An Almost Perfect Weekend (We are Ok)

This weekend was almost perfect.  It was warm and sunny, we had a full family day hiking to the river, seeing the hydro-electric dam that generates power for Tenwek, meeting some Kenyan kids to play with, a skype call with Michael's sister.  And then a notification from the US Embassy: Do not go to Westgate Mall. Shooting. Al-Shabab. Sheer terror.

If that notification went unnoticed, the weekend could have been so nice. For us in isolation.  

But we don't live in isolation.  Bad news really does affect us.  We were in that shopping mall and the Nakumatt supermarket that is under siege exactly two weeks ago stocking all our supplies.  When I lay my children down to sleep at night, it's on pillows purchased in that holed up terror hideout. I cover them with blankets bought in the upper isolated back corner of that store, where I don't know if I saw an emergency exit or not. 

I wish that image were not in my head. We were trained for this in pre-field so I feel even the simulated surge of panic rush my veins. I wish it were just daisies and roses and not really happening.  This is the third day of it. 

We are pushed to examine our motives for being here again.  God, is this where you want us? 

But Sunday came and I had a commitment to go to church with our house-helper, Peris.  Peris has been leading Bible studies for women together with another missionary for 8 years now.  They train women to teach other women the Scriptures and when they have memorized 18 verses, they are given their own Kipsigis language Bible.  I knew it was important day for them, but I had no idea how important.  So yesterday I got to go to a Kipsigis church service that lasted 5 hours for these 83 women to receive their first Bible.  That was why I was here.

They put a graduation gown on us and all 83 women had sashes and uniform for graduation.  We marched in singing and processing.  I wanted to duck into the first empty seat possible, but being dubbed “line leader” they had me sit on the dirt floor platform with the other leaders for the ceremony.  Thankfully I knew a little bit of what to expect from a Kenyan church ceremony event.  I needed to make an official greeting and short word to the congregation so I told them I also just graduated from my Bible study at Emmanuel Christian Seminary in the USA and my professor was a Kenyan, even a member of their tribal family the Kalenjin. And I needed to sit there for five hours.  The hundred or so children would stand outside quiet and still too as they waited to see their mamas awarded.  And there was singing. Oh there was singing and singing and singing.  These folks got their praise on yesterday.  They sang “I know that Jesus has loved me” over and over in Kipsigis language.

If my Internet was able, I’d upload a video of the singing.   They got their names called up and I handed the Bible to them with two hands because a gift is given and received with two thankful hands in Kenya.  Then I shook hands just like President Sweeney did for me at Emmanuel Christian Seminary graduation a few months ago. And then the families put garlands of shiny tinsel around their necks and the paparazzi took phone photos with intensity. And then they sang some more.  They sang in Kipsigis “Thank you Linda, God sent you from America to bring us this Bible”.  (Linda is the missionary whose home we are residing in this year while she is on furlough, and who gives me the honor of hosting the women’s Bible study training in the home too)

It was intense, and it was real.  They were so grateful to receive their own Bible, like you wouldn’t believe.  But we do believe.  We do believe that the Word became flesh and resided among us so that we could receive His Life that is truly Life.  And it is an awesome thing to consider.  So that when terror strikes, I can recite over and over and over again “I know that Jesus has loved me” and that is where my life is.  Even if I’m holed up in my deepest fear of dying in Wal-mart, a senseless death or tragic waste, that Jesus has loved me and given his death defeating Life to me is enough.  I have to remember that.

In truth, my heart and flesh cry out for the safety and comforts of an easy peaceful life.  And he answers back to me that I have already died with Christ and my life is hid with Him.  Is there anything safer or more comforting than those Mighty Outstretched Arms that reached down to rescue me already?

Even if I made my bed in Hell, still there He would find me. (Ps. 139)

So we press on, living by faith and not by fear. 

