How I try to protect God, and how He tells me not to {Lessons from Uganda}

October 10, 2012 by 5 Comments

When I met the woman on the plane who said that she runs an NGO in Uganda with a “more holistic” focus on helping women, I shrank. When I was in the crowd with 50 long-term missionaries, with so little experience of my own and in awe of what they were doing, I wilted.

I’m just not sure how much good many short-term missions can do. Sure, we go for ourselves, we go to be changed. But it has to be more than that, or we’re just doing poverty/sad story tourism.

Uganda kids

Image by Beth Schafers

It was more. I believe in Mercy for Mamas, and I saw the positive work we’re doing to support existing ministry.

But every step along the agenda, I stood back, observing, questioning, analyzing, unpacking. Skeptical. Needing proof. Wanting answers and certainty and assurance.

And then God put a beautiful friend in my life who said to me, more than once, give it space. Let it be. See what happens. You can’t see the whole story.

So when I wasn’t sure about something we were doing, when I couldn’t quantify the sustainability of a certain activity for an afternoon, when all my alarm bells were ringing,  God still didn’t need me to defend him.

He needed me to trust him.

God doesn’t need me to test everything out, make sure it meets his approval, to stand back and not get involved because it might not be perfect. He calls me to jump in anyway. He gives me freedom to use my brain but reminds me not to forget my heart. He asks me to follow him even if I can’t see the whole story.

He reminds me that even in the messiest situations and in the worst examples of American gospel-pounding missions, he can still work. That he doesn’t need me to protect him. He doesn’t need me to be certain, and he doesn’t even need me to approve. He will work anyway.

It’s just one of his best and most beautiful qualities. That no matter how ridiculous it looks to me, no matter how little I can understand and how much I rage at him for something that’s been done or left undone, he finds the shard of truth, the scrap of beauty, and he says that’s mine.

And then he redeems it, one tiny, gorgeous shard at a time.

Which, when you think about it, is exactly what he’s doing in my little heart, too.

 

Linking with Emily.

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Mission, purpose, meaning: Living a life that matters (at home)

October 8, 2012 by 2 Comments

I go back to Uganda every night.

I dream of a girl I met in an orphanage. I see the young women I met. I hold their babies. I have entire conversations with new soul-sisters in the back of the bus.

If Benjamin wakes up at midnight I can barely register where I am, who he is, what I’m here for.

Photo courtesy Katie Busby

Even before I left, I have wanted to get back there. There is life-on-purpose. There is the freedom of forgetting myself. There is the luxury of African time, the shrugging shoulders when plans go sideways, because what can you do? This is Africa. There is clear meaning, definite purpose. There, everything matters.

Here, it’s the faces I love but the routine we can’t escape. It’s the luxuries of a big house and a thermostat and cold beverages but the rush and hurry of schedule. Here, it’s the lists and responsibilities and calendars and to-do lists. Here, it’s the thrum of dawn-to-dusk that can cloud Larger Mission.

And so I’m in Uganda all night and daydreaming about moving there all day, but partly I’m just running away from myself.

It’s the lure of short-term missions: The whirlwind, the intensity, the immediate gratification that’s so unlike the long walk in the same direction of parenting, of discipleship, of all the Most Important Things God has called me to.

Short-term missions are so fun because we’re seeing the fruit of already established ministry.

If someone came into my life on a 10-day mission trip when my kids are in their twenties, they’d have so much fun hanging out with these beautiful young adults, exploring and finding who they are. But I’d be there in the background, having cultivated these moments from the time they were this little, having given them everything I had, having spent it all to see them grow into their identities in the One who made them and are giving them purpose.

It’s exciting to step in, to go on vacation, even to go outside comfort for a few days of deep meaning, amazing people, sights, sounds and lessons that you just can’t get at home.

But it’s Here where I’m planted. It’s here God calls me to the long, hard, rewarding, beautiful long way, the constant bending in the same direction, the call of repetition and consistency. It’s the holy work that shapes human character, and it’s no small task.

May I be here and see the calling. May I live in the details with an eye on the goal.

