Haiti in Retrospect: Introduction

Exactly four years ago, on January 17, 2013, I was unpacking my stuff after returning to Haiti for the second time. I had spent three months (Sept - Dec) teaching school in an orphanage, and I had gotten malaria in December and returned to the US for a month to recover. Then I went back to Haiti to finish out my time until May.

This second time in Haiti kicked off one of the most difficult, bewildering, disorienting seasons of life that I've ever walked through. It has taken me these 4 years just to gain a semblance of perspective, begin to evaluate what exactly happened, and to have the courage to share it publicly.

Context

In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, there was a dramatic rise in the instances of cholera in the country. Fox news reported that there were more than 3000 confirmed cases by the end of October, and the disease continued to spread, until by January, it reached our creche. If it was just a disease outbreak, it would have been one thing. Yes, it would have been an emergency, and people would have worked hard and gotten less sleep and gone through an intense period of effort to bring about recovery, but that would have been all. For me and for the others around me, there was much, much more to it than that. The cholera outbreak was just a medical emergency. But something worse than cholera was infecting the way things were being run as a whole. Over the next few months, I would witness spiritual abuse, hypocrisy, and deception at the highest level, and it was being so skillfully done that we didn't see it until it was too late to prevent the damage.

In December of 2012 when I went home from Haiti, I was walking on clouds. I remember thinking, "I've found the thing that is worth living for above all other things. There is nothing higher or better that I could pursue. I don't need to experiment, guess, or or try other career paths. I am already enjoying the most satisfying life of all." And yet, only a few months later, I had been caught up into a web of so many lies, such clever deception, and such blatant deceit, that I would find myself asking in my journal if it was possible that the whole Christianity thing was just a fraud, too.

The reason for all of this confusion was that the founder of the orphanage where I was working was a fraud, and I didn't yet know it.

Heather Elyse Savage (who now goes by the name of Heather Matranga) was the founder and director of Giving Hope Rescue Mission. I worked for Giving Hope as a schoolteacher at the orphanage from September through May (2012-2013). I considered Heather a friend, even if I didn't think she considered me as an equal. I admired the work she was doing and thought it was legitimate. And then I saw her wreak havoc and leave a trail of carnage in her wake. None of the lives that her life touched were unaffected. Some were hurt worse than others (and I think I somehow escaped the most unscathed of anyone), but everyone was wounded. The spiritual abuse and hypocrisy that I was exposed to in being part of her organization left an indelible mark on me.

In the intervening time, I have come to see that some of the things that I walked through are also consistent with a larger pattern. Other people also operate in a similar way, and there are vocabulary words for the actions that form part of that pattern.

When you read the upcoming journal entries about the cholera experience, keep in mind that these journal entries were written at the time I was going through it. I didn't yet see the pattern. I didn't yet know the extent of what I was involved with. I still trusted Heather and thought that she was acting in everyone's best interest. The only thing that has been edited in after the fact are the handful of interspersed comments on the lessons I learned, that, looking back, I can see as mismanagement (or worse) all along.

Ultimately, while there is little in the way of redemption that is visible to me so far, I hope to trace the story of God's hand through it all. In little ways, I can see glimpses of what God was doing, though I cannot yet see the fuller picture of how He will finally work all things for good.

The journey starts in two days, when I tell the story of my experience with the babies that had cholera in Port-Au-Prince.

2016: Year in Review

Only two posts in all of 2016. Now that is sad. But it's also understandable.

When I started this blog, I was well aware of the fact that everything I posted would be there forever, that it was posted in public, and that anyone in the world could read it if they wanted to. But, I thought, "I'm nobody, so what does it matter if I talk about the things I do? Only my family and friends care, and they're the ones I'm writing to, and if a random stranger does happen across my page and the content pleases and entertains them, no big deal."

It's interesting, though, how life's experiences bring pain. Close encounters with one or two toxic people a couple of years back made me very reluctant to post anything any more, lest "they" should be watching--those people who hurt me, the people who might still be interested in knowing what I'm up to, the people who might be keeping tabs on me for their own unknown reasons. And suddenly the world seemed a much less friendly place, and my blog died.

In the midst of that season, I kept resolving to resurrect it, but my posting habits fell from a high of 215 posts in the year 2012 to just 9 in 2015 and only 2 in 2016. Alas. So much for resolutions, when resolutions are eclipsed by deep-rooted factors that provide much more persuasive reasons why not to post.

Maybe one day, I'll have the courage to tell the stories of the way I saw toxic people hurt others and what became of it. Maybe one day, I'll have the perspective to draw conclusions, reveal the common pattern that these people operated by, and spare others from falling into a similar pitfall.

For now, though, it's an act of courage even to pull off posting something as simple as a year in review. For now, it requires the silencing of alarm bells in my brain before I can view any post as not "dangerous." Posting to a blog is dangerous. Perhaps it is more dangerous because of enemies I haven't met yet than it is because of the enemies I have left behind. But it's also dangerous to me not to post (or at least, to write). I have so many things that I haven't processed or fully understood, simply because I haven't written about them. I am less in touch with the things I have encountered, seen, and done, because for me, I don't fully experience things until I've written about them. I have experience growing pains that I have failed to fully grow into simply because I didn't write about them. And there was something indefinable about knowing that there were people who could read what I had written that motivated me to write.

So how to get through a dilemma like this? For now, one small step. I'll post the year in review, as an act of courage and defiance to that pull that says, "No, no, no, don't."

JANUARY:
A friend of mine warned me that I was getting to love money too much, and shared some warning scriptures along that line. Perhaps it was true. I was unconscious of the fact that I was sliding into a comfortable snobbery where the needs of, say, the homeless, were becoming less of a thing to have compassion for and more of a thing to just dismiss as "their problem" (and something I'd rather be sheltered from even hearing about). Not a good state to be in. My long-time passion and fervor for missions had waned to the point that I was doubtful if I could ever choose to leave a job as nice as mine to go back to the mission field.

FEBRUARY:
On February 4, I fasted and prayed a prayer of definite renewal of consecration to God. I gave him everything I could think of to name: my house, my career, my possessions, my books, the stuff in my garage, my bike, my gadgets (like tools, a headlamp, etc.), my craft supplies, my kitchen stuff, my silverware, my health, my skin, my hair, my shoes, my clothes, my finances, my food, my ability to eat healthy, my electronics, my garden, my car, y dishes, my reputation, my ability to have Christian friends, my instruments, my freedom from pain, my ironing board & iron, my little luxuries of having the right tool for the right occasion (like a tortilla press or a candy thermometer), my cookware, my Wusthof knives, my cleaning supplies, my uninterrupted solitude, my bedroom set, my safety and comfort, my ability to give nice gifts, my talents, my weaknesses, all that I am and all that I have.

The next day (a Friday), I was sitting at work and I had the vivid thought (as clearly as being told) that I was going to lose my job.

"Ah!" I thought, "I have been wondering if I could bring myself to choose to leave this job...but what if the choice is not going to be left to me?" I expected that I would lose my job Monday, so I packed up all my personal items from my desk and took them home with me that night.