Karibu Tenwek (our first week)

Tomorrow will be the end of our first full week here at Tenwek.  It's hard to know where to start when you sit to write something like this, when you have sensed, felt, and experienced so much in the past week.  It would probably be best to start at the beginning.  Here we are departing from Atlanta incognito.  My favorite comment on this picture has been that I bear a striking resemblance to one of the Mario Brothers, and that Josiah is looking "shifty" an apt description of him.  It made for some comic relief in the setting of good-byes, though we did our 'staches' off before heading through security.


The flights were long, and as smooth as can be expected traveling with young ones.  Our first night in this guest house we all went to bed early (in the morning), and slept through the night until late the next morning we saw the African sun shining on this little paradise in Nairobi.  "We sure are good at this traveling thing" we thought as the kids went back to bed smoothly that second night... to awaken again in about an hour and be up until 4 AM.  Since then, the 'jet-lag awake at night' time has gotten progressively shorter, until we are pretty well back to sleeping through again.  One advantage of being awake from 1-3 AM last Saturday with jet-lagged kids watching Lady and the Tramp was that we could listen to the University of Georgia vs. South Carolina football game radio broadcast online.


Our reception here has been overwhelming.  We have joked that it is an all-inclusive resort (for a few days), where other missionary families have cooked all our meals for our first few days, and there are so many people around to help us.  One night, as we were getting ready for dinner, Katie went out to our little garden to find a sweet potato for dinner.  She knelt in the African soil in her long missionary skirt and a kitchen knife in hand, dug out a sweet potato, and in perfect Scarlett O'hara, "As God is my witness, I'll never go hungry again!"
Other big family news has been Josiah's first days of kindergarten.  These are his buddies: Jacob, Cooper, and Walter.  He has a song that he likes to sing, "You never get bored in Kenya!" is the refrain.


And I got to start doing some doctoring again earlier this week, and I know it's a cliche, but it's really a dream come true for me.  This life and work is what I've been preparing for my whole life.  I've had fantastic opportunities to learn about medicine in Kenya, and to serve some extraordinary patients, and to do some clinical teaching for some incredible Kenyan interns and med students and a Cameroonian resident.  I hope to post a case of the week series, so stay tuned. 

This is the good life!

Two weeks into mission training, two weeks from leaving

4:30 a.m. on Monday- drive out to the ATL airport for our big month long Colorado adventure at Mission Training International.  As we sat in the plane still on the ground  in Atlanta, my eye was drawn to the air traffic control tower windows with taped in jumbo letters.  Our flight was delayed for a mechanical check, and while waiting an extra 45 minutes to make sure all engines were go, I knew we were going to miss our 45 min connection in Houston.   But which would you prefer: fly under mechanical uncertainty and depart on time, or wait for mechanical clearance and run like the wind with small children through the terminal to connect with a closed door and rebook in customer service?  The window in Atlanta ATC tower was prophetic.  The sign says “OWN IT!” Yes, I want the air traffic controllers and the mechanics and the pilot to “own it” when I fly with them. 

And after missing the connection in Houston by 30 seconds, we rebooked to Denver instead of Colorado Springs, begged a merciful old friend to drive us from Denver up to our destination at Mission Training International.  Inconvenient.  Time to spare go by air.  And yet alive because someone was doing the job right.

The first 2 weeks here we did a program  The main idea behind language learning in a new culture will be: “OWN IT”!  We have been equipped with tools for entering a new language (for us it will be Kiswahili and Kipsigis) and the kids too have a corresponding class every day that helps them prepare for cross cultural living.   While it takes extra time and effort and unearthly amounts of energy, it will be important for our new context that we enter well.  Language has an almost magical power to access people in their context.  For example, does the name Pavlov ring a bell with you?

called Principles in Language Acquisition Training.

While we may feel like a nursing home resident with no keys to our name,  (house and cars all gone) language learning will be the symbol of responsibility in our pocket.  It will take more time than we’d like if we choose to do it.  It will be frustrating too.  But no one else will own it for us.

