Out of the Fog and Back on My Knees

After a particularly troublesome spell, I'm finally coming out of the fog.  It's been interesting, but not too fun. 

Maybe this is what separates me from the big time writers and speakers:  I still can't reconcile my personal life with my (very limited) public life. 

How to the "real" writers do it?  How do they keep writing, talking, and encouraging others when they have dry times spiritually, when God seems silent, and when relationships are sticky?  I picture them firmly on the pedestal where I have placed them, continuing faithfully in the Word, trusting God in prayer, and finding spiritual applications to share with us average Christians who are slogging our way through life's difficulties.

Somehow as much as I want to be "real" with you here, I keep slipping into my preferred stance as an expert-wannabe, and then I groan when "being real" forces me to acknowledge that I am in the same trenches with you, fighting similar battles.  The glitch is that I can't freely share the nature of my battles, since the story involves some seriously messed up, intertwined lives.  People would be hurt if I broadcast our squabbles on a public forum like this.

With my apologies for being so vague, let me just say that after a prolonged conflict, I feel like the end is in sight.  It's been a doozy, let me tell you!  For the past few weeks, I have decided to stop making excuses for sticking my head in the sand, and I've started spending one solid hour in prayer every day, almost without fail.  As a result, I am seeing answered prayer and breakthroughs in the battle. Maybe next time I won't be so slow to return to the Power Source.

Rather than reprinting the story here, you can read about a similar lesson in prayer on my personal blog, Memories and Musings from Mexico:  Mixed-up Prayers.  It's a true story that happened in Guatemala after my third son was born in 1989.  Back then the only time I could be quiet and alone for devotions was when the baby woke up to be fed at 2:00 A.M.

That's what I'm trying to do again, meet with God for a solid hour when the rest of the family is asleep.  Nothing needs to be done in the middle of the night.  The phone isn't going to ring, no neighbors will be stopping by; the only thing I am missing is sleep.  It seems to be harder in my 50's than it was in my 20's, but it's still just as vital to sacrifice whatever it takes to have time to talk to God and listen for my daily marching orders.

Do tell, how do you carve out a private time and place to meet with the Lord each day?  Surely there's a better solution that doesn't involve crawling out of bed in the wee hours of the morning.  Please share!

IRL:  It's good to be out of the fog and back on my knees again in earnest.

Cheap Lumpy Mattresses

“What’s one thing you wish you had known when you first started out?”  That was the question I had to address recently at a ladies’ tea.  Maybe some of you youngsters could come up with a quick easy answer for this, but for me, “starting out” was literally half a lifetime ago.

Truth be told, maybe people did try to tell me certain things back then, but it never sank in until I learned them by experience.  How many people used to say, “Enjoy those children while they’re young; they grow up so fast!”  Did I learn it just hearing it from some older, wiser woman?  No way, Jose.

Viewing it from this side of fifty, it’s humbling on the one hand how much I still have to learn, and at the same time I find it challenging to take my own life lessons and make anything but a lame attempt to pack them into a neat little lesson to teach women coming behind me. 

One thing I wish I had understood better starting out 26 years ago is the nature of spiritual warfare.  I wish I had been more aware that there is an enemy out there who wants to destroy my marriage, ministry, family, and me.  I wish I had known that the enemy is not my husband, coworkers, or children.

What did I answer these kind women who so eagerly wanted to hear about my experiences?  Nothing very profound, to be sure.  In fact, I’m sure they were disappointed.  I said that I wished I had known then how much God truly loves me and cares for me apart from anything I might accomplish in this life, that He doesn’t mind if I am comfortable occasionally.

For years I used to feel a pang of guilt for even wishing for creature comforts.  Now I embrace them when they come my way, though I struggle against purposely seeking them out for myself.  I’ve learned that there is nothing more spiritual about sleeping on the ground or on a cheap, lumpy bed, and there is nothing sinful about being color coordinated or wearing makeup.

While there are certain products I need to stay physically attractive to my husband, there are also helps I need to stay physically healthy.

I’ve also learned that there are certain things I must do in order to stay sweet and productive.  I do require a certain amount of sleep, preferably on a firm mattress, and I function better with daily exercise and good nutrition.  This summer after gaining back about 15 pounds, I learned again the danger of giving in to every craving and eating every dessert offered.

