for when you're feeling homesick… {Pt. 1}

{Today I'm linking up with the community of sojourning ladies over at Velvet Ashes, posting on last week's prompt "Home"… I have so many thoughts on this subject, there might have to be a Pt.2 to this post!}

A black car pulled up in the driveway, and my husband got out of the driver’s seat.  Ben and Will ran to meet him across the yard of our rental house.  Daddy picked them up and swung them around.

“What do you think of our new car?” he asked energetically.

Three-year-old Ben’s face immediately fell.  “That’s not our car!” he protested.  “I want my blue car!  I want our car, from Central Asia!  I want to go home!”  He burst into angry tears, and James’ face registered consternation as he looked at me over Ben’s head.  

Of our two boys, Ben struggled the most last year with our transition back to New Zealand for the birth of our next baby.  He didn’t like our “new” house, he didn’t like living in Christchurch, he wanted his own bed, his own house, his own trike back in Central Asia.

In a word, he was homesick.  

We’d only been living in this Central Asian village four and a half years, but we moved here right before Ben was born, and since three months old he’s spent more time here than anywhere else in the world.  

From our first days here my own heart, too, has been knitted to this place: the people, the simple layout of the town, the routes to different friends’ houses, the mountains, the fields, the flocks of sheep and cows and horses, the quiet, slow, backwater feel of the place.  

All three of our children (now ages 6, 4 and 1) have spent their early childhood here, so this place is the most familiar to them.  When we’re visiting one of their two passport countries, it’s so ironic to me when they say “I want to go home” - and they mean this tiny corner of Central Asia.  

It’s been in this village that our family has transitioned from three members to four members, and now to five with the addition of our daughter last year.  Our rental house for the past two years is the place where I prepare our meals, where we sleep and play and wake up day after day.  It’s the first place in which I’ve hosted my own parents, proudly fed them pizza and breadsticks made from scratch in “my own” kitchen.  

At this moment, for this season, this is our home.

My dad, having breakfast with the boys in our rental-kitchen...

I remember my Mom stenciling our house when I was little,
so when she came she helped me stencil this rental house,
even though I know we won't be here forever…
Now, when I see my red cherries, I think of her.

This has not been tested yet, but I think even if we have to change houses again in this country, or even if we change countries (a very real and contemplated possibility), “home” for us and our children will travel with us to the new place.  We’ll have our dishes, our bedspreads, our pictures on the walls, our books, our carpets, our water-filter, the same clothes and shoes and toys… and we’ll be together.  Familiar things and familiar people will make both the external house-shell and the internal atmosphere of our next house feel like home to all of us.

The dictionary on my word processor defines “home” as “the place where one lives permanently, especially as a member of a family or a household.”  But don’t you think it would be more accurate to describe the essence of home as familiarity?  Beloved people with whom we can be ourselves, a place where we know every little nook and cranny, a certain possession treasured because it evokes special memories… 

Our hearts seem to be designed to knit to other hearts and tie to certain places.  

In Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince, the prince has a conversation with a fox in which the fox asks the prince to tame him.  The prince asks, “What does ‘tamed’ mean?” 

The fox replies, “It means, ‘to create ties’…” 

“‘To create ties’?”

“That’s right,” the fox said.  “...If you tame me, we’ll need each other.  You’ll be the only boy in the world for me.  I’ll be the only fox in the world for you…” 

We are made to ‘create ties’, to long for connections that make us unique to the other in all the world.  We are created to lavish love and care on a person or a place, until they become so familiar and precious that when we’re away from them we ache inside.

And yet, places aren’t permanent, however much we wish they were, and eventually we have to say goodbye to people we love.  On this planet, the only constant thing is change.   

