about women who can hang their own curtain rods, right?
Okay I don't either, but I'm sure it's good.
Yup, this was my accomplishment for today and I'm pretty darn proud.
about women who can hang their own curtain rods, right?
Okay I don't either, but I'm sure it's good.
Yup, this was my accomplishment for today and I'm pretty darn proud.
My finger tips feel like they can't type fast enough. So many big and beautiful thoughts are trying to rush through them. I'm excited. Excited,happy, and for the first time in a long time, I don't feel overwhelmed.
Over Christmas Chris and I flew back to Minneapolis, and for one brief moment my time there overlapped with my beautiful best friends. We got up early, snuggled into a beautiful downtown eatery, poured the coffee and started the process of filling each other in on life. Around in a circle, we took turns updating each other with the highlights and low lights of the past year. Finally it got to me.
All the things I had been wanting to share and talk about with them the entire year came bubbling up to the surface in one burst, and suddenly the only words I had were "This year was hard but good. Marriage is good. Work is good. Life is good."
Sometimes I think we say things are good when they're not because we don't want people we love to worry.
Let me tell you, 2014 WAS good. But it also left me exhausted, fearful and dry.
Most days I felt like a creaky wheel, constantly feeling out of joint and confused about how to fall back into place and find a rhythm that felt like me. I creaked quietly to myself, loudly to my husband, and tried (unsuccessfully) to stifle it most of the time.
But today, on the first bright day of 2015, I don't creak.
And it's all thanks to one little word: hope. I collided into hope when I let go of fear.
I'm not exactly sure why I was so afraid last year. Honestly it all feels a little silly. But I was afraid of possibility. I was afraid to dream because what if those dreams failed? What if I failed? Unpursued dreams might feel safer, but they're a slow and painful graveyard. They leave behind bitterness and apathy. And for me, they bred mediocrity and laziness.
But in the week leading up to 2015 I've realized something hope-birthing. I've realized God loves when we actively dream. When we pursue the things that make us glow, we open up a frontier for the miraculous. We give God room to stretch out and work in our lives. Pursuing our God-given dreams lets him work and do amazing things through us.
I'm not great at New Year resolutions (is anyone?) but if I had to set a goal of any kind this year it would be to dream and grow. Life's too short to live in constant fear of failure. I don't want to spend another moment in a shrinking cocoon of apathy. I want to live fiercely and boldly. To try things and fall into grace when I fail. But even more, I want to give God the glory when he displays his power through dreams come true.
He is sweet, and life with him is sweetest. Here's to a year dreaming at his side.
When we lived in Uzbekistan we had an indoor kitchen for the winter and an outdoor kitchen for the paralyzing summers. Despite the heat, flies and unpurified water, it was culturally important to keep up the appearance of cleanliness. So every evening, just as the sun lowered itself to rest behind the Aral mountains, my mother would join thousands of Uzbek women and sprinkle water on the concrete kitchen floor before sweeping the dust away.
Sometimes my sisters and I were called upon to help too, and you'd hear nothing but the steady swishing of four brooms sweeping across the courtyard grounds. Us girls hated this chore and only did it when asked.
But my mother, like her Uzbek neighbors, would faithfully sweep the earth.
I look back on this with wonder at my mother. She and my father both felt a fire in their bones to move to Central Asia, to nurture a newly founded country, to give of themselves.
But while my dad served in the schools, teaching English and starting up the city's free Internet cafe and meeting with other humanitarian aid workers, my mother's sacrifice was so much more.
I think it's easier to give up everything in your life for a wild adventure. It's harder to give your life to daily sweeping dirt.
As a child I never understood the love offering my mother was giving. How it helped my father's standing and respect in the community to have a wife who did what was expected of a good Uzbek bride. She wasn't wild, she didn't wear jeans or make up. She let go of her western identity to gain trust, to build relationships that would last a lifetime.
Her role was vital, but I know it didn't feel that way when she'd pick up the broom for the fourth time that week and sweep the courtyard.
I know she never dreamed hand-washing cloth diapers. Or boiling pots of water for us to drink day in and day out. Training for their time overseas never prepared her for fighting for self-worth in the face of the mundane. But she did. She swept the courtyard, brushing away that persistent desert dust, knowing it'd be back again tomorrow.
It's these things I think about when I share my own doubts of self-worth in ministry to my mother over the phone. Holding back tears to prove I'm brave. I never thought my biggest contribution to God's calling on my husband and my life would be lifting boxes. But I know and have faith that somehow it fits in.