Monday came and went, Tuesday came and went, but Wednesday morning, the chief sales officer asked me to come with her. I knew what it meant. I asked her how she was recovering from her cold, and she thanked me for thinking about her in a moment like that while we walked over to the conference room. The HR director was sitting there. They informed me politely that my position had just ended. I thanked them politely for the great experience and the opportunity they had given me to become a better professional. I still remember Lauren responding with heartfelt fervor, "Rebekah, you are a fabulous professional." And I walked back to my desk, said goodbye to my coworkers, and that period of my life was over. (The company had just been bought by another company the day before, and they closed my entire department.)

The Lord took my consecration seriously, and He immediately touched the "career" category, but yet, He protected me and took very good care of me all along the way through the period of my unemployment.

MARCH - MAY
I attempted to start a business, putting into practice all the things I had learned about marketing, but I was unsuccessful. I was also unsuccessful at finishing a book that I was attempting to finish. I ended that season feeling like a failure. It's disappointing to fail. It hurts.

MAY
A newborn nephew beckoned me up to Washington, where I took care of my brother's kids and cooked for two weeks when my sister-in-law had a new baby. That was a joyous time of connecting with my sweet nephews.

JUNE
Another newborn nephew beckoned me from Tennessee, so I drove back the other way across the country to help cook & clean with that new little pumpkin's arrival. I also got to attend a cousin's wedding, visit people from Virginia to Florida, and attend another friend's wedding.

JULY
I resumed job hunting in earnest.

AUGUST
I got hired at a marketing agency where I now make my living as a writer, writing blogs and website content for our customers.

SEPTEMBER-DECEMBER
I agreed to commit to help someone out by cooking 3 meals a day for someone who was on a special diet. I had to fix meals that were gluten free, dairy free, soy free, corn free, dye free, processed food-free, sugar free, and 100% organic for 12 weeks. That taxed me to the limit some days, and I canceled everything except for work in order to pull that off. It was a relief when it ended, but I also felt I had grown and expanded in that experience.

DECEMBER
I got to go up to Washington AGAIN to spend Christmas with my brother. So many good times.

~

And there you have it. My year in review.

Chips, computer time, and Absolute Surrender

All my life, I have tried to completely surrender to Jesus. Every time I would sing, “I Surrender All,” I hoped it would finally be the time when I really, really meant it. I would pray and ask God to help me to really surrender this time, really just give up all of who I was and everything I had to Jesus. But I never seemed to be able to do it, or at least be sure that I had actually done it. It got to the point where after years of trying and failing to surrender, sometimes I wouldn't even join in the song because of this, in case I were actually lying and not truly surrendering everything. I would go to camp and someone would get up and speak about how they were miserable until the day they finally surrendered everything to Jesus, and then peace and joy reigned and everything turned around. I repeatedly declared my intentions to surrender, made attempts to surrender, tried to “yield my members” tried to “give up” and “depend on God,” and it all just seemed so abstract, so nebulous, so unconnected to any tangible action. 

Somehow, just by changing to use the word “submit,” it has translated all of this vagueness into something concrete, actionable, and understandable. 

What does it mean to submit? It means that if God asks me to get up at 5:00 in the morning, instead of allowing my sleep-dazed brain to hit snooze and roll over, I submit to God’s agenda. Submitting looks like putting my feet on the floor, turning on the light, and taking measures to prevent myself from falling immediately back to sleep. Submitting is a real thing that I either do or don’t do. It’s recognizing a higher authority and conforming myself to the wishes of that authority. It’s a thing that plays out at the micro level, the individual decision and task level. It is easy to know how to submit.

Submitting is the thing that I am bucking when a scenario like this one plays out:

• I’m sitting at my computer, it’s 7:30 PM, and I’ve decided to go to bed at 8:00 PM so that I can get up at 5:00 AM and still get 9 hours of sleep. Brilliant. Then I will be obeying God AND not being sleep deprived. Absolutely brilliant. I'm on board with this plan for sure. Well, I should start wrapping things up now so that I’ll actually be in bed turning the light out by 8:00.
• An hour later: Oops—whoa, how’d that happen? It’s 8:30 already. Goodness, don’t even know what I got so absorbed in there. Now it’s past my bedtime, but no worries, I probably couldn’t have fallen asleep that fast anyway since it’s so much earlier than I usually go to bed. Now I’ll do just this one last thing and then go to bed.
• An hour later. Gracious, now it’s 9:30. Great. Now I’m going to be cutting into my sleep to get up at 5:00. At this point, I probably won’t find the wherewithal at 5:00 in the morning to actually choose to get up. But I really am serious that I need to go to bed now. 
• An hour later: What in the world? How is it 10:30? You know what though? I was doing something that I’ve been putting off for a long time, and it was good that I got it done, and besides, it was ministry-related, so yeah, I might be acting foolishly and cutting into my sleep, but sometimes you’ve just got to do what you’ve got to do, right?
• An hour later: OK, seriously this is ridiculous. If I don’t go to bed now, I will be sick. It’s 11:30. Goodness, I’m exhausted. Why do I do this to myself? (Finally went to bed.)

Now, in that scenario (which is just one real example out of many), I was given 5 opportunities to submit, and each time, I refused to submit. The final time, I did take the action of going to bed, but it can’t really be called “submission” because it was me going to bed on my terms, in my timing, not me going against my own inclinations to actually submit to God’s contrary (and higher) plan for me. I can look at that scenario and say to myself, “Oh, me submitting would have actually looked like me shutting my computer at 7:30 and immediately and cheerfully going to get ready for bed.” It would have been me going lower, subduing my own plans, ideas, and actions to be subject to God’s. 

Submitting requires humility. And when I started to see everything in life in those terms, I suddenly discovered a mounting pile of evidence that showed me just how unsubmitted I really was.

Here’s another case in point:

• It’s lunch time, and I open a bag of chips. It’s a bag that has 5 servings, so technically it should last me 5 days. I absent-mindedly munch away until I look and suddenly discover that I have definitely eaten more than half the bag of chips. OK, that means I have had probably at least 3 servings. Time to stop. This is the voice of my conscience, which is in alignment with the nature and principles of God (e.g. moderation & self control). 

This is my opportunity to submit.

• “Just one more chip, though.” 

The act of reaching my hand into the bag one time to get one chip is a refusal to submit, which (if we call a spade a spade) is an act of rebellion, an act that will distance me from God, an act that involves turning off my brain and shutting my ears to the conscience, resulting in me being a little more deaf and a little harder of heart for subsequent occasions. But I do it, not just once, but again, and again, every 5 or 10 seconds or so, reaching in the bag, pulling out “just one more” chip, crunching it between my teeth, telling myself it’s not that bad because I’m actually not full yet, and going on to do it again, and again, and again.

This is not a conscious willfulness or deliberate stiff-necked rebellion. It’s something I’m doing without analyzing it at all, because my mind is engaged elsewhere, reading a book or taking a class or typing in between bites. I’m not thinking about the chips at all. I’m just eating them.

• My hand dives into the bag, fishes to the bottom, and comes up empty. “What? Gone already?” Well, now I must stop, because there aren’t any more. 

I have indeed consumed 5 whole servings of chips, which at 150 calories and 9 grams of fat per serving turns out to be a nice load of 750 calories and 45 grams of fat. Good going. 