The apostle Paul compares our earthly bodies with tents (he was a tentmaker, after all, so he knew his stuff), and says we have an actual “building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens…”  He encouraged the Corinthian church to look to the “unseen weight of glory beyond all comparison” to get them through “momentary, light affliction…”  (2 Cor 5:1-6)

How does knowing our true home, our “house not made with hands”, is in heaven - and that means we are actually sojourners, strangers and aliens on this earth - factor into our understanding of “home” and our heart-sense of where home is?

I find this difficult.  I’m a physical person with a physical body, and my heart naturally knits to beloved people and special things and physical bits of earth.  It is so hard for me to believe that intangible, difficult-to-imagine heaven will actually feel more like home than here…  

I do know God will be there, and I know the closer I draw to Him now in this life, the more familiar He will feel and the more my heart will be knitted to Him and I will long to be with Him in person all the time, face to face, without ceasing.  

While I was engaged to my husband, I went through this. When I was with him, I felt such a sense of belonging, of homecoming.  He made me feel so safe and loved and welcomed and cherished that I wanted to be with him all. the. time.  The more time we spent together (and even while we were apart), the closer our hearts drew together and the more familiar he felt to me.  The more familiar he felt, the more I loved being with him.  As we neared our wedding day, separating for sleep was torture.  (Having said that, after marriage, learning how to actually sleep and get good rest in the same bed with another person definitely took some getting used to!  But it was bliss not to have to say goodbye.)

A little-seen engagement photo from 9 years ago… :)

I wonder if that’s how we’re meant to feel now about heaven.  Like an engaged bride feels about her coming marriage.  What if we felt so comforted and accepted and safe and welcomed and cherished when we experience the presence of even Jesus’ non-physical Holy Spirit, that to be physically with Jesus Himself, our Bridegroom, face to face for all time and never have to say goodbye again… would be unimaginable bliss?

Maybe that’s why Paul (a person with arguably one of the closest ever relationships with the risen Jesus) wrote to the Galatians saying, “It is better for me by far to depart and be with Christ, but for your sake I’ll stay here on this messed-up, broken planet and keep shepherding you for your progress and joy in the faith…”  (Phil 1:21-25, my paraphrase, emphasis added)  

He was longing to be united with Christ.  

Paul goes on to describes death not as unclothing us from our earthly bodies, but as being further clothed - “swallowed up by life.”  After death, we’ll be more Alive, Paul says.  Our resurrection bodies will be even more gloriously Real than the ones we have now.  

What if it was the same for our sense of home, and all our knitted ties here on earth?  What if after death (or when Jesus comes back!) we experience an even deeper sense of familiarity and delicious Home-coming than we ever have before?  

In his book on heaven and hell, The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis imagines the grass of heaven to be so much more Real than earth-grass that its spikes hurt the feet of the spirit-people who travel there in a bus to take a look.  Might the sense of Home in heaven be like that too?  More Real, more strangely familiar, more deliciously comforting than anything we’ve known on earth? 

What if all our varied experiences of “home” on this earth - our house growing up, our parents’ home, our new homes we build as adults, our various patches of earth around the world to which we tie ourselves throughout the course of our lives - what if all these glimpses are merely meant to whet our appetites for the Real Thing?

What if we imagined each glimpse of beauty or delicious sense of homecoming or mouth-watering whiff of baking bread or sweet kiss from our child as a lovely shadow cast by an even lovelier Reality in Another Country?  Wouldn’t we long to get to that Country?

In his thought-provoking fairytale The Golden Key, George MacDonald describes the journey of two children, Tangle and Mossy.  During their travels they pass through a land of wonderful shadows, which MacDonald narrates in part like this:

“Now a wonderful form, half bird-like half human, would float across on outspread sailing pinions.  Anon an exquisite shadow group of gambolling children would be followed by the loveliest female form, and that again by the grand stride of a Titanic shape, each disappearing in the surrounding press of shadowy foliage.  Sometimes a profile of unspeakable beauty or grandeur would appear for a moment and vanish.  Sometimes they seemed lovers that passed linked arm in arm, sometimes father and son, sometimes brothers in loving contest, sometimes sisters… Sometime wild horses would tear across… But some of the things which pleased them most they never knew how to describe.   