May we all be present where we’re called, missional in the everyday, cultivating meaning in the little things, grabbing onto the moments that give a glimpse of the never-finished goal.

Every day on purpose.

 

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The hardest day, or, Your life matters

October 2, 2012 by 4 Comments

How can I tell you about this trip? How can I tell you about Africa?

I could start with Saturday. It was the hardest day.

I could tell you that just one other member of the team and I went to a hospital like I’ve never seen before. I could tell you I saw beds lined up two feet apart, mothers who’d just had a C-section recovering together, 10 beds to a section, crowded together with their families because nurses don’t administer care, they just administer meds. You bring your own medical supplies, your own food, your own sheets for the bed. The nurse who led us around was very pleased at how many beds were empty and then they told us they’d discharged 22 patients that very morning — a number higher than the empty beds. She was so happy no one was on the floor. Lord, have mercy.

I could tell you about the kids I saw in the pediatric ward, all of them (ALL of them) with malaria, lined up on benches to get their IVs connected, a few with IVs in their hands, several in their heads, and a couple in their necks. An IV in a child’s carotid artery because the veins in their arms and heads are too collapsed to get a line in. Christ, have mercy.

But the thing that really wrecked me, the sight that I will never forget, was the boy in the nutrition center.

These are children who are starving (“wasting,” they call it). Children who can’t keep food down anymore because their bodies have gone so long without. Their mothers learn how to nurse them back to health, then take them home and hopefully the cycle doesn’t start again, but it probably does, because it starts with just plain not enough food to feed all the mouths.

There were two mothers sitting under a huge tree on mats, trying to feed their two babies. They looked hopeful. Their children looked like they’d make it.

But sitting right in front of us as the nurse was talking, there was a boy whose face looked at least 4 or 5 but whose body was the size of a small one-year-old. He was sitting all alone on his mat, no one around him, the nurse wondered if his mama was somewhere nearby but for the moment he was all alone.

He sat vacant, drooling, grinding his teeth. Maybe he was also handicapped, but I didn’t think it when I was there. I thought he just looked wildly hungry. I looked at the nurse as she was talking for a while, because he was hard to watch.

Then I heard a whisper: Look at him. Look at him until your eyes burn.

And so I muscled my eyes back to the place where he sat, and it got worse. His head started weaving around, his eyes going into spasms. I kept looking, swallowing the lump in my throat, blinking fast. I whispered a prayer for mercy, whatever that meant for him. Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy.

I said in my heart, I won’t forget you. Your life matters. I will remember you.

From the time we walked up to the nutrition area to the time we walked away, no one had come to help him. I didn’t help him. I couldn’t. I walked away with weak knees and a weaker promise.

I will remember you. Your life matters.

When we got back to the rest of the team, I climbed into our van and cried for an hour. My tears remained right there on the surface the rest of the evening.

I could tell you to do something for these children. I could encourage you to sponsor someone, to give aid, to come here and help, to follow your anger and find your passion and do just one thing, but I didn’t know how to help this little boy, and so I don’t know how to tell you to help, either.

There are things we can do, but is it ever enough? Or maybe God was doing something bigger. Maybe he was gently letting me know that I can’t do it alone, and I can’t fix it with one trip to Africa, or twenty, and even one organization doing good work isn’t enough for all of it. None of us will be able to solve all of it. But seeing what I saw means I can’t do nothing.

I will remember you. Your life matters.

I know Jesus loves that little boy desperately, and maybe that’s the whole point. In this whirlwind of a trip we saw a lot and some of it blurs together and taking a step back to take in all the need we saw in a single trip can be overwhelming. But maybe shining a spotlight on one little boy is the point. That every single life matters, and that Jesus has promised that little boy that he will never leave him and he will never forsake him, so even if he looks forsaken I can have faith.

I can join in his work, I can look until my eyes burn, I can hand over my heart to be broken over and over and then maybe I’ll begin to glimpse the Father’s heart, so that where there is hate and brokenness and pain, I can work with Him to sow love and redemption and healing.

It’s not up to me. But in letting me see that boy, God lets me see part of his heart, and He didn’t have to. He invites me to join in his redemptive work in this world, one life and one hurt at a time, but I can say no.