Notice that the end of the story was still that “I stopped eating the chips.” But even though the ending is the same, it's a completely different story to stop out of submission to my authority than it is to stop out of simple disappearance of the chips. “There weren’t any more, so I stopped” doesn’t require submission to anything but cause and effect. “There was half a bag left, and I stopped, even though the thought of having another chip still appetized me” requires submission, going low, yielding, surrender. To submit is to surrender my will, my way, my idea, and give God His way. 

Surrender, submitting. It’s the same thing—I don’t know why I didn’t see it before.

When I began to see all the little daily choices of my life in this light, I came to realize how very little I was ever even remotely submitted to God. Do I ever do anything but precisely what I want to do? I wondered. And by focusing on the little tiny steps of submission (like leaving the last few chips in the bag, or closing my computer down), I was also led to the bigger principle.

“What if I was so completely submitted that my default response in every situation would be to submit rather than to buck that thought and go my own way?”

I think this is what I would now see as the “Absolute Surrender” that up until now has just been this nebulous Christianese phrase in my head that I didn't know how to tie down to any tangible action (except for the fervent request that it would happen to me).

Fortunately, submitting to God is within the reach of both the smallest child and the oldest philosopher (though it tends to be far easier for the little child than for the philosopher). One doesn’t need any special equipment to do it. It doesn’t require special skills or years of theology or deep secrets of hidden knowledge. I know exactly how to refuse to eat a chip. I know exactly what I need to do to turn off my computer and get ready for bed. I know exactly how to get up in the morning when the alarm rings rather than put my head back on the pillow and pull the covers over my head. So what I am being asked to do is technically easy.

And this thought that it is easy has brought me much-needed perspective and pulled me up short when I was tempted to protest that “I just don’t know how to do it! I’ll be this way forever.” No—the deepest, most entrenched sins in my life can go, just the same way that I stop eating a chip.

I can submit. I can make myself low. I can humble myself and give God the place of authority He deserves. 

2015: Year in Review

"2015 is a year for getting strong," my sister said towards the end of 2014, and I feel like that statement encapsulates the theme of this past year for me.

JANUARY:
I embarked on a journey in January to bring to fruition a vision I had had ever since I moved to Colorado: begin a women's Bible study in the local jail. It took a decent amount of effort to just find who I needed to talk to to get the ball rolling, but after 6 phone calls to the jail, I finally got in touch with the chaplain and started the application process.

FEBRUARY:
The plan that I had to buy a house was put on hold when I was asked to go to Vietnam and help start a Montessori kindergarten. This threw me for a loop and I agonized for weeks about what I should choose before finally (in the dark, not knowing if I did right) deciding against it. But through it, the Lord stopped me from going forward with buying a house, which looking back was God's good hand of protection from a step I was not ready for yet.

MARCH:
Several other people also applied to do the jail ministry with me, and the Lord built a team of 4. We started meeting together to plan and brainstorm about our Bible study.

APRIL:
I went home for Easter and had a lovely time with my family. Then I got back and got my wisdom teeth taken out. While that was healing, I drove down to Texas and got to stay with a dear family and attend a women's conference where the main speaker was a lady named Pamela Rosewell Moore. Her story was incredibly interesting and inspiring. She worked with Brother Andrew and with Corrie Ten Boom, and she had a powerful testimony of living a surrendered life to Jesus Christ. Part of the unique aspect of her story was that she was single until she was 42, and her love story was a beautiful picture of God's faithfulness. (See her book, Safer than a Known Way--I highly recommend it! )

MAY:
The team finally jumped through all the jail's hoops and we began our Bible study. The first night only one woman came, and gradually it grew, and we began to grow in our skills of presenting the gospel and leading women to know and walk in the truth.

JUNE:
On June 1, I moved into the most darling little rental house, and about two weeks later I hosted my first house guests--my mom and sister came for a little over a week, and we did some lovely hikes together. Living in my dear little house was the best, most fabulous gift that I could imagine,  and I could not help exulting in the goodness of God in my behalf. I am still in awe over this.

JULY:
July brought more house guests (my uncle and cousin) and it was a really sweet month of tending my garden, bike rides, and having my jail team over every Wednesday night. I think it was also then that we started up a second study in the jail on Friday mornings.

AUGUST:
My youngest sister got married on August 1, and at the last minute I got to have the day off work and fly home for the wedding, surprising almost all the family members (two were in on the secret so that I would have someone to pick me up from the airport). Back in Colorado, I had the incomparable experience of summiting Long's Peak with 3 friends, which was exhausting but totally worth it. At the end of the month, I also got to go visit my newest little baby nephew, who is the joy of my heart and truly the happiest baby I have ever seen, which is not too surprising considering that my sister has always been the baby whisperer.

SEPTEMBER:
This month was mostly life as usual (work and so forth), except for a family reunion in Ohio where all my dad's side of the family got together. We all enjoyed each other's company tremendously and also got to see the darling bitsy munchkin nephew again. Also my newly-married sister and her husband came, and I heard about a book my cousin had written that would be coming out soon.

OCTOBER:
My favorite month of the year, work-wise, because I was given a number of awesome projects to do (such as creating tutorial videos for our customers) and my company also sent me to Mexico for a week for a UX study, which was super fascinating. While I was in Mexico, our jail Bible study team experienced some growing pains with a situation that arose that threatened our unity, which I look back on as a team-building exercise created by God especially for us. Also, we added 3 new team members to the Bible study, with the intention of opening up a men's study that the chaplain had offered to us.

NOVEMBER:
I flew to Washington for Thanksgiving, which was a lovely time of getting 4 of the 6 siblings together. We went up to Mt. Ranier and drove out to the coast and enjoyed happy fun times with my brother and his family. I dropped my brand new phone in the ocean and that was sad.

DECEMBER:
My cousin came out to stay with me for her Christmas break, and we had some fabulous times together, going up to Vail village, spending a couple days in Utah, and then coaxing my sister and two more cousins to drive out and join us. We did a snowshoe trek the day after they got here, and then we decided to drive up to Idaho, where we joined up with my brother and another cousin and her husband. It was quite the cousin-sibling reunion, and we brought in the new year with skiing and a visit to a hot spring (quite the novelty!) I lost my phone again. 2 phone mishaps in a month. I also read my cousin's new book, Overtaken by Destiny, which I found to be addicting and fabulously creative.

Reviewing back over this year, I see the Lord's hand of strengthening and blessing me with beautiful gifts beyond what I could have imagined. The year before (2014) was a difficult year where I was being stripped and broken, and it was in many ways the most difficult year of my life. This year (2015) was about God building me back up and restoring what had been broken, and not only that, but abundantly bestowing upon me many things I never thought I would have in my whole life (like a house all to myself).

