm not.

… I'm here because God invited me.  I still don't really know why.  I mean, yes, many of the skills and experiences and desires he has given me fit well with being here, from a practical perspective.   I'm also introverted and non-confrontational  and have to work really, really hard to pretend I'm comfortable meeting new people—those things don't fit quite as well.   Maybe God will use all of that here in a way that makes sense to me.  I don't know.

The thing that I do know, though, is that he did not invite me here so that I could be, or claim to be, extraordinary.

I so distinctly remember coming back from visiting my brother in Haiti, and reflecting on how beautiful and powerful God was in the "ordinary" lives of him and his fellow missionaries.  I remember recognizing how often my own desires to go overseas or do "missionary work" were rooted more in a desire for the exotic—in a desire to look different and special—than in a desire for God and his glory.  I thought at the time that I had learned that lesson. 

Ha. 

… Truth be told, I am often discouraged by and ashamed of how useless I feel here.  I have my three or four solid "I did something helpful!" stories, and cling to them and tell them and hope that other people will assume the rest of my days are filled with equally "good-thing-Marybeth-is-there" usefulness that I simply don't have time or inclination to share.  I hope that they—you—won't know how the majority of my days are spent doing nothing that looks special, and how often I see my weaknesses and fears and feel at a complete loss even how to begin "helping" here.

I am discovering, though, that the shame is not so much the shame of actual failure or sin.  It's just the soul-squirm of pride being mortified.  It's embarrassment that I'm not in fact the amazingly-awesome hero of service I want you all to think I am.

And—despite all that I have just written of my "uselessness" and fear—I am also discovering that this lack of clarity about my role here and "what I can do" is not in itself failure.  It's even, in a hard-to-grasp way, freeing.  The pressure is not on me.  God is here.  God is not useless.  God invited me here.  Apparently, though, God is needing to break or heal or change some things in me before he can use me in any way I can recognize.  Or maybe I won't ever recognize it.  Maybe that's the point.  I don't know.

I still want to be useful here, and I think that's okay.  But I am having to address the underlying question of what I mean by that.  Useful, like "people will love me and be so glad I'm here and be aware of how wonderful I am"?  Or useful like "holding my time and skills with open hands for God to do his work through them, however the heck he sees fit and however big or small my role looks in that work"?

I want to say it's the second, but so often find myself stuck in the first. 

I think I'm going to be learning this lesson for the rest of my life.

O for a thousand tongues to thank God for his patience with me. 

My grace is sufficient for you, 

for my power is made perfect in weakness.

2 Corinthians 12:9