But saying yes to God? Glimpsing more of his heart and letting go of my concerns for a little while? It will always be worth it. It will always change me — not break me, but transform me into more of the woman God saw in me from the beginning.

And so even now, halfway home with thoughts slowly transitioning from African time back to my normal life with my babies, even though my eyes still burn and my weak promise still stands, this I call to mind and therefore I have hope:

Because of the Lord’s great love, we are not consumed.

In other words? Love wins.

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I will trust you

September 29, 2012 by 2 Comments

Never will I forsake you

I came back to Uganda to find all of its lessons waiting for me.

Last year in the red dust of downtown Kampala, I found surrender. In the thick of adoption process stress and doing all I could to force things to go my way, I ran out of strategies. God took me to the end of myself, and there was no better place to be.

Here again, Africa is reminding me that I have no real control over this life. I set up lots of systems to make me feel in control, I do all I can to steer things in the direction I want them. But in the end, where can I run but into his arms? He alone holds the words of life.

When ministering in the slum, just hanging back and observing another team, the children just surround us. They hold on to any part of us they can reach, and we are pressed from all sides with children just craving love and affection. They stand and hold our hands, arms, fingers, waist, for hours. They look up into our faces every two minutes, because they want to see a smile, they want to know we are pleased with them as they are. {There’s a lesson here for me.}

I can’t make life better for them; I can’t tell their parents to show them they love them. I can give them love for one evening, to hold on to them when my feet ache and I’d rather sit down; to open my arms wider and let another little one feel a warm embrace; to ask them their names and cup their faces in my hands. But it’s not enough.

And so I have to leave them and say to the God who sees more than I can, I trust you I trust you I trust you.

When experiencing another side of this culture I don’t understand, when I observe methods of evangelism I haven’t seen in years, when it raises every red flag in my personal religious history, I have to take a deep breath.

I give it all to him, because I’m just one person, and I whisper I trust you I trust you I trust you.

We visit another orphanage, one that stays on my heart, heavy, all day, and we meet a sweet baby, so handsome, who completely steals the heart of a young woman on our team. We learn that his mother is 14 and his father is 15, and the orphanage can keep him for 5 years and maybe by then, when the mother is 19, she’ll make better decisions, and it feels so hopeless, and this is not the best life for him, not by a long shot, but what else can we do?

I have to trust we’re here for a reason, that locking eyes with him and the other babies for brief moments meant something, and I can’t help crying as my heart breaks and I say I trust you I trust you I trust you.

When situations don’t pan out the way we hope. When our hearts break and there’s nothing to be done. When we want something so much but it seems just out of reach. When we see the world’s brokenness and we feel so inadequate.

Say it with me, will you?

I trust you. I trust you. I trust you.

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Grasping at need: What can we do?

September 28, 2012 by 3 Comments

Orphan crisis

In Uganda, there is need everywhere. If you grasp at all the situations in front of you, you’ll quickly be pulled under. But does that mean we should do nothing? When we feel overwhelmed and underprepared and wrecked by it all, it’s tempting to stop trying.

When three one-year-olds crawl up in your lap in the orphanage, when another one points over the security wall and you wonder if they’re asking you to take them away from there, when an older child looks right in your face and asks you to be her mommy, what can you do?

I can’t support every orphanage, and I can’t adopt every child. But that doesn’t mean I should remain paralyzed in the face of overwhelming need.

One strategy to find your passion? Follow your anger.

When you hear about a situation and it just wrecks you, pay attention. When you learn about an injustice and it really makes you angry, incredulous, for days at a time, you may have found it.

And although grasping your passion might mean you have to pass over other needs, be encouraged. Jesus was a man of sorrows, too. He remained in a constant state of brokenness when he saw our need, and isn’t that the best example to follow?

I found my passion when I learned that 15 women die in childbirth every day in Uganda — and those are just the ones that are reported. Women are dying in childbirth. I still can’t believe it, or understand it, and it makes me really really angry. It shouldn’t happen, ever.