I look forward to what the future brings, knowing full well that the beauty and glory that I have exulted in this year may be changed completely tomorrow. Things can't always be THIS GOOD, and the fact that things have been so good, so sweet, even for a moment, is more than I deserve. If an unforseen twist in life should bring pain and suffering in the coming year in the same proportion that I have had joy and blessing this year, let me be found to be faithful, giving thanks in all things, valiant in faith, unshaken in my love to the Beloved, and unswerving in my declaration that He doeth all things well. May I not grow soft in the enjoyments of the comforts I have been granted, and may I not cling so tightly to the benefits and luxuries of this American way of living that I become unable to let it all go and leave it all behind the instant I am called upon to go to the front lines of the battle. May the Lord be glorified through my life in this season, and may my love and affection and adoration be poured unceasingly at His feet. May He find in me a willing servant and humble vessel who is quick to do His bidding. May the coming year see less of the flesh, more of the spirit; less self indulgence, more poured out sacrifice; less Martha, more Mary; less self-reliance, more dependence; less wringing my hands at areas that are out of control, more peaceful resting with all areas under His control. May I be consumed with Jesus, reflecting Jesus, putting Jesus on display, making Jesus known, and knowing him more.

Doxa en upsistis Theo!

That moment when you have 2 free hours and 45 things to do

Last night I had two free hours, and I said to myself, "What shall I do with this rare and massive treat? How shall I use this enormous gift of time?"

And my mind started flooding with all the things I could do, and I started writing them down.

Things I want to do - November 18 2015

1. Email E with my ideas on a topic that was discussed
2. Finish a 30 x 40" painting for above my piano
3. Paint 5 more canvases that I bought to make and hang on my living room walls
4. Watch my most recent video course on marketing from Shaw Academy
5. Reply to S's email
6. Create a course for my jail team on how to teach effectively
7. Record another chapter of the audiobook I'm working on
8. Contact K, who I haven't heard from in a couple of months
9. Do my dishes
10. Worship the Lord in song
11. Dedicate a couple of hours to prayer
12. Make 24 quotes on Photoshop for decorations for E's wedding 
13. Make, print, and mail Christmas cards to my friends & family
14. Plan a girls' tea party for December
15. Mail my rent payment 
16. Write a blog post
17. Develop a vision & framework for a business idea I have
18. Develop a vision and purpose statement for my jail ministry
19. Wrap Christmas presents for J, M, and M
20. Run errands: Pick up hand soap, oatmeal, wrapping paper, etc.
21. Sweep leaves off back porch
22. Upgrade Finale
23. Make a budget
24. Make 2 apple pies
25. Cook pumpkin
26. Make carrot juice
27. RSVP to the wedding invitation I got last week
28. Sing through & record Psalm 119 in Song
29. Write the account of the beginnings of our jail ministry
30. Write a chapter in my book on suffering
31. Write a chapter in my book on singleness
32. Write a chapter in my book on education
33. Revise and prepare my draft on witnessing
34. Prepare a meal for the G's
35. Pay car insurance
36. Pay toll bill
37. Pay trash bill
38. Spend 30 minutes at the gym
39. Read my most recent issue of World Magazine
40. Read Writer to Writer, the book on writing advice that just came in from Amazon
41. Read Crucial Conversations
42. Spend 2 hours learning HTML
43. Study one chapter in my Greek New Testament
44. Clean garage cabinets with TSP
45. Brainstorm time management

By taking care of the smallest and easiest things first, I was able to tick 7 of these items off in two hours (#8, 9, 15, 27, 35, 36, & 37).

That still leaves 38 items, some of which will take extravagant amounts of time (#3, 6, 12, 30, 31, 32). I have approximately 3 days a week where I can squeeze in 2 "free" hours to work on this stuff. If I can tick 2 items off the list each time (which is SUPREMELY optimistic), it will still take me 6 weeks to get through this list, which means it will take me until New Year's. And that's assuming that all these are one-off projects. A lot of the things on this list are recurring (#4, 7, 9, 10, 11, 15, 16, 20, 26, 30, 31, 32, 37, 38, 42, 43).

Is it just me, or is this a lot?

Does everyone have this many things going on in their head at once?

How do other people get everything DONE? I mean, I don't even have kids! If I do something like forget to eat, it's not that big of a deal. How do people do it when they have kids who won't let you forget to eat?

And this list is just the projects I have actually taken on.

There's a whole other list in my head of things that I would do if I only had time.

• Offer piano lessons to kids at church
• Study engineering or law
• Study graphic design and animation
• Learn programming and create apps
• Create a children's storybook app with a fun idea I have
• Create a video series to post on YouTube with instruction on hymn improvisation
• Categorize the whole book of Proverbs with all the verses on each theme
• Do hand embroidery on some fabric to make some fabulous artistic curtains for 7 windows in my house
• Make and bottle my own homemade chai tea recipe for mass production
• Compose and record (more of) my own music
• Learn to (actually) play the guitar (well)
• Learn French and Arabic and Mandarin. And German. And Russian. LOL.
• Create a series of fun 5-minute videos on Biblical discipleship in Spanish
• Campaign to end homelessness in Denver
• Learn enough about woodworking to make a homemade shelf for my plants out of a pallet I have in my garage
• Dig up a new 2'x10' section in my side yard for a garden that has better light next summer 

And this list is just the projects that I have in my head for "outside of work, in my free time." There's a whole other list of things in my head that I'm doing at work (as well as back burner projects that I want to do that my boss estimated would take me 2 years to complete if I did them all).

And then there's a whole other list of routine things that I'm already doing that take time that haven't been written down yet.

• Working 8 hours a day
• Sleeping 8-9 hours a night
• Keeping my house clean 
• Personal hygiene
• Cooking & eating meals
• Doing laundry
• Weekly Bible Study in the jail (plus preparation and team meetings)
• Church 2x a week
• Frequent (1-2x/week) meetings with friends for coffee or dinner or just a chat
• Phone calls, emails & texts

I really am curious: Do other people have this many things going on in their head at one time?

If so, how do you balance it all?
If not, how do you keep all these ideas out? Do you just kill them dead on the spot, or do they not even approach and knock for admittance in the first place?

I think I would feel bored and restless and sort of dead if I didn't have this much going on at one time. Juggling this many things makes me feel alive and purposeful and energized and happy. I take on all these things (and hold the other list of highly interesting things in the "pending" category) because it pleases me to do so. Of course, I also admit I'm riding on the fine line of keeping just under taking on too much, and sometimes I inadvertently take on one too many things and then it becomes stressful and I have to drop something. I had to drop guitar lessons last year about this time. It has been months since I have really had a chance to sit down and write. A bagful of my garden tomatoes rotted in my fridge before I got around to making them into tomato sauce. And I hope my apples and pumpkin don't rot before I make them into pies. So there is a limit. My precariously balanced pile of tasks can topple and crash if I'm not careful.

What I would prefer to do, if I could, would be to expand time to accommodate all the things I want to do, rather than having to compress or eliminate the things on my list.

It seems I'm not given the luxury of having my preference on that one.

However, there are always little advances that one can find to redeem every moment of time. Lately I've been operating in a sort of hyper-aware, extra-fast mode that is new to me. Rather than allowing myself to get lost or daydream or wander about aimlessly through tasks, I've been experiencing a sense of urgency and a level of energy that allows me to whisk through the mundane parts of my day and approach all these 45 fun and compelling and exciting things on my list with a focused intensity and an optimism that keeps it from becoming overwhelming. (I think the carrot juicing is at least partly responsible for this new speed and energy. Yay for carrot-beet-spinach-endive-tumeric-cucumber juice!)

But--the question remains:

What do YOU do when you have 2 free hours and 45 things to do?