"I know when you're in the middle of it, it feels like this is it forever," I can hear my mother smiling on the other side of the phone. "But it's not, a new season will come and you'll realize God was growing you and preparing you for something more beautiful than you could ever imagine."
How can I not believe her? This is coming from the woman who swept dirt for nine years.
Some seasons we're just called to face the dust. Not a new challenge, not an exciting one, but the same stubborn dirt that'll be back the next day. I'm learning in these seasons, victory is simply faithfully facing it again and sweeping it away.
Success is sometimes just showing up again and being used again.
"You're my girl, and I'm proud of you," she says before we hang up.
And I go to bed, ready to face the dust.
I picture him sitting by the camp walls, the hot night sky bright with stars. I try to imagine his thoughts as news of Gaza in flames, and Iraqi minorities massacred and scattered, reach the refugee camp. I imagine his dark eyes lifting up to the stars, wondering what his life will be, what his future will hold, if he’ll ever leave and do something with his life.
This is what I imagine about Ahmed. But what I know is he’s a 22 year old Syrian refugee living in a camp in Jordan. Surrounded on all sides by war, and more immediately, 110,000 other Syrian refugees, I know Ahmed contemplates whether or not he should return to Syria to fight with the rebels. I know he’s forced to stay in the camp day after day, and isn’t legally permitted to work. Displaced and disempowered, his life looks much different than mine did at 22.
Different, but full of potential and possibility.
“I’ve come to the conclusion,” Ahmed confides one night in the camp, “heroes and terrorists are born in the same context.”
The context of pain, suffering, and hope for future redemption. Ahmed is one of 1.3 million Syrians struggling with what it means to live within this context.
“They can be heroes,” my brother-in-law writes from the refugee camp, “Heroes with empathy, pain, and redemption of epic proportions.”
I’ve read those words over and over again, and hope in the hopelessness can’t help but creep in.
Empathy makes heroes. Empathy is the first step to changing the world. Sympathy doesn't go far enough.
Yesterday I sat in an airline lounge, coffee in hand, and watched a Yazidi family be rescued by a helicopter. A couple business men and I watched silently. Once the Yazidi family was safely in the air, they cried tears of relief and I found my own cheeks wet with sympathy.
But when the camera turned back to the CNN anchor, I couldn’t help but shift uncomfortably in my chair. Surrounded by clean water, food, people in suits and laptops, the contrast was almost unbearable. Again, my eyes welled with hot tears— but this time because of the injustice of it all. And suddenly I felt pathetic holding my cup of coffee. When I looked around, the businessmen had returned to their quiche. Everyone else in the room seemed totally unmoved.
Empathy. The ability to understand. To share the feelings of another. It’s my belief we struggle to empathize in the U.S.
We have sympathy by the truckload. Sympathy throws water, food, and provisions off a moving helicopter. Sympathy builds refugee camps. It changes profile pictures and reposts articles. Gives to charities, without following up. And sympathy comes from a good heart that can’t help but feel for humanity. But sympathy doesn’t go far enough.
It’s limited in its ability to be nuanced and helpful. Sympathy, by its very definition, victimizes its recipients. It can’t empower because it doesn’t understand the situation. It doesn't touch.
It’s true, as a Americans, few of us actually know what it’s like to flee our homes with gunfire at our heels. Few of us know what its like to go without water. Few of us have watched our family members gunned down before our very eyes. We don’t know what its like to scramble onto a helicopter, and because we can’t make the connection, we avert our eyes.
But God didn’t avert his eyes from us. When our world descended into chaos and sin at our own hands, he became flesh and dwelt among us. He knew he had to become us, so he chose to literally put himself in our shoes. Because he faced our suffering, we do not have a great High Priest who is unable to relate to our condition, but one who has willing endured all things.
We are far closer in our experience to our Middle Eastern brothers and sisters, than God was to us.
When we practice empathy, we practice putting ourselves in someone else’s place. We try our hardest to understand the what compels someone to act a certain way. And when we practice empathy, we also confess that we’re not qualified to make decisions when we don’t fully understand.
Empathy makes heroes, it instills hope. Empathy says “us” instead of “them”.
You may feel powerless to do anything as the news flashes horrific images day after day. But nothing could be less true. You can practice empathy. You can try to understand, instead of looking away.