“About the middle of the plain they sat down to to rest… After sitting for a while, each, looking up, saw the other in tears: they were each longing after the country whence the shadows fell.”

For the rest of their journey Mossy and Tangle are filled with this unspeakable longing to reach “the country whence the shadows fell”.  MacDonald ends his fairytale  like this:

“He took his key.  It turned in the lock to the sounds of Aeolian music.  A door opened upon slow hinges, and disclosed a winding stair within.  The key vanished from his fingers.  Tangle went up.  Mossy followed.  The door closed behind them.  They climbed out of the earth; and, still climbing, rose above it.  They were in the rainbow.  Far abroad, over ocean and land, they could see through its transparent walls the earth beneath their feet.  Stairs beside stairs wound up together, and beautiful beings of all ages climbed along with them. 

“They knew that they were going up to the country whence the shadows fall. 

“And by this time I think they must have got there.”

Surely our love of “home” and our ability to get “homesick” proves that every human being on this planet has a God-planted longing deep in our hearts, a longing to find our Way Home.  

Isn’t it wonderful that the One who said, 

“I have gone to prepare a place for you...” 

also said 

“I am the Way…” ?

And aren’t we here, sojourning on this planet, to introduce the hearts longing for home all around us to that One who is Himself the Way to our True Home? 

I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to get to 

“the country from whence the shadows fall”.  

Because once there, with Him, we’ll never be homesick. ever. again.  

aware of wealth

{A flashback from early September, starting our second three-week wait for visas…}

September 1, 2013 

We are, all five of us, sleeping in one room for a cluster of nights as we embark on our third trip this summer, waiting for visas again…

Never have I felt so vulnerable, never has my foothold in this cleft of rock, this tiny corner of the globe, seemed so tenuous.  I feel powerless to provide my children with what I long to give them, what I know they need: a home.  Stability.  Routine.  Consistency.

And yet, as the darkness deepens here in this funny oblong triple room in a guesthouse in a strange city in the middle of Central Asia, I am aware of wealth.

I pick up my baby from the bottom of her cot, her limbs splayed out, heavy with sleep.  While she nurses, I perch on the side of my bed, listen to four other pairs of lungs besides my own, breathing in, breathing out.  One boy sighs in his sleep.  Another rustles his covers, stirring in slumber.  

I give her the other side, and then, since she’s too soundly asleep to suck, I gently lay her back down.  I pull over her chubby bare legs the summer blanket of pink gingham edged in eyelet my mother made for me when I was a baby, lovingly stored away away against the day when her baby girl would have a baby girl of her own.  

I step across the room to my oldest son, pull up his sheet, smooth his forehead, ministrations a thousand thousands of mothers have performed before me, and will perform long after my mothering days are done.  

I stoop to kiss my second son, the one we all love so much it hurts, the one who hurts us with the violence of his passions, his loves, his hates, his frustrations.  The boy whose blue eyes fairly popped with joy, two inches from my face, as he shouted earlier in the garden, “Did YOU see THAT, Mom?  Didja see what I can do??” as he cavorted and gamboled gleefully with his brother.  

The boy who, tonight as Daddy was tucking him in, moaned in a voice dripping with mournfulness, “But Da-ad, if I close my eyes, I can’t see anything!”  

The boy who exhausts us with his exuberance, levels us by loving us, shouts and sulks his way through each three-year-old day with such reckless abandon as to make me cringe at the thought of him at 13… and 23… and… 

I tuck the covers in around this boy, kiss his babyish three-year-old cheek, listen to him sucking on his thumb, feel my heart swell with maternal pride.  

These four human beings, the ones I birthed and the one who sired them, we are bone of bone, flesh of flesh.  Our soft collective breathing fills this space, and I suddenly revel in this one set of four walls containing the whole of us.  Our family.  That there would be such a thing in the world as the miracle of a family, that I would have one of my own, created out of two become one, birthed from my womb, entrusted to me to nurture...  