• How do you handle it? 
• How do you prioritize wisely? 
• How do you juggle the multiple demands of life? 
• How do you defend the most important things from the louder "tyranny of the urgent"?

Taming the Paper Monster

I woke up this morning to this disorder and chaos in my dining room, and yet, strangely enough, I rejoiced and exulted over it with an immense satisfaction.

This situation caused me to see an analogy to how God can still rejoice over us even in the midst of our mess.

Usually my dining room looks perfectly tidy, and since the day I moved, I think this is the first time I have had any clutter or mess on my table overnight. So how could I have such a rush of pleasure upon having my first waking thought be the state of my dining room? Why would it give me such genuine thrills from the very depths of my being to see it in such a state?

Because of what I did in my dining room last night that caused it to be left in such a state.

Last night I finally worked up the courage to go through a certain blue rubbermaid bin. This bin has been weighing on my mind ever since I moved into this house, and I have been telling myself for 3 months that I needed to do it and trying to work up the courage to tackle it.

This rubbermaid bin was full of papers.

Papers have always been my worst enemy. Clutter from papers has always been my nemesis. Piles of papers, to me, have never been anything but a paralyzingly confusing puzzle to solve. I would stand there in the midst of my paper mess, looking dazedly at the problem, and finding it utterly daunting. I would wander aimlessly from one paper to another, pick it up, look at it, try to drag out of my brain a good idea for what to do with it, and put it back down only to repeat the process with a different paper.

For the last two years, I have had no system of organization, and in that time my papers grew to fill this Rubbermaid bin. I labeled this bin "the bin of death," and I regarded it with dread. Its existence grew to be a weight always present at the back of my mind. It was a giant, utterly disordered mixture of important and unimportant stuff, from still-unopened junk mail two years old to birthday cards to bank statements to things like my vehicle title and my passport. It was all such a jumble I would never have been able to actually FIND any of these documents if I had needed them.

Since June, the bin had sat in my garage. In July, I bought a filing cabinet at a yard sale. In August, I bought file folders and hanging folders. Still, I kept procrastinating on actually hauling it forth into the light to tackle it, mainly because of how impossible it seemed. All of my life, I had had problems with paper clutter, but never this bad.

But wonder of wonders! Last night I got the courage to pull it out.

And then the real miracle began.

One by one I looked at the papers, created a file folder for them, wrote the name neatly in calligraphy on the tab, and tucked the paper into its folder. (I know, amazing, right? Who would have thought to use folders to file papers?)

I had gone through the whole top layer of the bin when I realized that for the first time ever, this was easy. Nowhere to be found was the overwhelmed paralysis, the wandering aimlessly in circles, picking up a paper only to put it down somewhere else and pick up another one. Gone was the distress of losing massive amounts of time without actually getting anywhere. Strangely missing was the cluelessness of how to proceed that had hitherto always been with me when I worked myself up to tackle my papers.

And when it dawned on me that it was easy, I realized I was also enjoying myself immensely. With a surge of new energy, I knew that I would be able to tackle every paper down to very the bottom of the bin in this same way. With a feeling akin to euphoria, I whipped out my iPhone to document this incredible marvel.

For the first time in my life, I tamed the paper monster. I got through the whole box without ever being paralyzed once, and I completely organized the whole mess in one evening. I am the master of my papers rather than them being the master of me.

It was midnight, and I went to bed, leaving a couple of random, easy-to-do things on the table, knowing that the source of stress and procrastination was over. The bin is only half-full now (the rest got thrown away), and even what is still in the bin is just there to be carried back out to the garage to be placed neatly into the filing cabinet drawers, where it will rest in tranquility and order. And then the bin will actually be empty, and it will be freed up for storage of stuff more appropriate to its design.

It brought the most immense sense of relief and peace to have this weight off my mind, and I slept like a baby.

Praise and glory and thanksgiving be to the name of Jesus for enabling me to do this!!

It's no wonder, then, that I woke up this morning with that sense of relief and thankfulness and empowerment still fresh upon me. Walking into the dining room and laying my eyes on THIS was such a privilege and a joy.

Therefore, the fact that the dining room has a few things still to be attended to (which will be easy and quick) does not diminish my rejoicing in the least.

All of this caused me to think of the fact that God, in His infinite mercy and wisdom, sees our inner lives and notes the places where there is chaos and disorder (even when we've tucked it into an inconspicuous bin on the bottom shelf of the garage). In the fullness of time, He brings the bin out and starts to deal with it. One by one, piece by piece, He infallibly puts it in order. He rejoices over this work, because He loves us and desires us to see us walk in the light and conform to His image.

When we respond to His cleansing work and allow Him to bring up all these things that have long lain buried under a facade of apparent order, things surface that we haven't seen for a while. And if we don't have the perspective on the greater work God is doing, we could wake up in the morning and say, "Oh no! What happened to my dining room? It was always clean before!"

Trust me: I would much rather have a small quantity of papers on my dining room table overnight than to keep my dining room clean and have that bin of papers continually festering in the back of my mind for months on end. The difficult work is done, but the outward results don't necessarily show the whole story.

There's the bin in my garage. Pretty innocuous, wouldn't you agree? Who would ever guess that its contents would be such a big deal? An outsider just looking at this garage would just shrug and not see anything remarkable. You wouldn't guess that this bin was the source of so much distress and mental anguish over a prolonged period of time.

And that's like our lives. We have this one little section, this one little hidden area of sin, this thing that has been allowed to fester, where it's really not super urgent or a big deal if we take care of it or not. The world is not going to end if we procrastinate on it just a little longer. We know it's going to be daunting if we drag it out into the open where it needs to be if it gets taken care of. But as long as it is left unattended, our nemesis will continue to get the better of us.

As soon as I brought the bin into the house, the dining room got quite messy very quickly. At one point, the row of folders on the table got so long that I had to watch out that the front ones didn't slide onto the floor. And my garage wasn't that much better for the temporary absence of one bin. In fact, even after I have emptied out all the papers, the bin is still going to take up the same footprint in the garage that it always did. So for all outward appearances, things had progressed backward rather than forward.

Don't we usually stop right there when God begins to work in our lives? We freak out over the fact that things are looking worse rather than better, and we say, "You know what? No, I'm just going to shove that bin right back into the spot in the garage where it was when my dining room was always clean."

But then the problem will just have to be dragged out at some other time. The mail is going to continue to build up. The lack of a system for papers is going to cause me to begin to fill a second bin if I don't deal with the first one, and down the road it will be twice as much work to solve the problem. The chaos will contribute to extra loss of time and unneeded stress when I do something like decide to sell my vehicle and suddenly I realize I don't know where the title is, and I begin frantically digging through the bin and scattering all these same papers that I was unwilling to deal with when God pointed them out.

God does the heavy lifting in our lives, pulling out the bin and sitting down and sorting out the issues, and then He invites us to rejoice with Him. Let us rejoice, even if we see a couple more things that He is going to get to in the morning. Do not discount the quality and truth of rejoicing merely due to unworthiness on your part. Will I rejoice a little more when I pick up the last few things from my dining room and move all the folders to the filing cabinet? Absolutely. But my rejoicing over the fact that the paper bin was tamed was so sweet that for the moment no other issues were able to eclipse it.

What a Jesus we serve!

