At Home

I'm sitting on a cushion on the floor of a small living room. There is a PowerPoint presentation projected onto one wall. Surrounding me are 25 other college students, two leaders, and three MCC workers. I'm listening to a list of projects that MCC is working on in Jordan. And there are tears in my eyes.

What?

I pause and look around the room, and it blurs for a moment as I am reminded of another, similar room. This one is warmer, and sun streams in the windows. It's full of people, but not as many: an MCC El Salvador team meeting.

I only spent four of my nineteen years in El Salvador. It has now been ten years since we moved back to the States. But there is still an undeniable mark on my soul from the time I spent there.

Despite the gap of time, I still feel more at home in a random office half way across the world than I ever did in any classroom of my high school or any church sanctuary.

And that's why I am sitting on the floor, with tears in my eyes and a grin on my face.

10 Things That I Know To Be True

1) Even though it defies logic, I'd rather be hot than cold.

2) "Time moves faster the older you get" was not some crazy idea made up by an old dude with a time machine. It's true.

3) I hate confinement.

4) I'm an extrovert, and that's okay.

5) Every now and then, I need an introvert day.

6) Timing is rarely what we think it should be.

7) Grace is freeing.

8) In two weeks, I will be in the Middle East. For an entire semester. This is insanely exciting, slightly intimidating, and sort of unbelievable.

9) What I understand about God, compared to all He is, is about the same as zero compared to infinity. And that's ok. Trying to make my zero a bit bigger is what a faith journey is about.

10) I'm pretty darn excited about life

photo credit: Bethany Hench

Stop Answering. Start Asking.

You heard me. Answers are the pits. They are dead ends. They teach you nothing.

Yes but...they're so nice. They come packaged in little boxes, complete with orderly labels. I can file them away on the shelves of my mind so easily. After that, I don't have to deal with them!

Questions, on the other hand, are so....blobby. Misshapen. And they change! Kind of like flubber, come to think of it. They don't stay in boxes. And when they ooze between the cracks or bust out the lid, they get all over the answers neatly stacked around them and screw those up too! Questions are messy.

Questions are also uncomfortable. They get stuck in places, and you run into them when you're trying to get to an answer. I know the answer is there, if I can just get past this stupid question... I need to ask the right person, read the right book, hear the right sermon - then it will go away. We hide our questions, convinced that we are the only ones with this gooey chaos, ashamed that our boxes aren't in order, worried that it will make us less credible, less mature, less real.

But that's the thing: the questions are way more real than any of the answers we have already boxed up. They are here. Now. They point to things we need to work on, or remind us of things we should pay more attention to. They do us much more good than answers do.

So you have to learn to live with the questions. And I don't mean just tolerate them until the answer shows up. I mean stop waiting around for the answer. Love the question. Explore it. Carry it with you. Walk around it, study it from different angles. Give it room to mold and flow. Maybe even give it room to mold you.

Open up the question and look inside, understand where it came from. Let it change as you walk through life. Let your approach to it change. Come up with half-answers, then ditch them and build something new when the old doesn't fit anymore. Let the question grow with you. Let it make you grow.

Perhaps most importantly, don't hide the question. Bring it into the light. Talk about it. Show it to people. Maybe they will see new angles that you couldn't. Maybe they have the same question, or one like it, and you can show them new angles.

Maybe they will have never before seen anything like your question. Maybe they will have no idea what to say. But they can still help you carry that wibbly-wobbly, uncomfortable mess. I don't know. That's a good question. Lets keep working on it. 

"Well yeah, that's all good and fine for you to say. Sounds like a walk in the park when you put it like that. But these questions are hard! They hurt. They don't feel like flubber at all. Most of the time it's more like running into a brick wall. How can you tell me to love that?!"

I know. Believe me, I know. I've felt that brick wall. But I've also felt that box. That made-up, held together by tape and desperation, suffocating box of an answer. I thought it was enough. I thought it was better. But then I let it fall apart, and I was able to see the beauty of the question. And I could finally breathe again.

Yeah, answers are alright for some things. But it's the questions that make you who you are. It's the questions that make you grow. It's the questions that determine your journey.

It's the questions that I have come to love.

O Elegant Mystery

o elegant mystery,
creator of time,
revealer of history,
tune of the chime,
echo and swirl and curl through
my mind.
here I am waiting to be found
and to find.
seeker and shepherd,
blossom of laws,
lion of conquest sharpen your claws,
here I am waiting,
a child of your light;
no more debating
with my soul in the night.
circle and stir and renew my soul
o elegant mystery
splinter me whole.