Wealth.  Untold.

And I realize the answer to my unspoken, wordless question, my longing to provide them with security, stability: here, within these four walls, is God’s plan for doing just that.  He planned for each human being to be placed in a family, with a certain, special set of human beings to belong to, to own, to love.  

I sit quietly in the dark, feeling complete.  Knowing I am home, in this hotel room, as home as I’ll ever be on this planet.

Home isn’t a place: it’s being part of a family.  

And my heart suddenly wells up with a desperate ache, for all the broken ones, the lost ones, the separated ones, sleeping lonely, crying… Alone in the dark.  

Lying flat on my bed now, under the covers, silent tears trickle into my ears and drip onto the pillow as I pray, with all the love in my heart, that God would draw near to each lonely one, touch each broken heart, adopt each orphan, take the hand of anyone who’s lost, and lead them…

...Home.  

If you're lost and lonely today, longing for family and home, 

cry out to the God who is Father….

"For He is good;

His steadfast love endures forever,

and his faithfulness to all generations."

(Ps. 100:5)

And leave a comment or send me an email - I would love to pray for you!

good to be home

{Written last weekend... yeah, it's a week old now but it still applies... enjoying being in our own space!)

A Russian disco beat from a local party floats up the hill on the breeze, into my banana-muffin-scented kitchen.  I haven’t been able to bake in a month.  Having something slowly turning golden in my oven feels good.  The timer beeps, and I grab potholders, open the oven door with a blast of hot air in my face, pull out my blue silicon heart-shaped muffin pan.  I balance it on top of the stove, letting the muffins cool in the breeze wafting in through the open window.  My red geranium sits cheerily on the windowsill, matching the red cherries my sweet Mom helped me stencil on the walls of my kitchen, during their visit two years ago.  Has it really been two years already?  

My little son sits contentedly at the kitchen table munching pieces of yellow apple.  Autumn is here already.  It’s hard to believe.  I feel like we blinked and missed summer.  My baby girl scoots across the kitchen linoleum on the seat of her pink pants, clutching a sliver of apple in her fist.  I sit at my kitchen desk, sip Earl Grey tea in my new china mug with the blue flowers, a gift from my thoughtful husband.  

My eldest son saunters in from the fresh air, hops into a kitchen chair, begs again to play our game of Connect-4. I had put it on hold while I kneaded and set to rise some rosemary-scented Tuscan flatbread which I want to tear and eat it, hot and golden, with our Sunday supper frittata.  (I’m inspired - I’ve been reading Marlena di Blasi all afternoon.)

“What color do you want to be, Mommy?”

“I don’t mind.”

“Ok, I’m red.”  The bright yellow and red plastic counters make a peaceful clacking sound sliding down their chutes.  He beats me, fair and square.  I reach for another muffin, sip my tea.  Consolation.  My son is growing up.  

My daughter pulls herself up using Ben’s chair for support, wobbles back and forth, loudly requesting more apple.  A few shaky steps and she’s clutching my pant leg, grinning cheekily up at me with cheeks bulging.  One little hand spread-eagled on my jeans for balance, she bounces her little knees and grins at me with each chew.  I blinked, and her first year went by.  

The second game of Connect-4 we fill up the entire board except for one final empty slot in the top right-hand corner.  He beats me again.  He’ll be smarter than me soon, I think.  Not much time left.    

I shoo us all outside to catch the late afternoon sunlight, grabbing Ruby under one arm, my kitchen scissors, the camera.  Ruby holds on to her stroller to practice walking.  I snip the last of the sunflowers and zinnias, snap photos in the slanting rays of light.  

James comes home, opens the gate, drives the car in.  Ruby sinks to her bottom, scoots to Daddy, holds up her arms.  He tosses her in the air.  She squeals with delight, flashing her lopsided dimples and enchanting little teeth.  