Garden: Before & after

The first weekend after I moved, I planted a garden in a lovely little 5' x 8' garden plot that a previous tenant must have created. It was grown over with grass and I had to dig it up by hand. I was pleased to find that I actually had rather nice soil, very loose and dark, with very few stones and a ton of earthworms. I added a bag of compost, a bag of "sheep & peat," and two bags of topsoil.

Then I planted some plants that I had bought from a local man and his wife who raised them in their greenhouse. They were the most beautiful little seedlings you could find.

I planted...

• Roma Tomatoes
• Amish Slicer (large tomatoes)
• Sweet Million (cherry tomatoes)
• Zucchini
• Lemon cucumber
• Burpee cucumber

I also bought a couple of herbs from Home Depot and put them in their own individual little pots: Basil, Parsley, Rosemary, and Peppermint.

Before:

Grass-grown plot

Digging up the grass was rather backbreaking. I was sore afterward!

Nice smooth level dirt, ready for plants.
I prepared it before I went to bed and then a heavy rain came overnight and drenched it. Brilliant!

My cute little seedlings

Seedlings successfully placed into the ground

Mulch!

I added a border of some landscaping stone I got at a yard sale, and planted some herb seeds in the section near the fence. 

After:

All the work I did at the beginning has paid off. About a month later, my tomatoes are already higher than their cages and I haven't had to pull a single weed. 

 

Everything is flourishing except the basil and the zucchini, which the slugs keep eating

Cherry tomatoes will be ripe soon

A story about the zucchini: My poor little zucchini got eaten immediately by slugs. They ate all the leaves except for half of one leaf, and I thought it was surely going to die. I went to a local nursery and bought another zucchini plant and planted it next to the one that had received such a setback in its tender young life, and I expected it would die right away.

Except - the one from the nursery is now the one that looks like it is going to die, and the original one has sprouted a whole new set of leaves! I don't know how this happened, but it certainly makes me want to get my plants from the same people next year who grew such a robust zucchini plant.

1. Zucchini plant that got almost completely eaten and is coming back.
2. Zucchini plant that came from the nursery

I moved!

The Lord is so good to me.

I rented a house! For the first time in my life, I have space to call my own. Objectively, it's just a 500-square-foot house, but to me, it is a palace, with gold floors and sapphire trim and diamond windows.

Here are a couple of pictures of my darling sweet little home.

Kitchen

Dining Room

Living Room

Bedroom 

(and a glimpse of the tiny little bathroom & hallway between the dining room & bedroom)

The surprising story of my rejection at the Canada border (part 5)

The final saga of the events that unfolded last year around this time

Part 5: A door definitively closed, and restoration of what I had lost

It was so unexpected to have this intended plan completely not work out, but it felt to me like life from the dead. In a manner as definitive and unarguable as the Canadian Border Authorities, God closed the door.

I felt like Abraham, sacrificing his son on the altar. They were at the top of Mount Moriah. Isaac was on the altar. The knife was raised. And suddenly, God called to Abraham and said “Stop.” He let him get all the way to that point before he detained the final move. He didn’t let Abraham see that he was going to be stopped until the last minute. And God said, “Now I know that you will not withhold even your only son from me.” In Hebrews, it said that Abraham was “accounting that God was able to raise him up, even from the dead, from which also he received him in a figure.” 

In just the same way, I felt like I had been detained at the last minute. “Stop,” God declared. “Now I know that you are willing. You have not withheld your dreams, your future, your house from me. You have declared yourself to be totally available to me, and I have accepted it. Now go back to Colorado and do the work I have for you to do.”

An overwhelming sense of relief flooded over me. Life from the dead was better than life that had never died. I was not only getting my life back, I was now freed from all the thorns of merimnao that had been choking me. 

I was not misguided after all in feeling like it was the Lord who had led me to put down roots and settle in Colorado. I had given up my dreams, and they had died, and I had mourned, but what I was getting back was like a fresh new slate, a life that God could guide, a walk of newfound dependence on the Lord. It would be daily, it would be dependent, it would not count on tomorrow, but it was rooted so much more firmly in the One who is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. 

I made the comment to my mom on the phone, “I thought I couldn’t see beyond the next 3 months, but I found out I actually couldn’t see beyond the end of the day.” The Lord re-fixed my focus on Him, and not on the length of time that I could discern the future.

I got back to Colorado on Thursday evening, April 25, and wonder of wonders, in a series of events that I didn't even ask for, I got my books back, I got my kitchen stuff back, and I got my stuff back out of the yard sale pile where I had put it. It had been sacrificed, and I didn't expect to see it again, and here it was, still mine, but the tentacles of possessiveness and materialism and merimnao (the cares of this life) had been severed. Now it was just stuff. I was beyond grateful to get it back, but I was also free from the clutches that these things had over me.

On Monday (April 28), I got a call from the father of the family in Canada, saying he had talked to a member of Parliament from his district, and she had expressed surprise that I had gotten turned away at the border. “That shouldn’t have happened to her,” she said, and committed to look into it.

She later called them back after looking into my case, and they updated me on Tuesday (April 29). He said that the Parliament member had spoken to the immigration authorities at the border where I had tried to cross and had found out that I have been labeled forever as a “nanny attempter” and that there was no way to override that decision. Therefore, whenever I ever try to enter Canada for any reason in the future, I will be detained and questioned and suspected. There was nothing more that the Parliament member could do.

On Wednesday (April 30), I received a final email that said, “I also thought of more questions for our Member of Parliament, regarding...whether there was any appeal system in place for you to get your "criminal record of stealing nanny jobs from Canadians" pardoned. What my MP office said is that as far as trying to get you off the "most wanted list" there is no appeal system in place to plead your innocence. So I asked the lady if you wanted to fly from Denver, CO to Calgary, AB for a vacation you wouldn't be allowed in and she said that is right, you would not be allowed in. The lady in the office did have some suggestions for you if you wanted to still get into Canada in the near future.(wouldn't blame you if you didn't) but none the less she suggested contacting Canadian Immigration, to apply for a visitor visa, this would cost you $200.00 and some time spent dealing with gov't officials. She also suggested you could go to the Canadian Consulate in Denver (1625 Broadway street) and work through them. The lady at the office was very helpful and knowledgeable about immigration and was willing to talk to you if you had any questions about the situation you find yourself in. This is for your info only and if you wanted to know more about your situation. Like I said before, I wouldn't blame you if you wouldn't want to talk to another Canadian official ever again.”

I wrote back and replied, “I really appreciate your words of thanks and affirmation in this whole process. I also thank you for taking the time to do this research and find out these things for me. Right now I do not have any foreseeable need to visit Canada, but it is good to know the procedures and contact information should I need to go the route of getting a visa. And I am not one to hold a grudge, so it hadn't even crossed my mind to be like "I don't want to talk to another Canadian official ever again." Do you know what I feel like? I feel like I am reading a book, and the author throws in a little twist to the story in one of the characters lives that seems insignificant at the time but that will become significant later on. Right now, I'm like, "Oh my, I'm a nanny attempter. Big deal." But I have this feeling that later on down the road, there might be some reason that I urgently need to go back to Canada, and I won't be able to because of this little incident. However, this is not a cause for foreboding; this is a cause for excitedly anticipating the way the Author will work things out.”