Empathy also informs prayer. I confess, as I’ve watched the news these past few weeks, I’ve doubted the power of prayer. I wrote as much in a recent email to my brother-in-law who works in the Syrian refugee camps in Jordan, and told me about Ahmed. He responded with this:
“Gabby, if you doubt the power of prayer, imagine the thousands of Christians in Iraq whose prayers for salvation have ended in decapitation. Doubt, struggle with it. I do every day. But continue. We still love our families in the face of arguments, no? So pray in the face of doubt. For every brutal death can be turned into a redemption. Is that not the very example we cling to as an entire religion? “
Is that not the very example we cling to as an entire religion? The words pierce me. They inspire me to let empathy inform my prayers. Let’s pray as people who take the time to investigate the truth, to find the nuances, who pray specific prayers that address the needs of those living through the terrors happening right now in the Middle East.
I also asked my brother-in-law if there was anything that could be done by me, the average American whose heart is breaking with sympathy, but longs to do something actually meaningful. He responded with the following three ways.
1. Media - that voices would move towards a courageous search for truth, not propaganda in any direction.
2. Protection for Christians and Yazidis in Northern Iraq and Syria -- that supply chains and lines would open at least for them to receive food and water.
3. That Jordan would be wise in its choices, to remain stable in light of all that cracks and crumbles around it.
4. That people across the region would have their hearts divinely shielded from developing hatred, as hatred and resentment will fuel all of this for years.
5. That ISIS would be stopped, someway, somehow. But not dehumanized. Though we shudder at their deeds, may we extend the same empathy and grace that was extended to us. We don’t fully know the paths that have led them to commit these horrible acts. Let’s pray for our enemies, and not just against them.
If you want to sign a petition, go ahead. I actually agree with Obama’s current air strikes, my brother-in-law writes. At this stage death is everywhere. The Iraqi army is not functioning. The Kurdish army is strong, but penetrable, especially the further West/South you get from Erbil. Someone needs to stop ISIS’s supply lines.
Support Kurdish People in Kobani
Most organizations are repeating tired practices that don’t work in the Middle East given the culture/power dynamics. Some organizations, though, are doing good things.
A massive thank you must be given to my brother-in-law who has helped me start to make sense of the pain and chaos in the Middle East. I could not have written this article without his guidance and on-the-ground knowledge. Grateful for him and all those currently working in the Middle East in the face of pain, suffering and war. Of those who believe in a future full of hope for the Middle East.
It's weird the things that stick with you. Total non-events that impress themselves into your memory and make a home there indefinitely. I'm not sure why I remember that frigid late afternoon in Oklahoma City so vividly, but I do. All of us climbing over empty McDonald bags, squeezed in between the backpacks, beneath sock-stuff holes that did little to block wintery drafts from gusting into Bellarive's white tour van.
In typical off-day fashion we were caravanning to scout out the local hipster coffee shop. We had nearly all under-estimated how cold Oklahoma could be in the winter, and shivered cheerfully.
And yet, it's those moments that make road life feel human, bearable, and like family. Only one month into road life at the time, I couldn't help but feel like it was that adventure that sealed affection in my heart for this amazing group of people. For this band from Florida, for Bellarive.
Today they've released their second album. I remember listening to it with C around the kitchen table in Northern Ireland, tears welling in my eyes as the first song played. Listening to it again today I'm convinced it's one of the most beautiful calls to worship I've heard all year.
I don't write album reviews. And this isn't one. But I do know that this album sparks creativity in me. It sparks love for my God. It sparks life in my soul. These are the songs my heart sings underneath the chaos of life.
Listening to Before There Was is like meeting a kindred spirit-- like finding a friend who gets it.
Which makes sense, because that's what it's like to be friends with our Bellarive family. I've shared more "ah-hah" moments with them this year than almost anyone else. We've shared a lot of firsts-- moving to Atlanta, finding apartments, finding God and community in a new place. I know from conversations over coffee, backstage at churches, in our living rooms, sometimes through tears-- the struggle of being faithful to the calling of this life of ministry. This album reflects this past year to me. Prayers and anthems of grace. Faith in a God who comes through in the most impossible circumstances.
I love this creative offering. I love the people who are behind it. And I love God they worship. So worship with us.
The first day I moved to Atlanta I thought the sound of cicadas would cause my eardrums to burst. It was their tenor buzz that greeted me when I stepped out the car on that first night and looked around. Instantly swallowed in a cloud of humidity, I listened to thunder rumble above as fireflies twinkled, unperturbed.
What was I doing here? No job, one friend and no family. Nothing but me and the cicadas.
They were foreign. This place was foreign. They sang a song of shrill fear and expectation.
Why did this decision that had once filled me with peace, suddenly feel like the most reckless decision of my life? When I left Madison, Wisconsin, fireworks championed me on, celebrating the end of a beautiful season, and welcoming the new. I left the day after the Fourth of July, heart full and eyes shining. Now my knees barely kept me standing in the driveway.