We trail back inside together, stepping over the detritus of our first full day at home - every available floor space littered with toys, the kids getting reacquainted with all their treasures after yet another month away from home.  I fill a Mason jar with water for the zinnias, place them in the middle of the chaos on the kitchen table.  The two tallest sprigs of sunflowers I stand up in a pretty china pitcher on the windowsill.  Behind me, the boys straggle in from throwing rocks in the canal, Ben whimpering over his latest war wound.  He pulls up his shirt to show me the scratch, I kiss his forehead.  

“Can we watch something?”  The inevitable, hundred-times-a-day question.  This time I say yes, tell them to agree on a DVD, turn on the player.  I go knead my dough, divide it into two oval rounds, set it to rise on a baking sheet under a clean towel.  The boys fight and bicker over the DVD, I threaten cancellation if they can’t agree.  I can hear Ben trying to pull the “wounded soldier” card: “I got an owie!  I want to pick!”  Finally, seeing no end in sight, I choose for them, and the strains of Curious George float peacefully from the living room.  

As I scrub the muffin pan, I think back over our summer.  Three weeks of June in Turkey.  One week at home, then a visa run which turned into a 25-day marathon saga.  The month of August at home, just 30 short days (10 of which, James was away).  Then we gathered the troops for a second visa run these first three weeks of September, finally climaxing last Friday with the grant of our long-awaited 1-year visa, the culmination of months of hard work and hassles….  

My soul feels tired.  

Even though we are only renting this house, it’s full of the things we love and the pieces of ourselves that make it feel like home.  The afternoon sun bronzing the walnut leaves outside, the sound of Curious George, the scent of rising rosemary flatbread, the familiar red cherries on my kitchen walls... 

The sum of all this leaves me feeling suddenly wealthy.  

The little local boy who tends to turn up at meal times pokes his brown head politely around my kitchen door.  “Assalam aleykum,” he greets me with a grin, adding, in his frank little way, that he’s just had a muncha (shower) - probably a once-a-week experience at best.  I grin back, and motion to the living room and the Curious George watchers.  He ducks his head and disappears.  

Ruby starts her pre-dinner shriek, and I rack my brain to think of what I can feed her as an appetizer… Oh, right.  Fresh-baked banana muffin.  

She grins her cheeky, toothy grin at me and presses one little hand to her bib - sign-language for “please”.  

Aaaahhhh.  It’s good to be home.  

Grandma Ruby's Zinfandel of Beef

The other night, I made my grandma's recipe for beef stew.

It. was. delicious.

So delicious that at the end of dinner (after two helpings each), our dishes looked like this:

Will's comment when he came in from outside and smelled it cooking was, "Wow, Mom!  That smells good!"  Yes, I am raising boys, and they like to eat.  I'm afraid to imagine the teenage years.

I felt a warm glow of pride that my family was so happy with my cooking, and also a kind of domestic thrill that I have preserved this special recipe from my grandma... I know it will be feeding our family for many years to come!

In case you're craving a warm, hearty stew one of these chilly spring evenings...

Here, for your cooking pleasure, is Grandma Ruby's Zinfandel of Beef.  Enjoy!

3-4lbs beef stew meat, cubed
2 cups onions, sliced
2-3 cups potatoes, cubed
2-3 cups carrots, cubed
2 cups celery, chopped (I left this out and it was still yummy!)
2 cups fresh or canned tomatoes, chopped
7-8 cups liquid: 2 cups hearty red wine, 5-6 cups beef stock
6 T butter, melted
4-6 T flour

Simmer beef for 2-3 hours in the wine and beef stock.  Check for doneness.  Add vegetables, simmer 30-40 minutes until tender.  Remove beef and vegetables from pot.  Melt butter, stir in flour a little at a time.  Remove from heat.  Whisk in broth a little at a time until a smooth paste forms.  Reincorporate paste back into the remaining broth, add meat and vegetables back in, heat until bubbling.  Serve with crusty bread and sliced cucumbers!