Didn’t I know that before we left Mexico for our summer in the U.S.?  I did.  Yet I still had to learn that hard lesson again, experientially.  Thankfully we were able to join a gym for just two months, which helps a lot to feel better even though the rest of my lifestyle is temporarily out of balance.

So back to the original question:  What do you wish you had known then that you know now?

IRL*Most of us learn the hard way by sleeping on cheap, lumpy mattresses.

Zest that Exudes

When I die, just put me in the box as is, or is it as am?  As I will be? 

Some women beg their friends to promise there will be no open casket when they die.  Why?  Mercy, they say, what if my hair isn’t done just so?  What if they put on the wrong color of lipstick?  Ew, what if I look gross?

As for me, I say put me on display for all to see.  Don’t bother with my hair or make-up.  Let everyone comment about how horrible I look.  Maybe people will finally appreciate all the effort I put into looking presentable at this season of life.

At the same time, tell everyone that for the first time ever, I do not care about my appearance.  Finally I will be free from my mortal body and sin nature that always cared too much how I looked and what people thought. 

Then I will be truly beautiful inside and out with no vanity or wrong motives.  Let my decaying body be a reminder to all who see it that I am not there!  Don’t waste money on embalming and beautifying my corpse.  Let my pale wrinkly old face serve as an object lesson.

I’ve shared before about my ongoing struggle against becoming a frumpy missionary, but as I grow older and wiser I wonder why on earth I fight the inevitable.  Money is precious, and worldly beauty is costly.  How can I rationalize the haircuts, the makeup, the clothing, and the shoes? 

Yet I look in the mirror, and I shudder to think what my family would be seeing all day if I didn’t touch up the results of a restless night’s sleep. Lord, help me to find balance!

This past week I met an exuberantly vivacious (is that redundant?) old woman who epitomizes true beauty.  I want to grow up to be her.  She radically changed my definition of loveliness.  True beauty has nothing to do with glamour, jewelry, clothing, hairstyles, or even teeth. 

If there were a missionary magazine looking for a centerfold of the most beautiful woman on earth, I would submit Valentina.  She has curiously split ear lobes, no teeth, failing eyesight, wrinkles galore, unruly gray hair, feet that shuffle, posture that stoops, and a voice quality that warbles and squeaks.

But you know what else she has?  Valentina possesses an inner glow, a zest that exudes joyfully from every pore of her being, even though she lives spitting distance from a cemetery and within sniffing range of the city dump. 

She is the me I want to be when they put me in that pine box someday. 

I want people to stand around and tell stories about my life, not about my decaying body.  I want people to smile and remember the real me, the radiant me who reflected God’s beauty and glory, just like Valentina.

What made me chuckle is that even my hero, Hermana Valentina herself, attempted to smooth down her long gray braids when she saw the camera, braids that were once carefully tied with red satin ribbons.  Vanity is an issue even among the world’s most astonishing beauties.

IRL* When I grow up, I want to be a Valentina who still acts young, not an old person trying to look young.

Flora. Fauna. Forgetfulness.

About a mile high.  Pomegranate.  80’s during the day, 40’s or 50’s at night.  Yes, it’s probably safe to drink that.  Another short while and we’ll arrive in the village.  You know, I have no idea.

Can you guess what I’m doing this week?  Yep, we’re hosting a short-term team from the States, and I am answering the same questions we are frequently asked.

What’s the altitude here?  What kind of tree is that?  How hot does it get here?  What’s the coldest it gets?  Do you think they boiled the water they used to make this drink?  How much further until we get there? 

I’m okay up to this point (as long as, in fact, it is a pomegranate or jacaranda or one of the other two trees I can actually identify).  Then we get into regional birds.  “Yes, that is a bird.”  (No idea what variety or species or however you identify such things.)  Then I resort to a long string of “I have no idea” answers until they finally stop asking. 

Just between friends (shhhh!), I confess I may at times make up a plausible sounding answer just to avoid yet another admission of my ignorance.  I shudder to think of visitors passing these fabrications as the truth.  Lord, forgive me - after You stop laughing.  (He gets my wacky humor.)

Personally I am always relieved with the visitors who consider what it would be like if I came to their neighborhood and asked them to identify all the flora, fauna, and the warm-blooded egg-laying vertebrates with beaks and feathers.  Probably they don’t know the population of every surrounding neighborhood, the daily income levels, and the occupations of each person on a given street either.