When you’ve followed your anger and found your passion, start by doing just one thing. Research and ask questions and make sure you go about it as ethically as possible, but do something. It may lead to another thing, and another, and you may just find your calling in the process.

 

Linking with Lisa-Jo for Five Minute Friday. FMF readers, I’m currently blogging my way through Uganda on a mission trip with Mercy for Mamas. Click on the “Honestly Adoption the blog” button to read back through my other posts. Thanks for visiting!

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Orphanage Day, or, How God Loves Us

September 27, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Benjamin never spent time in an orphanage, so maybe I didn’t know. Benja is my son now and I know his story, so I was surprised to find all of this new to me.

There are children in Uganda without parents. Do you know this?

It’s one thing to know it. Do you see it? Have you held them?

Adoption in Uganda

I don’t know how to do this without sounding like one of those old Sally Struthers fly-on-the-face commercials. I don’t want it to be that. For me, those commercials were a spectator sport. I saw it, I felt sorry, but I still didn’t know. Because I didn’t do anything.

But having been here, I have to tell you. I saw what I saw and I can’t go back, and I can’t not tell you about these children.

In the orphanages we visited today, the staff and leadership are doing so many things right — which is no easy task in Uganda. They are protecting the children, they are trying to resettle them with their families, and if that doesn’t work they’re trying to find foster families, adoptive families in Uganda, or international adoptive families. They’re sending them to school, they’re loving these kids the best they can, they’re building relationships with visitors and asking for feedback and new ideas for how to improve.

But these kids still need families. Each day, they still long for a mommy and a daddy.

I know, because they told me.

During prayer time at one of the orphanages, a beautiful 7-year-old, Grace,* was playing tickle games with me, running around, chasing, laughing loudly when I caught her. After a while, she asked me to sit down and she crawled into my lap. After I promised I wouldn’t tickle her so she could relax, she said, “No, I want you to hold me. I want to go home with you.”

And I immediately wanted to adopt every orphan in Africa.

I asked her why she’d like to come home with me, and she said, “Because I laaaahhhhhv you.”

I hugged her tighter, my heart breaking all over again.

Uganda Adoption

During prayer time, 12-year-old Geoffrey,* a beautiful, bright and tall boy who quickly became a favorite of many in the group (maybe for his dancing skills, because he loved to move) said, “Please pray for me so that I can have a sponsor.”

The Ja-Ja (grandmother) and founder of the orphanage, gently corrected him, “You mean you’d like us to pray that you get a mommy and daddy?” Geoffrey nodded.

That this boy would so long for a place to belong without even having the language to express it, to not know exactly what his heart longs for — I turned away to swallow the lump in my throat.

Isn’t Geoffrey’s prayer request and JaJa’s gentle reminder of his true heart’s cry a beautiful reminder of how God loves us?

So often I am praying for one thing, sure that my plans are best, but God sees my heart and knows, better than I do, what I’m really asking for, what I really need. And that’s the request he answers.

Even if my words are inadequate, even if I don’t even have the language to know what I need, I rest in the safety of my Father’s arms, who knows what I need before the thought reaches my mind. Oh, how he loves us.

International Adoption

* * *

We adopted Benjamin when he was just a little babe, but today the older waiting kids stole my heart completely. Any of the kids I met today would be a beautiful addition to a loving family.

If you’ve always considered adoption but haven’t jumped in yet, please know there will be no perfect time to start. Sometimes there’s no voice from heaven or “aha moment,” but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t adopt. It doesn’t mean you should, either – I’m a big advocate for reading up on older child adoption and knowing what you’re getting into, but also standing on God’s promises and not bowing to fear.

Please consider how you can help – either by looking into adoption, or by supporting one of the orphanages we visited today. They are both doing wonderful things and you can be assured that your donations will go to a very good place. Click here to read more about Redeemer House, or here to read more about An Open Door.

 

*Names have been changed.

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Getting Lost in Africa

September 26, 2012 by 4 Comments

Do you know what freedom feels like?

It feels like stepping so far outside yourself that you forget. It feels like service. It feels like pouring your life out, helping in a tiny way. It feels like getting your heart broken over and over. It feels like redemption won at a cost.