Five Minute Friday: Home

{Every Friday, the lovely Lisa-Jo Baker posts a prompt and lots of beautiful hearts write for 5 unedited, unscripted minutes... Join in with me?}

This week's prompt:
(to which I wrote while still groggy from sleep... I know, I know - no disclaimers, sorry!)

HOME.

{Ben and a friend blowing bubbles last summer 

on the steps of our then-new-to-us "home" in Central Asia}

GO.

I woke up from my nap, checked for this Friday's prompt while we're still in Thailand with fast internet, waiting to go back to our current "home"... and the prompt was this word.  This cryptic, loaded, elusive word.  Home.  Home is a word that encompasses familiar, that wraps you around like a blanket, that hugs your heart.

Home is where the heart is.  And in this life of sojourning (whether, like us, you travel continents and live out of suitcases, or whether you've lived your whole life in one house - you are still a sojourner, you know.  We all are...) it's important to know where Home is.

For me, Home is Heaven.  Home is Jesus.  "Home" on this earth is where all the members of my new immediate family: my husband, my two sons, and my gorgeous baby daughter: are gathered in one place.  "Home" for me used to be where my parents live, but not any longer... and that's as it should be.  I'm creating a new "home", for my new family.  My children will say "home" is where we are - Mom and Dad - and that's as it should be.  But my Home?  My true Home?

Is just simply nowhere in this world.  With every year that passes, and every airplane flight we take, the world gets smaller.  And feels less and less like it fits around me.  Maybe when I'm 80, I'll just be so loose in my body that I'll just simply slip it off and float away... Home.

And that's when I'll see Him face to face for the first time, and my heart will know... Home is where my heart is, and my heart has been with Him since I was 6 years old.  He is my Home.  Every sojourning heart needs His Home-ness to truly feel like you belong.  He's calling you Home today.

Can you hear Him?

STOP.

{I wrote a whole song about this... find it here!}

when everywhere's a race track...

Some photos from our morning, occupying time while Daddy finishes taking care of things on the computer... {James is so faithful... I am so blessed!}

For Ben, every surface is a race track.  He's had the World Circuit this trip!

Am I that portable?  Are the things I love to do always with me, or do I put them on hold?  

And if I put them on hold, how long will it be before I start to really live?  

The challenge: 

find things to do and love that are portable -

can be taken anywhere, done in any context.

Like, giving thanks?  

for when home seems a long way off...

The tears suddenly prick the back of my eyes as I say it.

"But - this side makes me feel more like we're in - " and I say the name of the country we live in.  The country we're going back to.  The one we live in reluctantly sometimes, the second-choice place.  Our first choice is out of our reach.  And despite our discontent at times, the second-choice place has gradually come to feel like home.

Tonight we're in yet another hotel room, still en route, still floating in mid-air, still transitioning.  I do remember that all of life is a transition.  We really are headed to heaven.  Just sometimes, I feel the transition more than others, like when we're sleeping in one bed after another...

I'm sprawled in pajamas on the right-hand side of this bed, the side James was sitting on just a minute ago.  I've collapsed in his spot after brushing my teeth at the end of another long shuttlebus-airplane-shuttlebus-taxi day.  I'm looking at email on his computer, so he sits down on the other side, the left-hand side, pulls my computer over and starts scrolling... Eventually he says, "Do you want that side?  This side's closer to Ruby..." Her little bed is in the corner, with her fast asleep in it right now, content.  No matter what continent we're on, as long as there is warm milk whenever she wakes, warm arms to hold her, warm kisses on her sweet face, she's content.  Am I?

I do know this world is not even my home, I'm just passing through... Am I holding on too tight to this world?  Or is this tightening in my throat, the hot tears pricking, are these the signs of "homesick" in a good way?  This "second-choice" place where God has planted us - could it be that since it's His first choice for us, He's knitting it into our hearts?

