Rain

It’s raining. After months of drought and weeks of 100 degree heat I’m sitting on my neighbor’s porch wrapped in a shawl and it’s raining. Cool, steady drops in a gentle, falling symphony. It’s as if I can feel the earth sigh through its scorched covering of grass and open its pores wide to receive.

The rain reminds me to be grateful. Water is a life-giving thing, but one we can’t control. It comes as a gift, God’s way of letting us continue to survive. He is good to us. After months of scorching heat comes rain for my thirsty heart. After a year of flooding and being overwhelmed with more than I can handle he gives reprieve and time to dry and find my feet steady beneath me once again. Everything in the season of his timing.

Always I am grateful for His goodness. So often now it pours out of me in tears while I wonder at the gift of being chosen and carried and taught and invited into knowing this God who loves me so inexplicably. And this morning this goodness and gratitude come in the form of rain.

Injustice

The images of what greed can do fill the inches of my computer screen—white men willing to kill hundreds to find a little white rock, others willing to turn a blind eye to bloodshed to make a profit. Countries are war torn, children are forced to become murderers. Millions are homeless, refugees, starving, separated from their families. I can read in a book a thousand facts about poverty, slavery, abuse. I can watch a small Asian girl walk down the street with a white man in Thailand, knowing that before the night is over she will splay her legs to a man who paid another man some money, who doesn’t care that if her skin was a different shade she could be his daughter, or perhaps even his daughter’s daughter.

I can weep at injustice. I can pound my fists in rage. But it doesn’t change that fact that I will never really understand. At the end of the day, forever and always, I will always be white. American. Born within the safety of four sturdy walls, within my father’s salary, within health care, within education, within fifty broad states, within two oceans that separate me from real brutality, starvation, torture. I can travel across the ocean and step foot on soils soaked with the blood of what should never be, but my passport will always carry me back to those four sturdy walls, will always insulate me from what it means to be dark or untouchable or sold or cast off or eliminated without anyone to notice. I will close my computer, fold my book, stow away my passport. I will buy food in refrigerated aisles of supercenters bigger than an Indian village. I will drive a car without anyone else inside it. I will sleep in my own apartment, with three rooms of space for only me, with a mattress, and ten pairs of shoes. And most days I won’t think twice about any of it.

When I am sorrowful, my pittance of grief is a token, a child’s pebble in the face of solid mountains of injustice. I may long not to be white and ignorant and naïve, but to fully understand I would have to be born as one of them. And if I were born as one of them I would long to be within these four sturdy, American walls—if I could even think to imagine them. Two worlds. So diverse it would seem they could never exist within the same planet—yet somehow they do. Some of us work or buy our way into living like royalty, and some of us are born into rock quarries to live and die working off a five-dollar debt our grandfather owed.

So many things I will never, never understand. Never. But God forgive me if I fail to hurl my pebble as hard and ferociously as my feeble arm can at the rocky face of injustice. God help me.

Less-than-ideal

My sister came to visit me this weekend. I looked forward to it all week, having her presence with me. Then Sunday morning she woke up sick, and everything I had envisioned for the day—bringing her with me to church, venturing downtown to the bookshop, slipping into the ice cream shop, laughing together over a bowl of popcorn—couldn’t happen.

It strikes me that very few things turn out the way we envision them. I can’t be mad at my sister. Hardly even disappointed really. She can’t help it. I am compelled with compassion instead. So I join her for bits of the afternoon on the couch and we watch a movie. It’s not an intimate, joyful sense of being together, heads bent over common intrigue and experience. It’s more of a complicit agitation, me holding her feet in my lap while she tosses and turns on the other side of the couch. Me sitting quietly with my book on the next couch, just to be in the room with her, while she slips into another fitful sleep.

But we are together.

It strikes me that community is rarely what one expects. I tend to envision ideal relationships, as if I were an artist capable of crafting another’s response to who I am. It takes two to make a friendship which means there will always be factors of the unknown. Though what I am left with is never quite what I imagined, perhaps the point isn’t the trip to the bookstore, or the shared ice cream cone. The point is being together. The point is staying when I’d rather not be in a room that could make me sick, when it seems easier to slip out and find someone else. But that is just the moment when I can’t—when I shouldn’t—because my presence is not just a pleasure; it’s a need.

I’m not very often good at community. Sometimes I tell myself it is easier to be alone because I fear the sickness of being wounded. But the first step to staying in this place of relationship and forcing myself to engage is to realize that my ideals are just ideals. When it feels different than I anticipated, it doesn’t mean I’ve failed; it just means I forgot to take into account those unknown factors I can’t control. It means that God has something bigger in mind. Something messier. Something, I’m trusting, in it’s time, more beautiful.

The People's City Mission

The men at the People’s City Mission are like the children in the slums of India. They come in need, but they mumble and complain, turn their noses up at what is offered, try to weasel their way into getting something more. I look at their grown-up forms and see the eyes of the small brown children in the slums with their manipulative puppy-dog eyes: Please, teacher. One more teacher.

I begin to think that people hard on their luck will be docile and grateful to receive whatever is free. I thought that once about children as they played with legos in India. I know better than to think that now. I am tempted to judge and say it’s wrong for grown men to complain or sneak extra food when others have gone out of their way to give them what is placed in their hands. I am tempted to think that they should be content. But then I think of the way I also try to get everything I can out of the dollars I’ve been given, how I look for sales, or advertisements with the word ‘free’, or fail to argue when my mother slips gift cards into my purse or offers to let me bring my laundry home. I too try to manipulate the system. I think it’s a part of human nature, the will to survive. I look at myself and call it frugality. I look at these hungry men and call it ungratefulness. The difference is a dainty word called hypocrisy.