So that closed the door definitively on all my potential for appeal, leaving me free to pursue the call of God on my life in the present moment, in the present place, and trust Him for the coming steps. I am rooted in Him, hidden in Him, and delighted to have Him back in the driver’s seat. 

To God be all the glory.

The End.

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Part 5 of 5. Start over at the beginning 

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The surprising story of my rejection at the Canada border (part 4)

The events of one year ago, continued...

Part 4: The Canadian Border Authorities' gracious boon

The next day I got on the road at 5:00 am. I drove up through the wild, vast, uninhabited stretches of North Dakota and got up to the Canada border about 4:00. The drive was a pleasant and delightful time spent with the Lord, in which I composed a song called "Wake Up the Mighty Men" as a call to the mighties of this generation to come and die (to self and the flesh) and rise up and do exploits for the kingdom of God. The refrain echoes the cry of the Moravian missionaries who called from the ship as it was pulling away from the shore, "Is not the Lamb who was slain worthy to receive the reward of his suffering?" I was very excited about the song and in a pleasant and happy frame of mind due to the joy of having spent almost two whole days alone in the car with Jesus.

Approaching the border, I had not the least nervousness. In my mind, there was no way anything could go wrong. I wasn’t doing anything wrong, so why should anything go wrong? I would just be upfront with them and explain the situation and they would understand and let me through. I drove up to the stop sign and stopped. A guard came over to my car.

“Purpose of your trip?” she said.

“Well, I guess you could call it a mission trip,” I said. “There’s a family, and the mom just died, and I’m going to stay with them for a few weeks and homeschool the girls and take care of the house for them.”

The guard asked me to go over to the side area and park. “Uh oh… this is not a good sign,” I thought.

She came over to my car and asked me a series of other questions: How long was I staying and did I have a job at home and how was I being supported and what was the name of my church and had we contacted immigration previously and what was this family’s address. I answered her questions. She left briefly and made a call. Then she asked me to step into the office. “Uh oh… this is really not a good sign,” I thought.

I stood and waited in the office for several minutes, still not really believing that anything could happen. Of course I would get through the border.

The guard came and summoned me to a back room. I followed her, thinking, “Oh, boy, we are going to the back room. This is really not good. Are they going to arrest me or something?” Another male guard accompanied us. We entered a small, bare room with a table and three plastic chairs that were bolted in place. It looked like the classic interrogation room you see in the movies. No artwork, no wallpaper, no beautifying touches. It was simple, stark, hard. The female guard motioned to me to have a seat.

“You are going to be allowed to leave Canada,” she said, as if she were granting me a gracious boon. “We cannot allow you to come into the country, because your entry would deny a potential job to a Canadian citizen. You should have contacted Immigration for a visa to do this kind of work. In order for you to come back, the family will have to get a Labor Market Opinion from Immigration, and that is practically impossible to obtain. It’s not a thing you can get in a day or a week; it’s something that takes months if you get it at all. If you should attempt to come back into Canada at another crossing, you will be banned from Canada for a year. You can make a U-turn and enter back into the American side. I will tell them that you’re coming.”

She also asked me to bring her a copy of my driver’s license and vehicle registration, so I went back out to the car to get it and brought it back to her in the main reception area of the office. She spent quite a long time entering all the details of all of my documents into the system. (I later found out, when a member of Canadian Parliament looked into my case, that she had labeled me irrevocably as a "nanny attempter" and that I will have difficulty getting into Canada for the rest of my life because of that.) As I was standing there, bewildered, surprised at the way things were progressing, the primary thought in my mind was, “Don’t be upset. This is of the Lord.”

I did, however, gently try to press for more details. “Is there anything I can do to change this?”

“No, there’s nothing you can do. The family will have to get a Labor Market Opinion. That is all.”

“So just to verity, without that document, there would be no way for me to enter the country?” I asked.

“That is correct.”

“What if the length of the trip were shorter?” I asked. “I'm going to North Carolina on May 9” (which was only two and a half weeks away).

The smallest flicker of hesitation crossed the guard’s face before she hid it behind a steely official demeanor. “Your denial is related to the purpose of your trip, not to the length of your trip,” she stated. Her posture and attitude were adamant.

Last look through my back window at the border crossing station

She gave me back my documents and made a phone call to the US side of the border crossing, letting them know I would be coming over. I drove around the building and crossed back into the US side. The guard asked me the reason for my denial. “I was going to stay with a family for a few weeks and I guess they think that is going to deny a Canadian a job,” I said with a shrug. The guard asked me to pull forward and pop my trunk. He opened it and looked in for about one second before closing it. “You’re good to go.” I drove off.

In the middle of all that, I got a text from the father of the family I was due to have visited, asking if I was close. I texted back and told him they just denied me at the border. I also tried to make a call to Ellerslie, but I didn’t have any signal. I finally made it back to the nearest town in North Dakota, where I had signal again. I called the father of the girls. “They just denied me at the border. I’m so sad,” I said. While I had remained calm at the immigration office, my voice now threatened to break. But I took a deep breath. This man didn’t need a breakdown over the telephone. We talked about the Labor Market Opinion that they had asked for, and I gave him a telephone number that they had given me to call.

Then I called Ellerslie and told them what had happened and asked them to pray. They expressed their condolences and asked what our plan was. I said I was headed for a nearby town (looking for one a bit larger than where I was), where I would have cell service and just hang out and wait to see if anything changed.

I talked to my Canadian host again after he had put in a call to the phone number I had given him. He said that the person he spoke with on the phone there was very much more sympathetic and that she had invited me to call her to see if we could get anywhere.

I called that number and spoke with the same person the man had spoken with. I started saying, “…and he said you had suggested that I call you—“ when she interrupted me with a very curt manner, saying, “No, that is not what I said to him. What I did say was that I would have no ability to override the decision that was made at the border. If they said he will have to get a Labor Market Opinion, then he will have to get a Labor Market Opinion.”

I called and told him what she had said. By then I was back in the closest town that was large enough to have a hotel, and we decided that I should get a hotel for the night and try again to cross the border in the morning. The girls' grandfather very kindly paid for the hotel. As we continued to communicate, we decided to write two letters, one from the father explaining the situation, and one from me asking that the border officials re-define the way they were labeling my proposed trip from some kind of work to a personal visit. We planned to print the letters out and bring them to the border officials the next day to see if that would change anything.

I stayed the night in the hotel, got up in the morning, checked out, and drove back up to the tiny little town that was close to the border. In the meantime, the father and his girls drove down from their home in Canada and crossed the border into the United States (which they were readily able to do). 

We met and had lunch. It was great to meet them, and we spent a couple of hours visiting. They told me that when they crossed the border, they stopped over on the Canadian side and talked with the people there. The father said they knew exactly who I was, and he said they were absolutely unwilling to work with him. They wouldn’t take the the letters or even read them. So he did not suggest that I try again.

After our lunch, the family drove back up to Canada and I drove back to Colorado.

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Part 4 of 5. Start over at the beginning | Read part 5 

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The surprising story of my rejection at the Canada border (part 3)

[A continuation of the story of Canada, with the events that happened on this day last year]

Part 3: Final preparations and setting off

The next day was Easter Sunday. Pastor Eric called me up to the front before the message and announced that I would be going to work with the family he had mentioned who needed help with their homeschooling for a few months. 