Now a word from our children:

Man-Cub Josiah loves living in this “hotel with a school inside it”.  We have a door that goes straight to the playground from our room!  He has mastered the monkey bars in his 3 a day workouts and will soon be ripping out of his t-shirts.  His class took a surprise field trip to the Garden of the Gods in the first week to help them understand expectations and surprises as a missionary kid.  He liked visiting the Manitou cliff dwellings of the ancient Anasazi Indians.  He liked it especially because he got his first bow and arrow there.

Little Miss Annie has been the most homesick one of us.  She transitioned into a big girl bed right out of her crib.  When she cried for her old bed, I cried too.  When she said “I wanna go hoooome” Josiah lovingly replied to her “Annie, we don’t have a home.  We just live free in the wild now”.  Annie does get to play with more friends here than she ever did before.  The older girls dote over her and the little bitty ones provide companionship she has needed for a long time.  They make mulch pies daily on the playground after class.

The children’s teachers here really study our children and help us learn their strengths and weaknesses.  We are living in a community of 30 adults and as many kids.  It’s a bit awkward at times. Our family  is adjusting to a new way of living and preparing for an even newer one.  We have our ups and downs with attitudes and with bodily function mal-functions (Daktari says it’s because we all have immunities to bugs in our home state but not to each other’s).  I’ve been out of class a few days when a child of ours needs to recover from something or another grotesque.  We like spending time together though so I’m usually glad to do it.

The trainers and staff here also comfort us with the stubborn fact that there is no perfect family.  When we pretend to be that, we become religious whitewash tombs full of dead men’s bones.  Woah. 

But if we learn to say “I’m sorry” to one another, we learn to be forgiven people.  And Jesus told us in Luke 7 that whoever is forgiven little will love little.  So we’ve been growing in love, you might say…

Home: by Daktari wife

So tired that my eyes were lined with red, my attitude similar. Tugging a few sleeping bags and some children along with me we made our way back home. Everyone a more than a little frayed with fatigue.

When I was in 3rd or 4th grade I remember a similar event. After a slumber party with catty little neighborhood girls, up all night, I had to walk ½ mile home with my sleeping bag in tow and the incessantly bright early morning sun shining through my squinted eyelids. Now that I’m all grown up, I use a sleeping mask on those occasions that I need to keep the morning mist and clouds and block out the light and hold on to my precious right to be tired. And cranky.

We spent the night at the church building last night.

Not for a slumber party youth event, but for overnight hosting with a local ministry our church participates in to give homeless families a shelter for a week. The families sleep in Sunday School class rooms for one week and move early on Sunday morning to another church building to spend another week trying to stay together as families without homes.

And I am so ornery with my children after just one night of it. Home. These children need to stay at home, not in the lobby of a church building with cots and pallets on the floor. Eating junk food and running amok late at night? Not my children! I used to use them as my excuse to not sign up for things like this. But the whole point of the ministry is that it is keeping families together through tough times. One of the guest families had a 6 month old and 2 year old and they are still kind and gracious to one another in the midst of homelessness. Mother Teresa once said to me rather incriminatingly: “Moodiness is nothing but the fruit of pride”.

But home is something we are made for, longing for it is the most natural and godly desire of our heart. It all began when we lost the Garden. The second part of the book of Isaiah is laden with the poetry of hearts longing for Home and the comfort, comfort my people, that it will come.

Buechner said “we are all homesick for the Kingdom of God” that is what we are missing. We seek to fill that homesickness with a beautiful house, backsplashes and bathrooms, these private places that we build for ourselves to feel most comforted in our “home” like we deserve this. But the American “dream” and the American market collapse have been built around the myth of home ownership that rival our Edenic loss and desire to get back in. And there was an angel set there to guard the gate with a flaming sword for a reason. We can’t get back. Not by our own means anyways. You must go in at the Gate.

