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Out on a limb.

by nic
Posted on December 15, 2018December 16, 2018

The December I turned maybe nine, we arrived like ninjas in Indiana. My uncles and…

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Africa Inland Mission
Epic Church
Excel Church
First Missionary Church of Berne
Kapaa Missionary
Lihue Missionary
Muncie First Church of the Nazarene
Old Stone Presbyterian

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PO Box 80
Kijabe, Kenya
00220

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December was my favorite. We got to have Braden home for his birthday AND Christmas, neither of which has happened for three years running, and I’m not sure I could invent a more generous possibility of a human being. Whenever I’d say, ‘Whose turn is it for dishes?’ B would answer, ‘I’ll do them,’ even though he’d washed 688 out of the last 700 times. While I was busy disinheriting people over card games, B was laughing, smoothing all our jagged edges, steering our vessel of familial crazy toward kinder, more rational shores. He forgives before you ask. He plays memory and basketball with his sister. He quotes Doctor Who, brews coffee eight times a day, and brushes his teeth after every meal and hearty snack. He left yesterday, and sometimes this world seems too much of a wild thing that eats soft shelled souls like him for breakfast. But. God is with him and for him wherever he goes, and he cannot walk into a reality where he isn’t paid for in blood. I love you, B. Go be braver and more faithful than we deserve. ♥️

There’s something about the six o’clock light, how the slant is just sharp enough to slice clean through me. It feels like sorrow and longing, a lamp in the window. It feels like coming home. That’s how Christmas seems today, like I’m deep in the middle of super nowhere, and I miss everyone, and I’m exactly where I’m meant to be. Merry Christmas, dearies. God has come for us.

When Zachamoodle was two or so, he perched beside me on the first pool step, his babyflesh ringed in floaties. I glanced away and then back again to find him face down in the water. He ended up fine, obviously. I snatched him up quick as a heart attack, and today he’s giant and eighteen and fine. But the thing I can never get all the way past is how drowning doesn’t make a sound. - This seems apt for the whole lot of us these days. We’re thrashing and desperate and signaling like mad, but it must look too much like swimming. - A friend of ours back home died in September, and how is this possible? One second he was fine and the next he had a stroke followed by a mostly recovery and then a brain-bleed. And as much as I know this life doesn’t orbit me, it feels impossible for someone I love to die when I’m not close enough to believe it. He is still there, I think. I will get on a plane, and then another and one more, and by the time I disembark with nappy plane-hair and a rollerbag, he will be there in all his big-hearted glory. - I just need enough planes, is all. - My oldest kiddo is here, fresh off a semester in South Africa, and this I love. I do not have time for him, for staring in his eyeballs and puttering around the house over lukewarm cups of best-ever coffee, and this I resent with all of my wizened heart. - Meanwhile in the bowels of Central Africa, no one is allowed across the river. Congolese army on one side, rebels on the other. The regular, non-soldier, non-rebel people can’t get food, they can’t access healthcare, they can’t, they can’t, they can’t. They drink grim cups of suffering, dark and sickly as a bruise. - Drowning, every one of us, but I am intent on noticing. I have all these people within reach, big and small and medium, Owens-people and otherwise, and I’m praying for hyper-awareness to spot the distress lining their easy composure, to grab hold long before they’re going under. - We belong to each other. - No one goes down alone. - Not on our watch. Not today.

I’ve never been much of a cat person. Growing up, we had two dogs (RIP, Casper and Sugar), a cockatiel, a rabbit, and a rotating passel of fish. Also centipedes of death, but those weren’t on purpose. No cats, though. - In CAR, however, cats were reputed to keep snakes and spiders at bay, so I was all, I♥️FELINES. When our kitten Sushi arrived, black and white and scared all over, she yowled for forty-eight hours straight. I was thisclose to asking for my snakes and spiders back, but on a dime she decided we were fine after all and switched into near-constant purring. - Truth be told, Sushi showed up in the depths of a bleak time for me. She was funny and needy and prone to pouncing on the goats in our yard of dirt. A loaded second later, she’d realize the error of her scrawny ways and scramble for her life up a tree. - I was crazy for that cat. Leaving her behind gutted me. - So now we’re in Kenya, and I have my very second cat in life: Waffles. When she’s not too busy being a lunatic, she’s really quite sweet. - Don’t rain down hate on me, Cat People, but I still kind of think that felines are nice but also useless (except for when it’s MY cat and I will walk through fire to save it). Still it’s startling how God keeps using these whiskered, particular creatures to sneak-attack my heart and keep me just north of emotional shipwreck. - If L has her way, next in the lineup is a dog, a tiny turtle, and possibly a bushbaby. (I would like a penguin and a baby elephant, but apparently that’s illegal.)🤷🏽‍♀️ The moral of my story is that cats are a gateway pet. Four months in and you’ll be signing for an African petting zoo. - Nevertheless. Viva la cats.

I think I’m supposed to be learning something in my season of emotional weirdness. I have the palest inkling of what that lesson might be, and so far it hasn’t been a party. - Every week here on campus we zero in on an unreached people group. This week is the Mbororo, except nobody warned my heart about this, so on Sunday there I stood by the chapel doors trying to be a normal person. - On the video screen our team leader recounted a visit with the village elders, how they passed around his gift of sugar with a solemnity that stills me. ‘Oseko. Oseko. Oseko,’ they said. ‘Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.’ - I’ve seen this clip and heard this story before, several times. And yet it’s possible that by the last Oseko I was losing my emotional marbles. - The rich, sweet thing, the merciful thing, is that my friend Jan was there. I can usually count on Jan to be tardy to church right beside me. 😊 And in those hot, fresh minutes of unspooling, where I worked valiantly to ugly cry in stealth mode, she held onto me with a ferocity that said You Will Not Go Down Alone. - It’s how I think God holds onto me, and it’s the grip we all seem to need. No way will the Mbororo suffer alone; not on our watch. We hitch our well-being to theirs, and all y’all tie your lives to ours until our web of frail humanity has laced a togetherness out of thin air. - These are the inklings I’m uncovering about what it means to be a neighbor: Either we all thrive or we sink en masse, but no one goes down alone.

Last Sunday I sat by a junior high fellow who is everything I’ve come to love about MKs. He called out responses to the pastor in quintessential East African style, perched on the front-most six inches of our bench, sang with a brightness unfettered by any concern with pitch or reputation. - I feel a kinship with this motley bunch we serve. They sweep the spectrum from earnest to jaded, magnetic to incurably awkward. A few of them speak six languages but fit into exactly zero cultures. They’re faithful and desperate, searching and kind, rooted and wounded and human. - Most minutes I don’t have two clues to rub together about how to shepherd their hearts. But somehow it keeps being enough to show up and fall hard upon the mercy of Jesus.

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