Uncensored: My heart 12 weeks later

It's hard to write this out.

It's hard because, there is so much going on, there is so much happening and so much that has happened, sometimes putting words to heavy heart matters seems impossible.

But I will try. I will try......but this is not going to be pretty......

We have been living here in Burkina Faso for three months now. I look back and wonder, "has it really been that long? I'm pretty sure that was us just yesterday running through the airport frantic to make our flight with mere seconds to spare."

But here we are.

Three months later.

These first three months have been a balance of hard and good. Not really one over the other. Not more hard than good or vise versa. Both equally hard and good.

My heart these past three months has gone through and is still going through a range of emotions. I'm told that's normal. If only the fact that it was normal made me feel better about it. :~)

One of the things my heart has been struggling with is American life. There are many days where thinking about American life makes me angry. I look at friends and family and I get mad. Okay, scratch that. Melissa "censored" would say mad. I'm gonna go out on a very lonely limb here...I'm gonna go uncensored, and say, actually, when I think about America and my friends and family living back there, and just American life in general....

...I feel disgusted.

At western culture.
At the lives I see people living.

And then, feeling disgusted, I feel guilty because I am being judgmental. And overly harsh and critical.

I said this wouldn't be pretty.
But it is reality.
It is the reality to how I, and many other people feel when they are plucked out of their cushy culture and thrown into a third world country.

It is reality.
And one thing I've learned is that reality ain't always pretty.
And when I look at America, my country, I do not see reality. I see isolation, ignorance, delusion, shallowness, and blissful distraction.

I think it's pitiful. Absolutely pitiful.

And it's really hard struggling through feelings like this. It doesn't exactly scream,  

"Hey, come talk to me, tell me all about the new two hundred dollar boots you just bought! Eek!!!"

It's more like this, "I kinda hate you right now, but please don't be offended that I can't stop rolling my eyes and gagging when I hear about 'home', and love me through this."

Because there is a part of me that is still deeply longing for the trivial familiar shallowness of home. There is that part of me that wants to hear and talk about boots, and new outfits, and movies, and talk about Jessica Simpson's parents gettin' a divorce, say what?! and laugh at random stupid things and talk about pinterest and the newest this' and that's.

Because sometimes talking about new fashion trends and celebrity gossip is just easier than talking about the man who came to my gate today begging for money to go back to Mali. And how he's been sleeping at the market and knocking on people's doors for food and water because he can't find work to buy it himself. Showing me the scars all over his body from only God knows what. Seeing him cry and beg and plead.....

...it's this reality that makes me want to talk about boots, and it's this same reality that makes me pity and roll my eyes and get angry at those who do.

I can't reconcile those two sides yet.
They are at odds.
They are at war in my heart.
I don't know if there can be a world in me where those two realities co-exist. 
I'm not sure God wants them to.
I do know that this is going to take time to sort out, and a whole heck of a lotta grace. Grace from others. And grace towards others.

Grace towards others as they continue living their lives, and grace towards me as I relearn how to live mine. Grace as I work through trying to figure out who I am now.

All the things I was. All the places I fit. All the things I did. The clothes I wore. The shoes I walked in. The stores that I shopped at. The people I talked to. The kind of church I worshiped at. The car we drove. The way I decorated my house. The language I spoke. The jewelry I wore. The food I ate.....

All the things that I have allowed to make me, me.....is being stripped away.

All of it.

The person that I was, the identity I had, the life I lived.....it's disappearing. The whole dying to self is no easy business. And I've chosen to do it. And I'm sorry, but coming to such extreme living conditions as these requires a whole lot more dying than when we lived in America, or were maybe instead stationed in Japan at an Air Force base with a commissary and BX and base housing and many other western conveniences.

This is a totally different ballgame.

In the United States I had the luxury, yes, luxury of going through my day and never seeing anything hard. Of saying to myself and God, "I'm just gonna wait on you today Lord. I'm gonna sit here and go about my life today until you speak a word to me to do otherwise. That homeless vet I see on the side of the street standing next to my car as I sit at the intersection...I'm just gonna keep on sitting and pretending that I don't see him unless you tell me to reach my hand out and help." Or maybe there is no homeless vet that day. Maybe there is no one. So there is no need to even direct a prayer toward God.

That life for me is gone. I don't have to luxury anymore to wake up and go about my life like it's just me and my family and nothing else exists outside that bubble. I don't have the option to just sit back anymore and wait on God to tell me to do something.

Living in such extreme conditions as these you have to make moment by moment decisions. Fast decisions. Poverty and suffering are everywhere. I no longer have the option to just stand in front of it all and say, "I'm just gonna pray, and wait on you God.....". I am having to learn to act. To think faster. I have learned that God is ALWAYS talking. Even if I don't hear Him. Even if He's not saying anything new to me in a particular moment. His WORD is clear. And when I see something that stuns me, and I'm frozen with shock, and my mind is scrambling with what to do, or how to respond, and I don't hear God tell me point blank, "Help this man in this specific way", I know what the Bible says, even while I'm relearning what the Bible says.

And I have failed at this so many times since moving here. While we were in Bobo right before we left we were outside a pretty nice ice cream parlor eating our ice cream on another 100 degree day. As we walked outside to eat I noticed two boys walking along the road up front. I turned to stand in front of the table the girls were eating at and I had my back to the parking lot. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the two boys approach from behind....two Garibous, carrying their red tomato cans. Ragged clothes. Dusty and dirty. Hot from the heat.

