From the eggroll of babes…

Yesterday we were at the mall and I didn’t want to be there, but I did want to see Allie and try to snatch a few minutes together as a family. Toni and Allie were going to shop and I parked myself in the food court to read. Toni and Allie showed up at my table with two giant spring rolls, a little repast to give some strength for the task lying ahead.

Then I saw the street kid going from table to table asking for food. Toni and Allie had their backs to him, but I saw him just walk up to a nearby table rudely ask a guy to give him some of his food. Geesh, I felt inside, get that kid out of here. I am so SICK of hungry kids needing, needing, needing. Can’t they go somewhere else and need. In fact, you know what? I need. I need life here to be more orderly. I need more ego-gratification in my job. I need more comfort. I need my house to be warm, the days to be longer. I need people in this country to obey traffic laws, for cryin’ out loud.

Then I knew he was headed for our table next. I was hungry, and half an eggroll didn’t seem like quite enough. And you know us… I mean, come on, it’s not like we have all the money in the world, and I really didn’t feel like engaging the world’s great needs at that moment. I mean, come on, it’s not like Toni showed up to the table with six platters of chinese gourmet. She had two spindly eggrolls. I wanted to nibble the little eggroll piece, wonder why Toni only bought two instead of three, and then get on reading my book.

So I gave the kid the blowoff, and then he said, “But I haven’t eaten all day.” I told him sorry, but that I wasn’t going to give him any of the food we had at our table, and that he should go ask someone else. I was a caveman huddled around my saber-tooth tiger leg (spindly as it was), running at a child making loud grunts, scaring him away from the firelight.

Allie said, “Why didn’t we give him any food?” Toni said, “That’s a great question Allie.” I sat there in silence. More perturbed by such assanine questions than I was hampered by a guilty conscience. “Well, Allie, I wasn’t going to let him eat off the same egg roll as us. He could be sick, or have a cold. I’m not just going to let someone I don’t know eat from my plate.”

“Well Daddy,” Allie said without judgment, “we could just break some off,” measuring out to me the place she wanted to break her eggroll. “Could you break it here, Daddy, and then I will find him.”

And so there went Allie through the food court with a napkin-full of egg roll mush, determined to find the kid I ignored. Toni followed a few steps behind. She came back a few minutes later. “Well, I couldn’t give it to him because the police were making him and his friends all go outside.”

Me? I can’t say I was smitten with, “woe is me, who hath not given of his eggroll to bequeath nutriment upon the outcast”. But I was reminded. I was pleasantly chastised by truth and by a child’s graciousness, reminded that social justice starts at our family table long before it moves up to the institutional level. I was thankful to have a daughter who marches to her own tune. Thankful that this same child who can so vehemently disobey our good instruction can also independently choose the good even when her father doesn’t rise to the occasion.

And I was left hoping that the kid got something to eat later on that day. Hoping that God was a lot more gracious to him than I was, and hoping that there would be some more kind-hearted folks outside who knew that it makes basic sense to give of your food to the hungry.

Holy Spaces at 2:45 am

I am in the kitchen at Christ Church, somewhere near 34′53″ S, 56′10″ W, letting Jesus love me and taking part in our prayer night. We have a big season ahead of us. “The Living” starts up next weekend. It is an unusual space for Christ Church, maybe a notch closer toward what you, dear U.S. evangelical reader, would probably classify as emergent (though, still laced through and through with “seeker-sensitive”, that is, if you are into categorizing).

There is also a picture of a burnt guy hanging on the wall. Joel Sonnenberg (www.joel.cc) arrives to tell his story in a week, all throughout Montevideo. God, please use him and let not the time and effort be in vain.

Some dear friends leave here in the coming months. Some face illnesses. Some older members of our community are near death. Our widows and orphans need to be touched. The building needs work. The poor need bread, and they need Life. We need greater understanding and love for one another. The people who come here on Sundays, whether from rote or from a genuine hunger and thirst, need a fresh visitation. Atiende nuestra suplica, Señor. Hear our prayer, O Lord.

This place is like a spiritual E.R. room, or a firehouse. Jake and James are asleep in the creche/nursery. Holes are being punched in the Kingdom of Darkness. I don’t know what strongholds are being torn now, but at least we come in the wee hours to remind Satan of his ultimate defeat and to hasten it along. Atiende nuestra súplica, Señor.

John and I had to talk about some heart shifts that took place while I was in the monastery, things that affect how I use my time, where I place my energies, and what future paths God may be calling us to walk. He suggested we do it up at church, during the vigil, even though it might distract us from prayer. But really, the whole conversation was a prayer. Atiende nuestra súplica, Señor.

He is at home by now, and I am so tired that I am weepy. But in the Holy Spaces, aren’t we supposed to cry? Or maybe it’s the other way around. Maybe it’s the tears themselves that turn this into Holy Space. Atiende nuestra súplica, Señor. Hear our prayer, O Lord.

Allie goes back to school

Allie went back to school on Friday. Well, she tried to go, and willingly to boot. Staying with her home-schooling cousin ruined her for life. Last Wednesday she arrived late afternoon. Our first days back, we don’t even THINK of doing anything public of societal. It would be like going from the surface of an ocean directly to 10,000 feet below, and would shrink our heads like those styrofoam cups they show you on National Geographic.

