Zdravstvuitye

Shasta's heart fainted at these words for he felt he had no strength left. And he writhed inside at what seemed the cruelty and unfairness of the demand. He had not yet learned that if you do one good deed your reward usually is to be set to do another and harder and better one.

- C.S. Lewis, The Horse and His Boy

If you love those who love you, what benefit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them.  And if you do good to those who do good to you, what benefit is that to you? For even sinners do the same.

- Luke 6:32-33 (English Standard Version)

Loving people is hard.

I remember a particularly difficult time with a friend at university, where she was working through deep wounds in her own life by trying to control her other relationships (like ours) in unhealthy ways.  Our friendship turned into a series of painful conversations and very high relational stress.  During that time, my desire to love her didn't waver, but my determination to act on that love certainly did.  I was tired, and bruised, and all my efforts seemed futile anyway.

I remember praying daily that God would help me to show his love to her.  It was only towards the end of that season, though, that I realized: I had not been asking God to help me love her better.  I had been asking him to make loving her easy.  I was hoping for—maybe even expecting—some sort of beatific wellspring to appear me, which would make it effortless to be kind and patient and encouraging.  I didn't want to be frustrated and hurt and choose to speak gently anyway; I wanted speaking gently to be the only thing that even occurred to me.  I wanted goodness to flow out of me unbidden.

Since then, I have discovered that attitude creeping up elsewhere: I want loving people to be easy, I want trusting God in impossible-seeming situations to be easy, I want breaking deeply-rooted cycles of sin to be easy...

Yes, I believe that as we grow in faith and our hearts become more closely aligned with Christ, that these things get easier.   But easier isn't easy.

On my very first day of Russian class, I was expected to say "zdravstvuitye."  Ha.  Right.  (Seriously, what kind of language puts that many consecutive consonants in the word "hello"?)  A few months of class, and Russian was "easier," too.  I could whip out zdravstvuityes without even thinking.  The horribly complicated system of word-endings necessary in order to say "I live in a house" instead of "the house lives on me," however?  Again, ha.  And again, a few months later that concept was easy and the next thing was hard.

I'm willing to put in the work and suffer the frustration to learn Russian grammatical systems (yes, I'm weird), yet when it comes to spiritual matters I expect to grow without effort.  I want magically to skip right from wherever I am to perfectly virtuous. 

…It's a hard thing for me to understand, how the completeness of God's work and my own efforts intertwine.  I am continuing to learn how God's power is made perfect in weakness, and how securely I can rest in his grace, and how trying to do and grow in my own strength is different from doing and growing in God's strength.  I do know, however, that we are not promised anywhere that loving people or trusting God or struggling against sin will be easy; in this broken world, those things will be hard.  We are promised help, and comfort, and hope, and sustenance, and strength, and power, and mercy...but not ease.

Loving that friend in college was not easy at the time.  Maybe now, years later, if I went back  as my current self and faced it again, it would be easier.  I'm pretty sure it would be, actually.  But it doesn't work like that.  Now I'm faced with now--the people and situations and struggles of today.  They're still hard.  Indeed, I have the distinct (sometimes sinking) feeling that that "really hard" time was just a zdravstvuitye in my life.  It will only keep getting harder.  Yet, perhaps weirdly, I'm convinced it will keep getting better, too.

Here comes North Carolina.  Praise God that he remembers that we are dust.

Three Things

Remember that there are only three kinds of things anyone need ever do. (1) Things we ought to do (2) Things we’ve got to do (3) Things we like doing. I say this because some people seem to spend so much of their time doing things for none of the three reasons, things like reading books they don’t like because other people read them.

- C.S.  Lewis,  Letters to Children

World Refugee Day

Photo courtesy of UNHCR - http://www.worldrefugeeday.us

Today is World Refugee Day.  It's a day to acknowledge the millions of people worldwide who have been forced to flee their homes because of violence or persecution.

Only a small fraction of those refugees end up permanently resettled in North America, the U.K. or Australia, but it's those "lucky few" that I would especially like to remember today.

I get the impression that many Americans believe that once refugees arrive in the U.S., most of their problems are over.  They've gotten out of the war zone and arrived in the land of wealth and opportunity: education, healthcare, and technology are at their fingertips.