It feels like forgetting about yourself for hours and days at a time.

Before I left, I wondered how this trip might break me and strip away all the junk I tell myself every day, the worries I have, hang-ups I obsess over and the mind games that ruin entire days, weeks, the dulling thrum of life that leaves me in a fog, going through the motions, grasping for hope.

I’ve found out how the breaking happens — it feels like freedom, and like forgetting. Like looking up after an entire day and realizing I’m still here in this amazing mess, marveling that I get to play a small part, wondering what it means and how God is in the smallest details.

It’s a beautiful thing to see how small you are.

I don’t compare myself here. There aren’t many mirrors and I don’t look for my reflection, glance down at my body, suck in or check my hair. Water is scarce and electricity is expensive and so there are short showers and no hair dryers. There’s red dirt caking my feet and there are pit latrines and sometimes not enough food for all the village children and there’s so much that just doesn’t matter.

My role in this place is so small compared to the gaping needs. I love the individual stories, because I get to see such aching beauty, hints of God’s fingerprints everywhere.

He’s right there, with the sick girl I held today in the village, so tiny and soft-spoken, wanting to go see the bubbles, fascinated by my glasses. He’s in the crisis pregnancy centers with the girls, and he’s in the village where they have so little, they argue over who gets the cardboard box we brought the mama kits in.

He’s even with the 12-year-old girl I met yesterday at the crisis pregnancy center. I do wonder where He was when she was attacked and raped and ended up pregnant. This little girl hadn’t even gotten her period yet. The entire session we had on breastfeeding and childbirth she sat there wide-eyed and shy, playing with a plastic dinosaur. She’s just a child, after all. Where were you, God? Who can bear a story like this?

But even she said she had peace. Because she was there, she said she had hope again.

God is redeeming her story, and don’t we all need it?

I need redemption in my story — freedom the lies I believe every day, from the afflictions that hold me down and the fear that holds me back.

These girls do, too.

If I see God’s fingerprints on their redemption stories, I’m sure they’re on mine, too. His hands are all over your story, too. Look around a little, remember, and you’ll see it in whispers and hints: I’m here. Look what I’m doing, even now, to weave beauty and hope and a future.

When we were visiting Mirembe House, Jane led the group in this song: Because He Lives

Some of them looked hopeful while others were shell-shocked, still absorbing the reality of where they were and what had happened to them. But the song was true for all of them, and it left me in tears.

I pray that one day, by relentlessly pursuing God’s plan for her life, the 12-year-old girl would be able to forget herself for a while, too. I pray that one day, she would see the beauty of her smallness, the fingerprints of redemption, and the weaving of it all into his glory.

 

* * *

I have more stories and I want to write them all. (Today we went to a traditional birthing attendant’s facility in a village, and this 69-year-old midwife was amazing and funny and proud and beautiful. Her story needs telling, too, along with many, many others.) But it’s easier somehow to write around them like this, to explore God’s work in my heart so I can get at some of how it feels to be here, so I can capture not just their stories but yours and mine, too, so that they’re here but they’re also home.

If you want to help these women we’ve met by partnering with these holistic ministries, consider making a donation to Mercy for Mamas. (Click on the “Donate” button on the right side.) 100% of your donation will go to purchase Mama Kits (which we buy wholesale for $7 per kit), which are donated to these centers and distributed to women in villages and to missionaries who work with girls.

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Meet Jane

September 24, 2012 by 2 Comments

Meet Jane. She is 18 years old. (Isn’t she beautiful?)

“When I realized I was pregnant, I felt my world had come to an end,” Jane told me. “All the people around me didn’t support me, and they made sure to put me down.”

With no support from her family, Jane tried to abort her baby — a common method of family planning in Uganda. I’m not sure how she did it. Maybe she took lots of contraceptives; maybe she tried taking some herbs. She might have tried drinking detergent.

Mercifully, it didn’t work. She found out about a crisis pregnancy center in Kampala called Mirembe House, which is run by Youth for Christ.

Mirembe means peace.