So why do I end up feeling unintelligent when people ask me all these things?  It’s just silly.  I don’t know.  I never have known.  Even if I learned it once upon a time, I probably forgot.  I can identify the few trees and most of the flowers in my garden, and usually I can call each of my children by the right name.  With that, I want to be content.

After being on the field all these years, you’d think I would know more than I do.  The fact is that the more I learn, the more I forget, and the more I discover that things I thought I knew were not exactly what I thought they were anyway.  Does this make any sense at all? 

This how it goes in my Christian life, too.  The longer I live, the more I see how much I still have to learn.  There is no point of “arriving” – at knowing everything.

IRL* Having teams is a humbling reminder of how much I have yet to learn. 

Transformational Sweat

Since no one shot me down last week, I had planned to continue the mini-series on acceptable sins, thinking I would have the perfect post on either laziness or grumbling and complaining. It turns out, I have been strangely industrious and – miracle of all miracles – haven’t had any complaints yet!

This is Holy Week – slash - spring break for our teens, but instead of hanging out, sleeping in, and being lazy all week, we are helping some coworkers who are hosting a team from the U.S. Unlike the rugged teams we normally send to suffer in a remote mountain location, this group is staying in Puerto Escondido, overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

While most people would jump at the opportunity to serve in such a beautiful place, I had to struggle get my heart straight before agreeing to come. Going to the beach, as I’ve mentioned before, is not my favorite thing. It requires a nasty long drive down a winding road up and down from 5000 feet down to sea level. And then being hot and sweaty is something I generally avoid like manual labor.

Considering the prospect of being in a non-air conditioned kitchen preparing dinner for 22 people, I imagined writing about a whole slew of other besetting sins. It turns out, however, that I have found great delight in doing this. The work the rest of the team (including my husband and kids) do each day is much more grueling than my going to market, shopping, disinfecting produce, chopping, cooking, and cleaning up.

Turns out I have the best job around – plus I get to sneak in an afternoon swim (while I pray, of course) before they get back. Plus we will eat in restaurants a couple of the seven nights, making my work even lighter. It’s as though God, knowing what a wimp I am, tests me to see if I am willing, and then He carries my load.

So we’ll gladly skip the post I thought I would have to write, and just praise the Lord that His mercies are new every morning, and that His grace is sufficient for all our needs. You know what? Even sweating isn’t such an awful plight to be dreaded. Joy has been my constant daily companion. I am so thankful I didn’t allow my flesh to talk me out of this opportunity.

Meanwhile our friends in Mali are going through terribly unsettling times following the coup last week, having had to evacuate before the borders closed on Sunday. There are few situations as dreaded or stressful than to be forced out of a country on short notice. My heart goes out to each of you who were affected, and especially your children leaving behind friends, pets, and toys that didn’t make the cut when the bags were quickly packed.

Sweating over a hot stove and being a servant is a privilege. Even if it were a struggle for me, I would not want to trivialize it in light of these serious times for so many of you. I have spent time each day interceding, not just for this work team, but also for each of you in your current struggles.

No one said this life was going to be easy, but I feel for those of you who are sweating these days of uncertainty. May you find comfort and encouragement as we anticipate Resurrection Sunday, as we keep busy at our tasks of reaching the lost before the coming of the Lord.

IRL*It's a privilege to serve up what He offers.

Furlough Boot Camp: Getting the Lil' Soldiers Ready

Getting ready for a summer furlough is so much easier with only three children who are actually not children, but teens. It's an amazing blessing that they can each pack and carry (!) their own bags, decide what books and music they need for the trip, and even go to the store on their own for whatever snacks they might want for travel days.

In the early days I used to put the little ones through "furlough boot camp." To prepare them for a season of being completely thrown out of their routines, I would make the preschoolers take naps in strange places around the house. No more comfy cribs or familiar beds. I would put a blanket and pillow somewhere on the floor and say, "Nighty-night," and leave them to figure out I meant business. This did help once we were on the road and staying in different people's homes because they were accustomed to going to sleep wherever and whenever I told them.

During boot camp, no matter what food I served them, they were not allowed to comment unless they really liked it. They were never to beg for seconds unless I specifically offered them. They had to say please and thank you with a smile on their faces. I trained them to respond to a discrete snap of my finger, wave of my hand, or lifting of an eyebrow. We'd make a game of "coming quickly when called." We even practiced walking in tight formation so we wouldn't appear to be as big a family as we really were. Each older child had a younger one they were responsible for, and the middle child was responsible for the diaper bag (or dog when we were dumb enough to travel with a pet). By the time we left for furlough, we were looking good!