Yes.  In many ways, life is safer and better here.  I would never want to deny that, nor how grateful most refugees are to come.  However, arrival in the U.S. doesn't magically fix everything.  Refugees still face language barriers, un-/under-employment, unfamiliar customs, and the aftereffects of trauma.  Many are separated from at least part of their family, sometimes permanently.  Many go without healthcare or food simply because they don't know how to use our systems.  Many want an education but their long work days make it almost impossible.

Those are the big things, though.  It's the "little," moment-to-moment challenges that I think we overlook most often.  The things in life that are so much a part of our lives that we don’t even realize we ever had to learn them.

What a refrigerator is.  How to hold a pencil.  How to buy food at a grocery store.  How to read the walk/don't walk symbols  at crosswalks.   How to know that when you buy toothpaste it comes in a box, even though when someone hands it to you it's in a tube.  How weekly garbage-collection works.  How to stand in a line.  Not only how to read, but--in some cases--how to understand that marks on paper can even have meaning.  

Picture encountering that much bewildering unfamiliarity, on top of the other "big" challenges.  Picture leaving a home where you were eloquent and skillful and respected, only to find yourself in a place where you don't even know how to prepare dinner or how to greet your neighbor; a place where people assume you're stupid.

In spite of all of this, most refugees who come to the States approach their new surroundings with an astounding level of energy and success.  Most I've met are quick to smile and eager to learn.   It's a beautiful testament to human resilience and the courage of the individuals themselves.

It's never easy, though.

I'd like to call people out today, to pray for the world's 43.7 million refugees and displaced people.  Pray for the people who are in the middle of fleeing and don't know where to go or if anyone will take them.  Pray for the people sitting in over-populated refugee camps, sometimes for decades.  And pray for the small fraction of refugees who have been resettled in our land of opportunity, that they would be encouraged and blessed and thrive in their new home.  

Pray also for us, as a resettlement country, that we would see and remember and love these people among us. 

Some places for more information about refugees and their lives:

- United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)

- International Rescue Committee

- What would you do? (an interactive tool to see the dilemmas faced by refugees)

On the Move

Last week, I accepted an invitation to move to Charlotte, North Carolina, to work among the refugee community there.

Come August, I'll be living in an apartment complex where they resettle refugees and, essentially, loving on people as we all live our normal lives. 

That part sounds awesome. 

However, loving people is always messy.  Throw in cultural, religious, generational and social differences, language barriers, and the effects of physical/emotional trauma, and it gets even more complicated.  I am very aware of my inadequacy to navigate these things on my own, and to meet the staggering needs I will encounter.  Part of me is afraid that I will go and invest my heart only to have it battered and exhausted.  Part of me is afraid that my heart will be battered and my presence there won't even be helpful, or that I will make things worse somehow.

Yet, despite those fears, I'm in one of those odd (blessed) places where even in my fear I have a confidence outside of myself that this is where I'm supposed to go, and that—although I am small and fragile—God is great and inexhaustible.  His love and grace will be the only source of any good that comes of this, anyway, and there is great comfort in that.  I am afraid, but I don't feel afraid.  (Usually.)

So, yeah.  Here's to the next stage of life's adventure.  May God do with it, and me, what He will.

Culinary Adventure (or, Sometimes They Really Do Have Those Warning Labels on There for a Reason)

So, I know it was stupid.

There I was, cutting french fries with my vegetable mandoline, and I had this one, funky, irregularly shaped piece of potato left over.

One half of my brain: I know you're never supposed to hold food in your hand when you use this crazy sharp tool, but it'll be okay just this once.

The other half of my brain: DANGER, Will Robinson!! DANGER!!

Unfortunately, that second voice wasn't quite fast enough, which is why I am now missing the tip of my right middle finger.

I'll spare you the details, but know: It was quite exciting.  Fortunately, we had a nurse practitioner visiting for dinner, so I didn't even have to go to urgent care.  It's all okay.  I'll just have a wonky looking finger for a while.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I'm going to be an aunt again!!

While you celebrate with me [happy dance], please pray for the health of the new little Harms, and my sister-in-law, and just all that complicated stuff that goes along with life growing inside another person.