That night I could barely sleep for the cicadas and anticipation. But I did eventually.
* * *
Tonight I sit on the riverbank by our home. We have one now. It's nothing much, just a few rooms, our books and the food we like to eat. But we love it.
On either side of me sit new friends, and my new family-- my husband. How did I get here? How did I start with nothing, but find my heart and hands so full? It's a very different night than the one that brought me here.
I doubted that He would pull through, but he did. He provided manna, in the desert. He provided fellowship when I stood alone.
Suddenly I hear the cicadas. Somehow their persistent clamor surfaces from the background, and I hear them again. Just as loud, just as full of Georgia summer life.
Instead of an unwelcome intrusion keeping me up at night, they've become the song I fall asleep to. A song of victory. A song of belonging.
Fireflies float over the rushing river, illuminating it quickly before disappearing into the blackness in a sleepy game of hide-n-seek.
* * *
Tomorrow we leave for the road again. That beautiful, untamed road. It's bittersweet. I'll miss this little sapling home we've planted here among the cicadas. But I know they'll be here to welcome us, to welcome us home.
We planted our seed in Midwestern snows
Set against odds, we prayed it might grow.
Huddled for warmth, and braced for the cold,
We sheltered this treasure planted in hope.
g.llewellyn
It’s silent, except for the ocean waves crashing on the beach thirteen stories below. In this quiet I rise and watch the 5 a.m. sky break into soul-igniting pink from the balcony. I’m not sleepy, but I feel weary.
This morning I feel old. I feel overwhelmed by all the things I want to accomplish— in this morning, in this day, in this month and in my life. The warm and faithful sun rises and I feel the temptation I’ve felt so many times before: to run away from the tasks in front of me. I’m tired before I’ve even begun.
My eyes wander to the beach below and there I see her. Alone on this stretch of beach, I can see the top of her greying head look out toward the water. She stands at the end of the boardwalk, right on the edge where the walk meets the sand.
And then it happens— she moves her cane and steps out on the sand. The morning sun continues to rise and she takes a few more slow and painstaking steps. Each step is guided out by a cane.
She’s alone. No family or friends guiding her by the arm. No one on the beach for half a mile on either side. But she doesn’t stop stepping out towards the lapping waves.
It’s a long walk. And every once in awhile she stops, and looks out at the water, as if to assess how far she has yet to go.
She is weak and slow and alone, but she is steady and faithful.
“…endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame…”
And then for the next half hour I watch her step toward her goal. Pink shirt fluttering in the breeze, matching the sky above, she is a woman who understands that some goals are worth taking pain-steps for.
I look down at my laptop.
Because the truth is, the things God calls us to are always worth any painful steps it may take to get there.
When I get overwhelmed I flee.
I hate to fail, so I choose the path of the coward and do nothing instead.
So often I’m that servant of God who buries his talent underground, instead of being faithful with the little I’ve received.
Instead of taking wobbly steps forward, knowing only an ocean of grace waits to welcome me into its arms.
Waves crash and I look, and she's made it. There's no fanfare about it. Just a simple gaze across the ocean, waves lapping at her feet. I sit down and start to work. Simple words written on a simple page.
Practicing my first steps of faithfulness.
I stare out the kitchen window, chewing my toast lazily and listening to the rain beat down on the Northern Irish countryside. Maybe it’s the rain, or that my sweet mother-in-law brought me a tea tray while I worked this morning, or the laughter and hearts shared each night around this kitchen table… but I feel I belong. It’s a belonging so deeply rooted it startles me.
But as I gaze across the wet and bleary driveway I know why I belong.
I never met her, my husband’s Granny, but she lived with my in-laws in a small apartment across the driveway next to the garage. A fierce Irish woman, a spiritual giant, a prayer warrior. Even though we never got the chance to meet, my life has been shaped by her faithfulness.
Before we were married or even engaged, I heard Granny stories. How she was born into a gaggle of Kellys from the south of Ireland. How she was a shopgirl in Belfast. How she fell in love and married George, who would be the love of her life until her dying day. How my husband would hear her praying when he’d walk past her open window. How he and his friends would pray in her living room because God’s presence was always welcome there. How passionately she believed in and invested in God’s work through her children’s and grandchildren’s lives and ministries. And eventually I would discover that she was praying for me, long before I would ever become a part of her family.
The rain doesn’t stop. You can almost hear the grass outside growing and getting greener. My butter-drenched toast is long gone, but my mind is still on Granny.