With this said, I must confess that I took the "training exercises" a bit too far, and pridefully drilled into my children how to be perfect little house guests. After all, we wouldn't want unruly children destroying the houses where we would be staying. Seriously! We do need to train our children, and furlough is a good excuse to go into high gear. On a deeper level, though, God only knows my true motives were nothing short of arrogance. I didn't want to risk anyone seeing what we were really like. Instead I painstakingly taught my children to become little hypocrites, acting the part of loving, well-mannered Christians, when their hearts were not quite there yet. I am sorry for that.

It wasn't until after I read the book Shepherding a Child's Heart (which I HIGHLY recommend, by the way), that I became convicted about only working on the outer appearances rather than focusing on heart issues. From then on I vowed to discipline my children for the purpose of training their hearts to fear God, not merely to make Mom look good in front of her friends. I'll never forget the time we went up with one teen and his big ol' afro, and other teen with his long stringy hair. It was still a struggle to not consider "What will people think?" but I forced myself to look at it from God's standpoint. No sin was being committed. Their hearts were good. Why should I require a haircut just to please our conservative support base?

Ironically, it wasn't until I stopped being so paranoid about our "real selves" being revealed in the presence of our supporters that people began to connect genuinely with me. I once had a woman tell me that she used to berate her children after we passed through as house guests, saying things like, "Why can't you be more like the Loker kids? They never...." Oh, my, what damage was done due to my pretense of having well-behaved children? This same woman was quite relieved on a later trip we made to the States, when she saw my children acting like the kids they really were, and even not acting very "Christian" (read between the lines: they were fighting!). Then she began to talk to me on a deeper level. No pretense. No shame. Just honesty. It was a good thing.

With that said, I have heard some frightening tales of things missionary friends' children have done on furloughs that made me glad I had trained mine to be inhumanly perfect. (Ha! Like that's possible.)

Maybe you can flesh this out with some real life experiences of funny things your children have done on furloughs.

IRL* The flip side is that I have fewer stories to tell.

Knock, Knock. Who's There?

“Oh, no you’re not, young lady!” seems to be the theme of my week, only minus the young part. It’s not me the mother talking, but me the daughter hearing these words. Ack. Just when I thought I was grown up enough to make my own decisions and do my own thing…

Thwarted. Repeatedly. Every time I turn around, Dad seems to be saying, “Oh, no you don’t.” Again I am out of control. He’s calling the shots.

This morning at breakfast my ds told an old knock-knock joke that I once told a friend, thinking she might see herself in it, but she didn’t. Today it hit dangerously close to home.

Knock-knock.

Who’s there?

Control Freak…. Now this is the part where you say ‘Control Freak who?’

Ack. I never thought this was particularly my problem, but suddenly nothing is going my way, and I realize again that I must lay down the reins all day long, every day of my life.

And you know what? When I do, I invariably find that God’s ways are better than my original plans.

The weekend retreat was lovely, and the messages were exactly what I needed. It was only behind the scenes that any power struggles occurred between the Trail Guide and myself.

Day one, we had planned a lovely 5-plus hour drive to the retreat center, just our family and the conference speaker and his wife, who have been dear friends for over twenty years. Then dh informed me we were caravanning with another family. Then the family informed us they were taking another family in their van, and yet a third vehicle was following them with another family of six.

First stop was McDonald’s. I thought we would drive through very quickly before leaving the city and take some burgers for lunch. Thwarted. It wasn’t yet noon, so all we could get was breakfast. Then the three other families decided they would go into McDonald’s to order. Forty minutes later we were finally on the road.

My plan was to arrive in plenty of time to get registered and settled before the first session, but due to a string of complications (road work, long potty stops, etc.), our 5-plus hour trip took a full 8 hours. It wasn’t bad, mind you, just not what I had envisioned. The poor speaker had to literally climb out of the car and walk straight to the podium and start speaking.

And so it went for the rest of the weekend. It’s like we remind the newbie missionaries, “Not bad, just different.” That’s my new mantra of the week. Surely I will soon stop trying to micromanage and allow the King of the universe to dictate what each day will hold.

IRL*Meanwhile, I am awaiting the imminent birth of my first granddaughter, which I had hoped (and planned) to announce today. ...