Someone in the back said, “Yaaay!” and everyone burst into applause. I felt so valued, so supported, so validated by the church. I knew they wanted me to go, not because they wanted to get rid of me, but because they felt like I would be a valuable addition the household of this family, and they believed in my capacity to do the work. 

Eric prayed for my time in Canada and I went back to my seat. After church, lots of people came up and congratulated me and expressed excitement for what I was doing. They asked when I was leaving, and I said, “Tomorrow.” I said this by faith, because I had so many things still to do, but I thought I might still be able to get it all done.

Story of my life: Sorting through the tornado

Bethany and I went home and ate Easter dinner and then went to my room and talked while I sorted through the tornado that was my room. It was a daunting, overwhelming level of disaster, but I slowly worked through it. It was still not done when I went to bed, so I let the father of the family know that I was slightly delayed and would not be able to leave early in the morning.

Monday morning, April 21, Bethany had the day off work, so she helped me again to get finished sorting through all the stuff. She packed boxes that I couldn’t bring myself to figure out what to do with, labeled things, and stacked everything that was done outside my door. Finally, I was all done. The last bit of luggage was stuffed into the trunk of my car, I had a lunch packed, and I had my directions all written out. 

I left at about 1:30 pm, drove to Mount Rushmore, snapped a couple of quick pictures of the iconic figures carved in stone (somewhat disappointed to note that they seemed much smaller than I had always expected them to be), and stayed the night at a cheap hotel I had reserved in Rapid City, SD.

Funny story about that hotel: it had to have been the worst experience I have ever had at any hotel anywhere (even worse than the cheap hostel I stayed at in Gibraltar--and that was a bad enough story already!). 

I knew it was going to be bad when I walked into the hotel and and the lobby smelled like cigarette smoke and cat pee. I would have walked right back out if it weren't for the fact that my reservation was non-refundable. The front desk clerk informed me that the continental breakfast was canceled and showed me to my "non-smoking" room, which smelled so strongly of smoke that my throat started swelling up. "Oh, well," I thought, "For one night I can stand it."

I got ready for bed early and lay down on the bed. The mattress was lumpy and sagging and sloped towards the floor, so no matter which way I lay, I felt like I would fall off. Therefore, I pulled the sheets and blanket off the bed and slept on the floor, which was infinitely more comfortable due to its consistent firmness. 

As I prepared to grin and bear it for the night, I was contemplating the bad review I was going to write about this hotel, but I said to myself, "I should look for SOMETHING positive to say. At least it's quiet." 

I was just dropping off to sleep when somebody pounded loudly on my door. So much for it being quiet. "Who's there?" I said, jumping up. No answer. I looked out the peephole. No one in sight. I lay back down on the floor. Five minutes later, BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG. They were at it again, pounding as if with the flat of their hand with great force on my door. What in the world was this? I was annoyed. "Who is there?" I yelled indignantly. Again, no answer. I looked out the peephole. Again, no one in sight, but it sounded like a faint moaning sound was coming from near the floor. Now I was really awake. I called the front desk. "Someone is pounding on my door," I said. "Can you please take a look in the hallway and see what is going on?" I heard a man come up to the hallway and talk with the person on the floor. "Oh, it's you." They had a conversation that sounded like they were on a first-name basis with each other and the guy left the person there. Bizarre. 

It took me a long time to fall asleep after that. Around 4:15 in the morning, the guest in the room next to mine woke me up with incessant coughing (no doubt due to the wretched air quality) with a loud, throaty, guttural cough that literally sounded as if they must be dying. The smell in the air made it unbearable to stay in the room any longer, so I hurried to get my stuff and leave. 

And then, if it wasn't already bad enough, I found I had received one additional gift in the night: bedbug bites. Fortunately I had taken the precautions of setting my luggage up on the luggage rack, so I successfully got away without any little hidden hitchhikers, but I was never so happy to be rid of a place in my life. 

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Part 3 of 5. Start over at the beginning | Read part 4 

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The surprising story of my rejection at the Canada border (Part 2)

Part 2: Practical steps toward leaving

On Saturday, April 19, 2014, one year ago today, I was in the process of transferring up to Canada, and my friend Bethany offered to help me to figure out what to do with the rest of my stuff. We went up to the attic together and started making three piles: Yard sale, Keep in the Attic, and Bring to my Room.

Little by little, we sorted all the stuff into the three piles, and the yard sale pile was the biggest. Reluctantly, I put perfectly good items that I would have liked to use in the future into the yard sale pile, because I didn’t think I would ever have a life that would accommodate the use of those items. My antique chair, my mop bucket, my artist’s easel, more books, more odds and ends. Then with the help of Andrew (the son of the family I live with), we started an assembly line-style brigade to bring all the boxes down from the attic. I took everything down the first flight of stairs, Bethany took it down the second, and Andrew put it into the gym where the family was collecting stuff for a yard sale they were about to have.

We were on the first or second box when John (the father of the family I live with) looked up from working on his car and asked me a question in a mystified tone of voice. “Rebekah, do you have ANY long-term goals for your life?”

That hit me deep. I couldn’t answer, for I was instantly in tears. So far, I had successfully pushed away the hurt of getting rid of all this stuff, but now it descended onto me in an unstoppable flood. To John, whose logical mind processed the facts of what I was doing, but who could not see the spiritual significance of it, my actions would have been incomprehensible. Me getting rid of all this stuff didn’t make any sense. It seemed arbitrary, random. I had been talking about my goal of buying a house, and now I was getting rid of all the stuff I could put in that house. Quitting my job and going up to Canada for a 3-month stint would have seemed like insanity, especially when I had no idea what I would do after that.

I thought back over the large collection of 3-month stints I had spent my life on, and the enemy doubled up his attack in my thoughts, though at the time I didn’t recognize it as an attack. "Long-term goals? You’re not allowed to have any. You tried that. You tried settling down and putting down roots and setting long-term goals, and what good was it? They were there only to get stripped away from you. There is no long-term goal setting for you. You will never have stuff, and you will never have anything nice. Here you are, giving it all away."

I tried to give John an answer, but I didn’t want him to see me crying, and I couldn’t speak without it coming out in sobs, so I just carried the boxes down the stairs with the tears silently coursing down my cheeks. Bethany, who took the boxes from me, was the only one who noticed, and she stood up for me. “Live for Jesus!” she said. “Spend your life for eternal things! Don’t listen to the world’s version of success!” Little by little, the whole big yard sale pile made its way out to the gym, and I went back to my room, still ragged with emotion. I sat down in the corner of my closet and just dissolved into a self-pitying lump of tears. For a while I couldn’t bring myself to do anything, but Bethany came and found me and got me working again, and I made it through some of my stuff, but not all by the end of the day. (Thank the Lord for Bethany! She was a true friend in that whole process.)

To everyone else, it was just stuff, but to me, it was my stuff, and not only that, it was the only stuff I had. So to get rid of it meant stripping myself down to nothing, and that was scary. But I chose to continue walking forward in that direction anyway, trusting that it was the way God was leading me to go, and walking in the light that I had.

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Part 2 of 5. Start over at the beginning | Read part 3 

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