I snuggle under the covers on this right-hand side, pull the blanket up over my face.  Block out the world.  Hide, just for a minute.  "This side feels... more like home."  Admitting to myself that the road feels long.  That six months is a long time to be away from the only bed we own in the world.  And even though we only own the bed, not hardly anything else in the house, at least it's something.  

At least I know which side I sleep on.  The right.

{Sometimes I can't remember.  I have to close my eyes and picture the wall in our bedroom back there - feel the bed in my mind, see the surroundings, my bedside table, our wardrobe, my desk - before I can remember which side I sleep on.  That's when I know I've been away too long.}

Only God can do that, can knit a place to your heart and a bed to your soul in a way that makes it feel like home, even when not one single mouth in our village speaks our heart language.  We speak theirs, and their hearts connect to ours, and that's what feels like home.  That, and familiarity.  Doing the same habits over and over until they become like breathing: our verse calendar at breakfast.  Reviewing my verses in the bathroom.  Sleeping on the same side of the bed.  Making pancakes.  Walking to the shop.  Stopping by a friend's house.  Those are the things that feel like home.

Those are the things I miss.

I sniff, and crawl over to the other side of this bed, the side closer to Ruby tonight, the side not mine.  I don't mind, not really.  We're not back yet, so it doesn't really matter.  And all this transitioning does remind me that I'm still en route to our Real Home, that I'll be sleeping in different beds for the rest of my life, until I sleep my final sleep and wake up in my Savior's arms.

But when we do finally get back, back to our second-choice turned first-choice, back to the only bed we own in this world right now, I will snuggle in to sleep on the right-hand side... and it will feel good.

It will feel like home.

"just have a little faeth"

You know what?  I’m letting it go.  I am letting. It. Go.  

The need for it to be perfect.  The need for it to be perfectly planned, perfectly executed, the frantic grasping after every detail to fall perfectly into place.

I’m letting it go.

I have to, you see: I’m driving everybody nuts.  Including myself.

The fact is, I saw this movie Friday night, by myself - I actually can’t remember the last time I did that.  This time I was babysitting for our teammates’ anniversary, and I had a whole quiet evening all to myself, with a new batch of movies to pick from.  I clicked on one called “Leap Year”, and opened up a story.  A story of a girl, not very different from me, who also loved control - even a bit more than I do, if that’s possible.  Through a series of events she ends up in Ireland, and meets this guy who couldn’t be more different from her…. And they have a series of adventures together, unwillingly at first, and then more willingly because each realizes the other has something they need, something that’s changing them.  For the better.  

My favorite line in the movie?  The scene I actually re-played on my computer the next day when I laid down to rest at naptime (can’t remember the last time I did that either)?

They agree to make dinner for the folks at their bed and breakfast, and they’re out in the garden picking vegetables.  Anna is consulting a recipe book, and trying to find three medium carrots; she decides one of her three is definitely larger than medium.  So the guy, Declan, takes the carrots from her, snaps a chunk off the end of the bigger one, and says, “There.  Three medium carrots.”  

And then he pushes the recipe book closed and says to Anna, in his soft Irish brogue: 

“It’s dinnuh!  Why dontcha stop tryin’ to control everythin’ in the known universe?  Just have a little faeth, that it will all work out!”  

Just have a little faith.  It will all work out.  I smile every time I remember him saying that.  Anna’s response?  The reason she doesn’t listen to advice like that is because her dad always said that, and all his money kept going after “the next big nothing” that came along.  Cut to Anna working two part-time jobs after school, and their house getting repossessed on Christmas Eve - Ho, ho, ho.  “So you’ll forgive me,” she says quietly, “if I don’t listen.”  