The writer in me has to stop and wonder at their stories. Why are each of them here tonight? Where are their families, their children, their wives? Did they ever have any? How have they been wronged, abused, discarded, blamed? Perhaps they’ve done something to deserve being here, accepting handouts because they cannot feed themselves. Perhaps. But maybe they haven’t in the human sense of fairness and equality. Maybe they got dealt a bad hand. And maybe I’ve sinned just as much as them. Maybe there is nothing separating me for a mission food line than the grace of God and shepherding of people who care.

I can be so quick to judge, but tonight I want to hold my tongue and ask God to show me the difference between what I see and what he understands.

Nightmare

There are a lot of things people find to be afraid of: pain, intruders, poverty, abandonment, dying. I know that I don’t quite think like most people when I don’t feel fear when I should, or at least when other people think I should. These things don’t frighten me. I’m told boarding a plane to the other side of the world—alone—where I have no previous relationship on foreign soil would be something most people fear. I forget to bat an eye.

So many times I look at the world I’m surrounded by and I see plastic. Pasted happiness, makeshift fortresses. A culture that spends its life making a name for itself without realizing it could all crack so easily. Or melt. Or blow to smithereens.

When fear makes me cringe, when it breathes down my neck and sends shivers down my spine, when it brings hot tears to my eyes until there is nothing left to cry—this is why:

I’m afraid of forgetting that the walls are plastic. I’m afraid of rhythms and normalcy messing with my vision, lulling me to sleep like a child in its cradle until I forget that I was made for something else outside the plastic. I’m afraid of being comfortable, afraid of wasting my time on trivialities when there is something more important to be done. I’m afraid of loving my life more than I love my God, afraid of reaching that point without even realizing it.

This would be my nightmare, my daymare, the horror film of my life. It keeps me praying for grace, pinching myself to make sure I’m awake, asking for vision to see beyond the plastic. God, don’t ever let me come close to normal.

Because God is bigger...

Sometimes you step into something and you don’t realize how much it’s going to cost you. But when that moment of exhaustion and overwhelmed and frustration, that moment when you wonder if it’s all worth it, that moment when you want to throw up your hands and run away to hide in a comfy couch with a good book in a place where no one else can reach you to ask you to do one more thing—that is the moment when you must remember that God knew how much this was going to cost in the moment when he brought you into it, even though you didn’t. That is the moment when you trust him, with every raw, aching muscle of your brain and heart. You trust that he has something beautiful to pull out of the middle of all this work, that there is some indelible reason why he’s moving in this way that pushes and prods and presses the clay of your soul. You cling to his vision with tenacity that comes from a grace bigger than yourself. You cling even though it’s a vision you can’t quite see. You surrender your own desires for what you would have wanted when you think of yourself, and you trust that the vision God is working is better than your own. So you get up morning after morning and you do what needs to be done. And you choose joy. Because joy is a choice. Just like obedience.

A Window of Timing

God takes an incredible interest in the small details of our lives. Whoever thinks differently can argue with me till their blue in the face and I still won’t believe them. Today proves it.

I’m moving to Lincoln next month to begin working on my masters in writing fiction. Yesterday I drove down to go apartment shopping. I’d never done this before. I didn’t really know what I was doing or the best way to go about it. Plus I was devoid of any company to serve as a sounding board for what was there to see (or the absence thereof). I lined up appointments all afternoon and raced from address to address, peeking in so many closets and bathrooms until they all started whirling around in my head.

All that work, and at the end of the day I had only one fairly viable option, but I wasn’t sure. It wasn’t quite the neighborhood I wanted. So 9 o’clock at night I’m crashing at Melissa’s place and scouring craigslist for any new postings. But it was all just so God could prove that he knew what I needed, see if I would trust Him to provide.

“Here’s one on K Street,” I said.

K street?!

Melissa and I looked up at each other. Then out the window. Then back at each other.

“That’s across the street,” we said.

So this morning I got up and called and nervously tried to distract myself while I waited to meet the landlord. I pulled some company along with me for the visit, and we invaded a girl and several guys who were supposed to be moved out but weren’t, prancing into their kitchen discussing dishwashers and electricity as they groggily stared back from couches and a bed. The place didn’t smell like smoke; it was the first thing I noticed. The second was the size. So spacious compared to others. It was the quickest tour I made, due to the awkward male occupancy, so I still have closets to discover when I move in, but it was the also the quickest decision I made.

“I want it,” I said as we stepped back out on the front stoop. And now it’s mine. I paid a deposit that says so. So I have my own place in a neighborhood overflowing with community and Taylors where my mother won’t have to worry for my safety and I can bike to school in a few minutes.

The crazy thing is that this was the first vacancy this building has had in over a year. The landlord had another viewing scheduled just a few hours later with a guy that said he wanted it, so if my timing had been off by just a few hours it never would’ve happened. If I had chosen to go to Lincoln another week or even just another day, I never would’ve found this place. It was definitely a God moment. What's to conclude except He cares about apartments, and neighbors, and landlords. He cares about us, and He knows how to meet our needs.