~ Steven James

Climb On

I am convinced that in our journey as humans, we do not travel on paved roads. The thing with asphalt is that when you go over a hill, once you are done going down, all thats left is to go up. On your way up a paved road, you don't slide back or have to go back down a bit to find a better way up - you just go...up.

This is not the story of the human journey. There is no even up and down. No paved roads.

Yes, there are mountains and valleys in every life - yes, every one. Some are deeper or higher than others. Some take longer to travel. But they are not smooth in either direction.

So what do you call the spaces where you're not stuck in a valley, and not perched on a mountain, but teetering in between, at one moment floundering and the next soaring? Whats the name for the place where you take one step up, and the sand gives way, letting you slide two steps back? How do you describe the moment when you look up from the ground and find a boulder in front of you, and spend the next while making your way sideways to get around it? Or how about the time when you go straight up, no slant, surging to a new height?

No, life isn't a paved road. It's a climb. And I'm learning that one slip does not mean failure. Neither does one peak equal success. There will be both in any journey worth taking. Sometimes they may seem to happen simultaneously. Sometimes the valleys will outweigh the mountains. But sometimes the mountains turn plateaus of joy.

It's not about reaching the top. It's about continuing, no matter what lies ahead, and finding those who will walk with you on this journey.

Act II: Growing

There is an orange piece of construction paper hanging on the door of my dorm room closet. I stare at it when homework turns me into a dead-eyed zombie. I answer questions about it when people visit my room. I quote it to myself - and have it quoted to me. I carry it in my mental backpack as I take the first few steps on the trek through sophomore year of college. In a rainbow array of marker, it reads:

This Year...
1) Drink more water
2) Get better posture
3) Embrace conversation
4) Refuse to be "fine"
5) Read more books

The first two are about being mindful of my body: the temple that God has given me, a gift to care for. The third is about building and expanding relationships. Yeah yeah, I know I already talk a lot, but this is about being intentional, and not avoiding deep, complicated conversations. The fourth is about caring for my emotions. They are there for a reason, and I will honor that by being honest about how I feel. The fifth is about feeding my brain - not just the textbook side, but also the fairytale side.

Growing. That's the word that comes to mind when I think of this year. It feels both comfortably familiar and excitingly new. I find myself looking twice in corners and peering under edges, searching for....something. I'm not sure what it is, but I have a feeling I'll know when I find it.

This semester, I'm gathering up the last of my gen-eds in preparation for entering the nursing program next fall. It seems simple enough, pretty routine, but between field hockey, outdoor adventures, and a group of new friends and mentors, I have no doubt that I will indeed grow.

Next semester, I will be in the Middle East on cross-cultural. It goes without saying that growth will happen there. New countries, new people, new food, new ideas, new problems, new views. I'm so ready to travel :)

I'm growing this year. I'm doing me. Because I deserve to know myself, and I want to know my place in the world.

Stumbling

The topic of modesty tends to make my hackles go up. It has been shoved in my face for years. It comes along with rules and measuring tapes and disapproving looks. It has been the cause for shame, guilt, and fear of my own body.

I would bet that many young women have experienced the same feelings. We are trained from a young age that our bodies will cause men to sin if we do not cover ourselves. We are told that we are stumbling blocks, and we must hide away to protect our brothers.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I am all for respecting yourself and wearing appropriate clothing. I’m not advocating for skimpy dress. What I am advocating for is accountability.

When we label young women as “stumbling blocks”, we are putting the weight of the sin on their shoulders. We insinuate that their hemline, neckline, or walk is solely responsible for any male’s response to it.

Not only is this degrading to women, by putting false responsibility on our shoulders, but it is demeaning to men. It assumes that men are incapable of controlling their thoughts, that they are victims of their own nature, that they are helpless, at the mercy of women’s wardrobes.

I don’t know about you, but the men in my life deserve much more credit than that. So why do we continue to heap shame on women and remove responsibility from men? Yes, it is a continuing problem. Just this summer, the camp I work at recommended that the female staff wear shorts over our swimsuits because we don’t want to be a “distraction” to the male staff. Curiously enough, I heard no mention of asking the male staff to wear shirts at the pool so as not to distract us girls. Either my legs are insanely more distracting than I thought, or there is some unequal distribution of blame going on.

Why is it that women are expected to control their own thoughts while we are also being told to cover up to protect the thoughts of men?

I am not a stumbling block. Your thoughts are not my responsibility. I will respect my body, and I expect the same from you. Every woman deserves this treatment – regardless of what she is wearing.