At Mirembe House, there is a nurse to teach the women, ages 13 to 19, about prenatal care, labor and delivery, and caring for their babies. There are Christian counselors to help them heal from their heart-scars, like rejection from their families, the shame of pregnancy outside a marriage, and the devastation of rape. There are vocational instructors to teach them tailoring skills, cookery and hair styling. They share the gospel with them, and make sure they have somewhere to go after their baby is born.

For Jane, they offered hope to two lives.

“When I came here, I started loving my baby before she was born,” Jane says. “The aunties here loved me and encouraged me, even though they were not my mother.”

Meet Jane’s baby, whom she named “Blessed Natasha.” Natasha is two days old.

“They gave me hope when I felt that hope was going out of my life,” Jane says. “I found God through my baby.”

I wanted to tell her that I did, too. I found God through my babies, and I saw God in hers.

I showed her a picture of Benjamin but couldn’t express what he and my other children mean to our family. But that’s probably because she already said it: They point us to God.

 

* * *

Africa is full of stories.

I came here to find them, but they found me. And I am undone.

I have so many stories, friends. I met women today who had been left, abused, abandoned. I listened as a woman told us about her baby with special needs, and how her friends told her to throw her in a pit latrine because she was worthless. I cried as she told us how Comforter Center, another crisis pregnancy ministry, helped her to see her child as valuable and part of God’s plan for her life, and how she learned to love her baby. I interviewed the directors and was inspired by their passion and sacrifice. I listened in roomfuls of women, watching us teaching each other, asking questions and sharing birth stories, encouraging and equipping each other for our tasks ahead.

After a day like this, I thought I’d feel heavy and overwhelmed. But I don’t. I feel hopeful.

These are redemption stories, friends.

Sometimes the hand of God is the most obvious in the most broken situations. How else could Jane have gone from where she was to where she is today? How else could he have brought me here to Africa again, where I see myself in these women’s eyes, where I see how we need each other, how we crave each other’s stories?

In their pain, I find my brokenness. In their healing, I find hope.

In their eyes, I see myself.

 

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When a Mother Leaves {Guest post at Gillian Marchenko}

September 21, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Today, I am over the Atlantic.

I’ll be here for hours, flying through the silent deafening darkness, and when tomorrow dawns too early I’ll land in another continent, then fly to another. When tomorrow is done, I’ll set foot in Africa again, and it will be so far away from familiar, and it will be like coming home again.

When I look over my shoulder, my three beautiful children will be nowhere I can reach.

I will count the hours at first, wonder after them, it’ll take a while to shake plate-balancing mode but then I will begin to forget them, for a moment, for longer. The work and stories and faces in front of me will blur the ones back home.

How can a mother do this to her children?

 

Join me at Gillian Marchenko’s blog to read more…

And please follow along here for the stories I’ll find along the way. Your prayers are necessary and appreciated.

xo

Filed Under: Africa

I am an ocean

September 17, 2012 by 7 Comments

Today I saw this on Facebook and I started to cry.

Click over to read Christina Cook’s beautiful piece on motherhood, worry and being enough at SheLoves Magazine, too.

 

Four days before I leave, four days until my world is turned around again (I just know it), four days until my heart breaks open and apart over and over again, and I just feel so small.

This is too big a task for me.

I am one woman, and I love Uganda too much to let her down. Who am I to go there, to think I can help, to imagine I might be able to convey one tiny sliver of truth through story? Who am I to minister, who am I to teach? I don’t know what the hell I’m doing most of the time.

Help me to feel like an ocean.

But then I’m reminded: This trip isn’t about me. I know this. I know this. I forget this.

Feeling the gravity of it all, I wish instead of feeling crushed I would lean harder into the God who brought me here.

I am an ocean, because God pours into me until I can’t help but pour out, wave after wave, I draw it out and still there is more, more, more. He promises. His faithfulness proven, why is my faith so weak?

I feel small, because on my own I am that fly. I am inadequate, poor in spirit, worn down, not cut out.

But it was never about me. I am an ocean, because He goes before me.

Please pray that I will remember.

 

Linking with Heather.
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