Well it’s always easier to speak of the sins of our neighbors and our society at large than it is to acknowledge my own sin written all over my weary face. We come home from church and take naps. Blessed Sabbath naps. My head on the pillow.: Home. But not quite. There’s a burning in my soul that is wanting more. Something is calling me out to spend this quiet time reading Isaiah. But I’m too weak. I sleep for a one sweet hour. Even then God still keeps the children at bay in their beds long enough for me to get into the Word too. I go Home into the scriptures. This is where I belong. Like Israel in Exile, we too must learn to live outside the geographic boundaries and into bigger dimensions of Home. God Himself is now our home. Nothing less will fill this need. Not my flight into busy, nor my quest for control over my children, neither my flight into bed nor coffee cup. I am quite simply sinning in this pursuit.

Now hear the Good News:

“I have swept away your offenses like a cloud,
your sins like the morning mist.
Return to me,
For I have redeemed you” Isaiah 44:22

Time to start packing up house, Katie. We are moving out in 4 weeks (or less)!

So I slough away some dusty belongings, then on Monday I attempt to bake bread, and watch Power Rangers with my boy. Happy together on our couch. I have been redeemed again.

Still, I am Homesick and haven’t even left for Africa yet.

Big Daddy in Memoriam

Last Sunday my grandfather passed away.  His name was “Big Daddy.” He was so named, not because of his ample girth (though he had the usual southern-fried extra around the middle, from eating my grandmother’s cooking for 63 years).  No, his name was Big Daddy because that was his personality.  His personality was huge, and left just such an impression everywhere he went.

One of his greatest loves in life was to make people laugh.  Any kind of person and any kind of laugh would do; from the smiles of the church lady at Cartwright Baptist, to the stately chuckles of the officials and politicos during his time as County Commissioner;  and the guffaws and belly laughs of the truckers at Wagner Freight and farmers of the Sequatchie Valley Co-op.  And there was no area of humor that he did not master: practical jokes were probably his favorite (including, maybe especially, the one where he ended up in jail), but the outrageous were probably his second favorite (ask his grandchildren about his toilet bowl guitar).  There were no topics that were off-limits: politics, race, family, religion all played into his jokes, and I will never forget the twinkle in his eyes just before he got to the punch line.

And another thing that everyone who knew Big Daddy appreciated about him was his generosity.  He gave so much, in so many ways.  He never met a stranger, and gave away his extraordinary personality to everyone he met.  One of my strongest memories of spending time with him was rising early in the morning on Saturday at the farm, driving in his old beat up Datsun pickup, which smelled like chewing tobacco and his dog (who accompanied him everywhere). We’d drive to Hardees, where they knew to expect him, and he would buy a bag of biscuits and drive through the valley, visiting neighbors, especially the homebound or poor, sitting with them and sharing breakfast.  I have no idea how much of his wealth he has given to charitable causes.  He never spoke of it to me.  But I am certain it is an astounding amount, because that’s the kind of person he was.

We always spent holidays at the farm.  And ever so occasionally, he would sit us (his grandchildren) down after a holiday meal for one of his fireside chats.  He rarely gave us advice, but when he did, it was best to listen closely.  His favorite topics were hard work, integrity, and family values.  He came to hear me speak several times, a message to our church, a valedictory speech, and a mission presentation, and he would give me pointers; most notably to always speak up and stand tall, and I always remember this in that second after I walk to a podium and before I open my mouth.

He is, and always will be, with me.  In the moments after his death, as I try to gather every memory and store it away for safekeeping, these are the first things that I recall.  They are by no means the only things, and everyone who has known him has a story.  That is legacy in its own right, and to be remembered in stories is to be remembered forever.  Thank you Big Daddy.

Josiah's Broken Arm

It was the first warm week of April in the East Tennessee mountains; the first opportunity to let the kids roam free outside with their friends.  There is a small pack of them on our street.  Usually 4-5 kids, aged 5-11, with the occasional older kid and the occasional Annie bringing up the rear at 2.  This group has spent a lot of time together over the past couple of years, and we’ve spent a lot of time in the yard with them.  And in this crowd there is a bully.  We’ve known about this group dynamic, and have been more or less involved in parenting this as it happens.

