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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
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Muncie First Church of the Nazarene
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Kijabe, Kenya
00220

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Sometimes I do this backward scuttle into solitude, a vestigial instinct that tips toward survival.⁣ ⁣ By most counts, I’m the problem. I’m hypersensitive, pathos lining my veins, and this world can feel like an assault on the heart.⁣ ⁣ I often marvel at how this is happening on our watch, this sideshow of human rights horrors. How can the poorest people on Earth bleed out on soil flush with gold and raw diamonds?⁣ ⁣ On Christmas day in Zemio, we did the Zande thing with the oranges. You pare off the rind and slice open the top, engineering a natural juice box. Then you slowly crush the orange into a velvet orb of pith and pulp, sucking out sun-colored juice as you go.⁣ ⁣ CAR is where I learned to love oranges and peace.⁣ ⁣ Maybe one day they’ll return. Maybe not tomorrow or next week or next year, but perhaps the Zande and Mbororo’s children, or their children’s children will return to Zemio. Maybe they’ll walk back in under clouds of mango and orange trees, palm nuts speckling the ground like rubies.⁣ ⁣ I have to think that the landscape of heaven might resemble a scene out of Central Africa: soil glittering bronze and gold, jeweled fruit trees, a sky so rich it breaks your heart.⁣ ⁣ ‘O come, desire of nations, bind / In one the hearts of all mankind / Bid Thou our sad divisions cease / And be Thyself our King of peace.’⁣ ⁣ I’m not doing Christmas music yet, but I am doing peace music.

I’ve never been more awake to sorrow, to how it veins beneath the skin of every glance and conversation. Its scent now familiar, I catch it on everyone’s breath.⁣ ⁣ Today I sat in the wind for a minute and watched monkeys skitter through the trees. I felt how I often feel when dusk is near: like this earth is impossibly beautiful and broken, and I’m so lucky to be alive in it.⁣ ⁣ These are weirdly fragile days — I’ll be hiking to staff meeting like a normal person, and out of nowhere I’m sniffling up a storm. And I’m like: GET IT TOGETHER, TEAR DUCTS. You can’t just go rogue out in public like this.⁣ ⁣ But it makes sense because a short list of sad things: I miss my big kids, and I’m kind of hollowed-out about our Zemio peeps, and people I love are sick.⁣ ⁣ And yet also a short list of good things: My dorm boys are quietly spunky and adorable, we had the sweetest, most filling summer, God pours mercy over my failure.⁣ ⁣ I love this life we’ve been given. Some of it breaks us past recognition, but I want to be here for all of it. My heart and skin are paying bright attention. I don’t want to miss a thing.

Back in the day when I went off to college (“when the world was still in black and white,” according to my hilarious children), I was so absorbed in having the time of my life that I didn’t know to miss my family. I was fine, fine, fine until we hit Christmas break and a blizzard slid in sideways to South Bend. The rest of campus trekked back to their moms and dads and many-stockinged fireplaces while I blinked quietly at a canceled flight and the 5000 miles between me and the people who loved me best.⁣ ⁣ Just like that, I was desperate for home.⁣ ⁣ This is the thing about MKs: they generally don’t go home. Not for fall break or Thanksgiving or Christmas or summer, and I think it mostly doesn’t occur to them to care until they watch everyone else head out.⁣ ⁣ I’m big on feelings this weekend (see: college orientation), but the one at the tippiest top is gratitude. I’m thankful for all the folks who fill that parent gap — the grandpeople and aunts & uncs, the friends who’ve known us since the cretaceous era. All y’all house and water my kids, you help them get summer jobs, you risk life and limb teaching them to drive (I am sorry and thank you). You stuff them with honeyed ham dinners. You sign them up on your phone plans. You let them fog up your bathrooms and eat too much cereal and teach your kids questionable jokes.⁣ ⁣ This will come as a surprise to zero people, but I am crying actual rolling tears as I type this. Thank you for standing in my shoes with so much heart and grace, and for doing the things I wish I could do for my college kids.⁣ ⁣ My heart is full.⁣ ⁣ #ittakesavillage #extravagantmercy

We are back in the land of slow corn and summer heat, and I could not be more in love. July is such a good idea.⁣ ⁣ I feel like we’ve shimmied and army-crawled through the past several years, and it’s a relief to curl into a place where we’re known without annotations. This is what it means to be home.⁣ ⁣ We’ve been to the grocery store three times now, and it’s like a destination unto itself. Everyone wants to come. The kids wander through the aisles goggling at rock-bottom American prices (Marshmallows are a dollar! And they’re fluffy and normal!) and composing impromptu poetry with titles like “We really need to buy these pizza rolls, Mom.”⁣ ⁣ It’s just been a week, and already you have nourished our souls with tacos. You have squeezed us and looked into our eyeballs and asked good questions. You have listened to pieces of our stories and cried at all the right places.⁣ ⁣ These days are fraught with seismic shifts in my emotional landscape, and I wonder: Is this just my life now? Will my heart ever find its footing? Perhaps it won’t, and I’m at the point where I think that’ll shake out okay. I have my people and my God. The rest will burn down around us to light and dust, and we will call ourselves blessed.⁣ ⁣ #homeagain #thesearemypeople #tacosforever

“In the span of God’s wide and rowdy family, we all belong to one another and there is no such thing as other people’s children. Take a look around. Find someone to nurture. This is how we’ll rise.” - @shannanwrites #eatingisforeveryone #lovesongforthelonghaul #ministryofordinaryplaces #KenyaKidsCan

Two minutes ago I was the mom of small people, the kind of humans who slide notes about “I love you Mom and can we have pudding cups” under the bathroom door, the kind who find the physical act of closing their mouths to blow through their noses insurmountably complicated. Two minutes ago I was at that mom-stage: besieged but enamored. Only it occurred to me yesterday that I am now the mom of adults. Well, 2/5ths of them so far, but the youngers are well on their way toward autonomy. At four distinct points in my twenties, I wheeled out of the hospital with a warm ball of sleepy newborn, unnerved that they let me exit the building with an actual human. Like, shouldn’t you at least pop-quiz me first? And what if it doesn’t like me? I wonder sometimes about this path we followed to Kenya - CAR - Uganda - Kenya again. Our lives before this felt like a different planet, a sunny one that looked you in the eye and didn’t ask gutting questions. I wonder if we all feel fuller, more awake, or if Africa cost us a brightness we’ll never recover. Both, I guess. It’s usually a little of both. “I tell you this to break your heart, by which I mean only that it break open and never close again to the rest of the world” (Mary Oliver).

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