I could feel them standing there, two feet behind me. Just standing, and watching. You wanna know what I did? Absolutely nothing. I just stood there, eating, never turning around, never meeting their eyes. Never acknowledging their presence. I pretended like they weren't there because I was eating a cup full of ice cream and they weren't. And it made me feel horrible. I could feel God telling me to turn around, but I didn't. I kept my back to them. And after a few minutes, maybe it was just one, they walked away.

Moment.gone.

Literally a moment. Two minutes at best. To decide whether to act, or ignore. To love, or to hoard. It didn't occur to me until I saw them walking back up the road that I should have walked them inside and let them pick out a scoop of ice cream. A treat. An extra. Something they never have.

That moment kills me. It absolutely kills me. I think about it and cry. Because that's how fast it happens here.

I don't have the option anymore to say, "Okay God, this week is like way busy, so how about you give me a really good idea to serve You next week, or ya know, next week is actually busy too, how about the end of the month, I can squeeze something in then." 

Here, it's everyday. And I will have two minutes at best sometimes to decide how to share God's love, and that's it. Two minutes. Sometimes it's seconds. And then the moment is gone. And with it the opportunity to reclaim the spaces where darkness has grown and spread a little bit of God's light into their life.

And when I think about life outside of here, how people go about their lives, living for themselves, being so cavalier with the sufferings happening in the world outside their lives....it's hard not to feel angry about that right now.

And it's really hard that virtually everyone back "home" will never understand. That part of it all is really hard to swallow at the moment. Knowing that the longer I am here, the more that I see, the more that I die to me and all I used to be....the less and less and less people will be able to relate to me.

I remember back in March I was in Pennsylvania sitting in a hotel for a women's retreat I was attending. I was sitting on the bed in my room, just me and Holly, taking a moment to rest and sit before the scheduled activities started up again. She quietly asked me what was one thing that I was afraid of for this move to Africa. I told her, trying to choke the tears down, that one of my biggest fears was, "becoming unrelateable."

I knew it would happen. I knew it would be inevitable. You can't live this kind of lifestyle without becoming isolated from all that was familiar to you, including relationships. Unless you live through this there is no way to know to relate to those that have. And I was scared of that.

I am still scared of that.

Because it is already happening.

I am already in a place of extreme isolation due to distance and language, but now I can see myself becoming further isolated due to my experiences. Because, I mean really, how do you talk about what I see here? People ask, "so, how are you, how is Africa?" How do you tell them, "well, today me and the girls played with forty street kids who's teeth were so rotted they were black and falling out and had ring worm so bad they had huge patches of hair missing from their head." Or, "I just got off the phone with a friend here who found out her Burkinabé neighbor was hit by a car and drove to a remote village to see the witch doctor because they couldn't afford to take her to the hospital and when she got there she had been laying on a dirt floor for a week with a broken femur bone."

Or, "Oh, Isaak's job? It's going great thanks for asking. He visited a prison today and walked through the hallways of the most disgusting place he's ever been, seeing up to nineteen men piled into a 10x15 foot cell. Watched as little kids ran naked through their cell, born into the prison because they mother was incarcerated pregnant, and now that is where they live. In a prison. Innocent and naked."

I'm not entirely convinced people want to hear all that. And maybe I'm wrong. Maybe they do. Mostly I think they don't. Because what do you say to that? Here's what I've heard people say, "wow."

And that's about it.

Because there is no way to relate to that type of suffering and pain and cruel raw conditions unless you've seen it.

And as a result, the people who do see it, become unrelateable in the relationships they have with those who don't. Either that, or I will be left having to change again, pretend I'm still the old me, to make everyone else comfortable.

Maybe there is another way. Maybe there is a way that I don't see yet to bridge the gap because those who can't be here, and we who are. Maybe there is a way to relate to them all that is happening in the world outside of their own. Maybe. Maybe not. But with only three months here that is not something I have begun to figure out yet.

But what I have figured out, well, am figuring out more and more everyday, is the absolute faithfulness of God. What it looks like to live by faith.What it looks like to love with a love that doesn't come from me.

Despite all the stuff that my heart is working through...as crazy as it sounds, especially after that rant, I feel good. Even on the days that I feel really really bad, I feel good. Even when I cry from the heaviness of it "all"....I love being here. I do, I love it.

Because even though I am daily surrendering myself over to be crucified, I am happy to do it. Even when it's hard and I don't think there is one more change I can make without having a mental breakdown, I give myself to Him still. I do it because there is His promise of Him. I do it because He equips me to. I do it because the Bible makes it crystal clear that that is His expectation of me. I am doing this because there is way too much darkness in this world and I want to be a part of shining God's light.

So I am good and happy and filled with joy....even in the midst of my frustration and messy heart....because His peace makes it so. His peace is what makes it so. It sounds crazy. To be so at peace in the middle of such chaos. But I am. And only Jesus can do that.

And that is a part my heart uncensored, the good the bad and the ugly of it all....twelve weeks later. No telling where I'll be in another twelve weeks....but wherever it is, His peace is comin' with me. For that I know....