But on this particular Monday evening, we are inside getting ready to host a dinner, and the kids are in the tree house in the backyard.  We hear the thud and the scream, and rush outside to see Josiah lying on the ground in front of the tree.  From the tree house we hear a chorus of, “she pushed him,” and register the words; but our focus is on our son on the ground, with the broken arm.

Over to the ER (where he knows which flavor of Popsicle he likes best), an X-ray and a cast, and we’re back home that night.  The arm doesn’t hurt so much anymore, but Josiah is very upset.  “She pushed me!” he says over and over.  What would you do with this?

Eventually, he goes to sleep and we go downstairs.  We’re sitting on the couch in the living room, and my blood is boiling.  This is my son, my only son, the one I love; and he has been hurt, maliciously not accidentally.  Hot tears are running down my face. 

And it is just a week after Easter.  The Spirit through Katie reminded me of this story.  There was a Father whose Son was hurt, maliciously not accidentally by the people who were supposed to be His friends.  The Father must have felt this pain, and more in a way I cannot imagine.  And the Son looked down from the cross and said, “Father forgive them, they don’t know what they’re doing.”

So we tell this story to ourselves, and to our son, and we become part of that story.  Josiah has a grasp on grace and forgiveness, and we are reminded.  And we go back out in the yard; we speak to the bully and her parents, telling them about what happened, that it mattered and that it was wrong, and that they’re forgiven.  It’s not a perfect story, and still awkward on our hill.  “But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.”

Daktari wife: on getting ready

I wrote this entry in my trusty ol' paper and leather journal while sitting at the DMV.  It felt closer to "nature" that way I suppose.  This is the Daktari's wife entry into the Blogosfear.
 

Blogging is looking at me like a big rumbling yella school bus looks at a 5 year old.  Who knows that one day it will be coming for him too.
Do I want to get on the bus and party with a make-believe identity, indulgent in self-expression and independence? Or do I fear getting on completely unnoticed and totally insecure in bearing me wee little soul to the big wide world, like a kindergartner in with 4th graders? Yes!

The truth is, I fear not measuring up to the blogger mommies who write such pithy and literary accounts of life.   I fear not measuring up to insta-gramming enough documentation of my beautiful life.  Moving to East Africa in 4 months with our pre-schoolers, living at a hospital amidst infectious tropical diseases, sharing our family in community with strangers, crossing the cultural divide of east/ west, all these things thrill me!  But writing about it for the www makes me quake!
Not that other people's children don't make demands on their time or that other people aren't struggling to process their life as it is lived too.  But I still have trouble getting dirty dishes out of the sink every night.  Let alone contemplative journal writing.  Online.

But the fact is, we are moving to Kenya in 4 months and like getting ready for the first day of school, I've got a lot of preparation to do before we get on the bus and go (or 747, actually). First, we've got to get freed up from much of our belongings.  (anybody want baby toys?) Moreover, I need to figure out how homeschooling or MK schooling works for my real kindergartner this fall.  No actual big yella bus is going to take him into academia out there in Bomet. There's some "supply" shopping to be done: long skirts, rain boots, learning apps for the kid's devices.  One more things is, I need to start blogging to build a bridge between our family and the ones we have to leave behind.  I desire to build understanding of what Africa is like, what our kids are like, what God is doing in our lives.

Mostly though, getting ready to go for me means trying to listen for the rumbling sound of troops marching in the top of the balsam trees- for the God of Angel Armies who goes before me.  Listen for the rhythm of the Good News that pounds down everyday saying "You'll never measure up to my requirements."  You aren't good enough.  (what?!) And THAT is why Jesus came for you.  THAT is where Jesus brings life, drives out fear, gives His Very Self to bring little ole you and me through battles of life.  It's Good News because it's not up to me.  It's Good News because it's about Jesus taking care of all my fears.  Because His love is stronger than the power of death- what have I to fear?  Fear is about death.  I will not fear being unnoticed, unliked, unfollowed, unpinned.  Listen, Katie.  Listen for the sound of the Gospel.  For without that engine rumble, it is all in vain.