It’s humbling. To be an heir to that kind of legacy; to be brought into a home drenched in prayer; to be the wife she prayed for her grandson; to know she has already prayed for our children; to inherit her love-spoken, whispered prayers.
I long to be like her. I want to have faith in the power of prayer to change generations. To pray because I believe in the God I pray to. To pray in the quiet, in seclusion, to have faith in the seeds being sown. To not chase after fame, recognition or the praise of man.
The rain hasn’t stopped yet and in Northern Ireland chances are it won’t ever stop. Constant and life-giving. Pouring into the generation of life to come.
I belong here in this legacy.
Cars honk below. Turns out Hong Kong doesn’t sleep. And even though I’ve been awake for over 34 hours, neither can I. So I soak in the humid air and let myself feel awake with the earth below my hotel window. Neon lights flash, taxis swerve in and out of traffic, and street vendors still serve dumplings and roast chicken proving the moon itself can’t stop the steady rhythm of this city. And even though I’ve been here less than 24 hours, I know this is how it is 365 days of the year.
I long to be that consistent. To know I’ll keep being me night or day, rain or shine. But what does that even mean? In a world where Facebook and Instagram likes inform what’s “good” about us and our lives; where approval and disapproval can mean earning or losing a job; where you’re straining to hear through the chaos of the day to day what God is saying, it can be hard to grasp who we are and who we want to be.
But tonight, despite the jet lag and humidity, it becomes clear me: we are who we really are when no one is watching.
When I applied to the journalism program at my university, my advisor told me to prove in my application that I love to write. To prove I had a long history of writing before I ever thought of applying, and that whether or not I got accepted to the program, I’d continue to write. He encouraged me to stand secure in the identity I claimed when I wasn’t under scrutiny. He also said it would be a good measure of whether or not I would actually enjoy and excel in the program— he was right.
I would have never survived the refining of those skills if I didn’t treasure them in the first place.
These days it feels like I’m experiencing those refining fires again— to boil down what it is I love to do. To discover what I’m meant to do. In the chaos and strain of the day to day, what brings me life? And what brings me to closer to God? What helps bring others into his presence? What desires has he rooted so deeply in the fabric of who you are it doesn’t matter if anyone else is privy to it? What brings him glory and you joy when you do it?
And though I believe our ultimate identity is secure in Jesus and what he did on the cross, I also believe God has created each human with gifts that make up his or her being. To deny those gifts is to deny the person God has made. To covet someone else’s gifts is to deny the intrinsic value of the gifts that make up you…
It’s like Hong Kong. A city that doesn’t stop flashing its lights or close its shop doors just because most people aren’t looking.
I bite my nails and take a swig of complimentary water. Hong Kong lives on.
It's morning and I find myself standing, barefoot on the linoleum kitchen floor. Microscopic coffee grounds attach themselves to my feet, but I'm still too groggy to care. All is quiet in the house, everyone's asleep except me and the sun. I start to make coffee and stare out the kitchen window.
It's been several weeks since that night I laid back flat against the bus bunk, searching for God's face in the pitch blackness. Several weeks of learning how to seek God's face where I don't expect him. And several weeks in, I still feel yearning for intimacy with God deeper and more steadfast than what I have right now.
Coffee beans happily crackle down into grounds and the kettle whistles. I lean against the counter and look out the kitchen window in contentment.
Then it strikes me how little I feel this at peace, how little I feel this happy with my circumstances.
But in reality, it's not my circumstances that are bad or even lacking. In that moment, there with the sunlight filtering through glass jars stacked with lemons, I recognize the culprit. Ugly and old as time, it lurks in the caverns of my heart-- discontentment.
It's a discontented heart that persists on finding the flaws, the weaknesses, the boring and mundane. Uncovering desires and longings, it feeds hostility toward the present. It blames God, my job, my body, my husband, my friends and family-- anything!-- anything other than myself.
Discontentment throws up a wall between my heart and the heart of God. I choose it over being humbled by the abundant good.
I shift uncomfortably. My coffee is getting cold, but I set it down and skim through the pages until I find what I'm looking for.
I read the words, let them sink in.
Life changes, it's good, it's bad, it's blissful and utterly painful. But contentment isn't easy-- it's rooted in faith, faith that God sees and has a plan.
This life breeds discontentment. It drove Adam and Eve out of the garden. It kept the Israelites out of the promised land. It keeps me from experiencing intimacy with God. I can't ask for nearness with one breath and curse his gifts with the next.
This morning I'm not sure if I have that faith. But I know I want it. Whatever it is that needs to be cultivated in me, I invite it. I invite this intimate revival.