Friday, by late in the afternoon, tired of walking around the land-mines of unpacked suitcases, she mustered up some “want to”. I suppose the idea of snuggling up with mom on the couch and studying nuclear physics appealed less to her than playing Barbies in broken-English with a miniature hoard of children all bedecked in Saint Patricks blue, white, and grey (incidentally, we chose the school based on its colors, “Hail Kirby High” and “Go Tigers Go”). She disappeared from the warzone and emerged from her room 5 minutes later looking like a poster-child for the school, sporting her brand new shoes she wanted so desperately to show her friends.

Toni took her to school only to find out that her whole class had left fifteen minutes earlier on a field trip to go see an English theater production of Peter Pan! Bullocks! Toni was a bit sadder than Allie. We pancaked and churched our way through the weekend and watched as the Angel of Death descended into Allie’s bedroom and held her prisoner in bed while all the other children were duly putting on their white socks, grey jogging pants, navy blue shirts, and light blue smocks. Allie just covered her head with her pillow.

I raised her blinds a bit and told her, “Don’t worry hon, you can wake up whenever you want.” She didn’t say anything. “No, really, just sleep on and don’t worry about school.” No movement. It dawned on me about 10 minutes later that I was doing one of those really lame parent things where you try to send a message by pretending you are saying the exact opposite. Or maybe I am turning Japanese.

So, live and let live. She emerges from her room well past first snack time, as all of her friends are eating their filled cookies, yogurts, pastries, or candy (even though the school encourages parents to send crazy snacks like bananas, or oranges, for heaven’s sake), prancing about in nearly nothing, and smiling at me, “I wasn’t really sleeping you know. I was just pretending so that I wouldn’t have to go to school.”

Oh yeah, THERE’S a big surprise.

Toni appears with an armload of clothes. “I have a big day today, so if you are ready by 10:30, I’ll give you a ride, but otherwise you can stay in your room all day.” “Oh great, and can I watch TV?”

Eventually, after a knock-down drag out over hairbrushing (man, we made a whole five days without one of those), and some spaces of silence, Allie asks Daddy if she can get a ride to school.

So, thirty minutes later, we pull up at the school door, take a deep breath, and then take some time to remind ourselves that not only do we NOT belong to THIS world, we don’t belong to the US either, nor to Europe. Nor to Christian Associates, nor to Christ Church, nor to blue and grey school uniforms. We belong to a celestial city governed by a radical, passionate, tender Father-Warrior-Lover-Wiseman King who is allowing us to live on a training ground to refine our ears, our eyes, our tastes, so that we might return home someday and bring a bunch of other kids with us.

“All right, Dad,” she says, with the voice of an infiltrating Kingdom subversive, “Let’s do it.”

You are not supposed to say these sorts of things…

I find myself having trouble making the adjustment back. The Spanish language center in my brain is malfunctioning. I have forgotten everyone’s phone numbers. It’s cold. It gets dark at like 2:30 in the afternoon (okay, more like 6:30).

I will spare the litany.

But it’s not that bad. Really.

PING!!!

Okay, call me narcissistic, but I am wondering who actually reads this. It is either a great blessing or a great danger to be blogging. Realizing that in some off-the-beaten-track kind of way my soul has found a place to prattle on a bit about the things which concern it (speaking in code of course)… It comes to offer its flowers as well as draw pictures of scary monsters, and I smile, trusting that it will be only after the fact when they read the blog and say, “Ooooh, we should have known all along.”

Coming home to De Bron…

Okay. I am in MOntevideo, NOT the De Bron conference center where I spent all of last week with my tribe. I wish I could package that stuff. It was like Rivendell (sp?), where I just sat down and decompressed and let all the myriad of voices (all mine) just have their time and space to ‘come out’ and worship God in their own way. Some sat in silence, some fell to their knees, some stood arms outstretched.

Soul connection. Dreaming. Listening. Processing. Thinking Kingdom Thoughts and dreaming Kingdom Dreams. Much Afraid, lifted up to the Heights to be reminded that there really is a Coming Kingdom that advances day by day, minute by minute, loving action by loving action.

Summer Camp for grown-ups and missionaries.

It was good to be there. I wanted to build tabernacles, like Peter.

And then, time was up, and we walked on from there. Back to Amsterdam. Back to Germany, or Spain, or Russia, or Norway, or Seattle, or Montevideo. All of us, parting out, back to our positions, reminded of God’s goodness… of His grandeur. And most importantly, reminded that He exists, that He loves us.

How do you remember that? What do you do if you forget that? And what do you do if you forget that you have forgotten? What do you do if you read the Bible, but it doesn’t make it into your soul and you read like an Alzheimer’s patient or like someone with amnesia seeing themselves in a family photo… “That looks like me, but…”

These questions aren’t rhetorical. They have answers. 1) Grace: I abandon myself to love deeply, God and my neighbor, and count on God to continue speaking His presence into me. 2) Pain: Either the pain that comes when I forget all the above and act/live ignorantly, or the pleasant pain of some sort of fasting or abstinence, chosen to awaken my soul to other realities, other realms, other winds, other voices.

Grace and Pain. Welcome, handmaidens. Do your work. Keep me awake. Don’t let me fall asleep again.