... [another happy dance]

Following God

"Look! Look! Look!" cried Lucy. 
"Where? What?" asked everyone. 
"The Lion," said Lucy. "Aslan himself. Didn't you see?" Her face had changed completely and her eyes shone. 
"Do you really mean—" began Peter. 
"Where did you think you saw him?" asked Susan. 
"I didn't think I saw him," said Lucy. "I saw him… Right up there between those mountain ashes. Up, not down. Just the opposite of the way you want to go. And he wanted us to go where he was—up there." 
"How do you know that was what he wanted?" asked Edmund. 
"He—I—I just know," said Lucy, "by his face." 

- C. S. Lewis, Prince Caspian 

I recently saw a chance to move to South Sudan for a year. I prayed about it. I applied. I prayed some more.

And ultimately, the decision I made was both one of the easiest and one off the hardest decisions I've ever made.

Easiest, because almost immediately after beginning to pray about it, I knew what the answer was.

Hardest, because I didn't like that answer.

The opportunity was perfect, and God said no.

Or I should say, He asked me to say no. Which was worse.

… I have spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to explain this decision to people when they ask. In fact, my fear of telling people that—once again—I was presented with this amazing-sounding opportunity and—once again—I chose not to do it, far outstripped any fear I had of moving to Northern Africa on a whim. I dreaded the disappointment (real or imagined) in the faces and voices of people who had been so excited for me to go. I dreaded the shame of knowing (or suspecting) that people I love and trust think I'm giving into fear, or "wasting my gifts," or making excuses. I dreaded not being able to defend my choice with any reasons that would "make sense."

I spent more than a week begging God—if indeed I was hearing right, that He didn't want me to go—to close the door Himself. If they simply didn't offer me the job, then that was that. No one could blame me. But He left the door open.

And it became clear that the question I've long wrestled with—what I mean when I tell God I'll follow Him anywhere—was deepening into something even harder for me to face than "Will I really do anything He asks, even if I don't see how it's important?"—becoming, instead, "Will I really do anything He asks, even if no one else understands what I'm doing? Even if I can never explain it to them, or even fully to myself? Even if people close to me misunderstand, or are horribly disappointed in me?"

I was being asked to choose: Follow what I and everyone else saw as the perfect opportunity, or follow God.  No matter what anyone else thinks.

I don't think that these will always be the two paths presented at the fork in the road. I didn't say no out of some morbid sense of self-denial: "This sounds fun, so obviously it would be more 'spiritual' to refuse it." I think God enjoys adventuring with us when we step out and throw ourselves into the things that come our way. And I think He has given me gifts and desires and experiences that lend themselves well to working cross-culturally. And I think that often the road that makes sense—that seems good, or exciting, or logical—is the road He leads us down.

But I also know that for me, in this instance, with this particular opportunity, with where I am right now, that saying no to South Sudan was saying yes to following God. 

And, despite my disappointment—and continued confusion about my future—there is a underlying peace in that which cannot be mistaken, or reproduced by the approval of other people.

So, here I am. Continuing to wait.

… I'm glad that God, at least, knows what's going on.

God Himself

Whenever God gives a vision to a Christian, it is as if He puts him in “the shadow of His hand” (Isaiah 49:2). The saint’s duty is to be still and listen. There is a “darkness” that comes from too much light--that is the time to listen. The story of Abram and Hagar in Genesis 16 is an excellent example of listening to so-called good advice during a time of darkness, rather than waiting for God to send the light. When God gives you a vision and darkness follows, wait. God will bring the vision He has given you to reality in your life if you will wait on His timing. Never try to help God fulfill His word. Abram went through thirteen years of silence, but in those years all of his self-sufficiency was destroyed. He grew past the point of relying on his own common sense. Those years of silence were a time of discipline, not a period of God’s displeasure. There is never any need to pretend that your life is filled with joy and confidence; just wait upon God and be grounded in Him (see Isaiah 50:10-11).

Do I trust at all in the flesh? Or have I learned to go beyond all confidence in myself and other people of God? Do I trust in books and prayers or other joys in my life? Or have I placed my confidence in God Himself, not in His blessings? “I am Almighty God . . .”— El-Shaddai, the All-Powerful God (Genesis 17:1). The reason we are all being disciplined is that we will know God is real. As soon as God becomes real to us, people pale by comparison, becoming shadows of reality. Nothing that other saints do or say can ever upset the one who is built on God.

-  Oswald Chambers,  "Vision and Darkness"