For Anna, it was an unreliable father that made the floor fall out of her world and shoved her into a life of trying to control every tiny detail.  What is it for me?  What is that makes me yearn to control every detail of my life, to straighten every space, de-clutter every surface?  What drives me?  You could say it’s because of our lifestyle, that when you move as much as we do, it’s natural to try to keep my surroundings as much in order as possible.  You could say when we live in countries where so many things are completely out of our control, it’s natural to want to control the little things I can reach.  

You know what it really is?

It’s really that I just don’t “have a little faith.”  Deep down, if I’m honest with myself, even though I do trust Jesus to do the big things - like, save me and get me to heaven - I’m not really trusting Him that He knows me well enough to take care of the little things too.  

Things like having a plumber actually show up when he says he will, so we can dismantle our water tanks from this house and hook them up in our new house all in one day, so I don’t have to go without running water for hours on end (like everybody in the rest of our town does every day - I know, I’m so spoiled).  

Things like what color curtains to have made, how to arrange our new living room, where to buy plastic storage containers for winter clothes, what meals to make while packing and shifting my kitchen.  

Things like fixing the window in the bathroom so the dust doesn’t get in.  Hot water in my next kitchen sink.  How to hammer nails for pictures into concrete walls without making craters in the plaster.

Things like that.  

Does Jesus really care about things like that?

The thing is, He does.  He actually does.  That movie taught me, in some way that I haven’t quite figured out yet, that Jesus actually cares about the little quirky bits of me - the bit that yearns to make pretty, ordered spaces around me, the bit that feels alone and abandoned and like a little lost child, the bit that hates being a floating speck of dust with nowhere to land, the bit that aches to own some earth somewhere in the world to plant a tree…  He cares about those bits too.  He really does.

If Jesus was Irish, I could just hear him saying to my heart: 

“Just have a little faeth, lass.  I’ll work it all out.”  

*****

“Be happy in him, O my heart, and in nothing but God,

for whatever a man trusts in,

from that he expects happiness.”

{From the Valley of Vision prayer “A Colloquy on Rejoicing”}

loosening the moorings

{Ben blowing bubbles with the boys' Russian tutor, 

sitting on our future front steps}

Every time we approach another transition, there is one prayer that floats uppermost in my heart: “Lord, please get me ready.”   All my reluctance to leave the known, my dread of the inconveniences of the unknown, and the ache of saying more goodbyes press down together in the pit of my stomach.  But each time, He does get me ready.  Often He’s still shifting things around in my heart down to the final hours before lift-off, but I am always ready when we come right to the edge.    

Remember that grief I was feeling a month ago towards leaving this house?  It subsided, gradually, as grief does.  It faded away as I said my early goodbyes to our back yard, to our garden, to our light, airy rooms.  It faded away as I threw myself into loving this place afresh, enjoying each of the things that make it home to us.  

In its place came peace.  Peace!  And even the first flutterings of excitement.  Now we are ten days deep into cleaning and painting and scrubbing and de-cluttering our new house, and as we physically loosen our moorings, about to push off again and float toward our next tethering place, I can feel my heart lifting too.  

There’s something immensely satisfying about taking a dusty, moldy, grease-spattered space and making it bright and shiny clean.  It’s deeply comforting to fill a space with praise music, preparing the atmosphere as well as the walls for God’s presence to be present.  It’s invigorating to invite the Holy Spirit to come wash my heart and make me ready to be mistress of these new spaces, this new house, on this new street, next to these new neighbors.  

You know something?  This will be the first time in six years of marriage and eight years of living overseas that I will have a color scheme in my kitchen.  It was partly chosen for me (the shiny red cabinets were already there), but I chose the yellow paint.  Red for apples and cherries and happiness, yellow for sunshine and the warmth of God’s favor.  And I am happy, basking in red love and yellow grace, soaking up the warmth of God’s generosity.  To me, this will be the best house we’ve been given yet in Asia.  The best house.  And even if our days here are numbered (aren’t they always numbered?), every time I enter my red and yellow kitchen I’ll remember not to take a single day in it for granted.

{one of several treasures found in our new house}