A refugee stole my baby!!

You've heard me talk a lot about the beautiful and refreshing dynamic of this communal living in the past.  The everything in common reality, the focus on relationships over task, the warmth of people who aren't mere neighbors, but friends and even family.  Today is not that day.  Today I'll choose from a plethora of instances that made me want to go buy a house, with a garage, hence a garage door opener, so I can go home and park in the garage and shut it immediately without anyone have a chance to barricade us!  It's been one of those months!

The other day I was paying bills while the kids were in the playroom together.  I was in the bedroom busying myself with things I can only do when the kids are doing their morning Independent Play time.  Basically, Dani goes into the pack and play with toys, and Levi hangs in the room with toys, and they play.  Alone.  Daily.  So in this scenario they cry.  Often.  Can't fit the toy through the hole?  Cry.  She has something I want.  Cry.  Immediate and urgent craving for crackers.  Cry.  The list goes on, but they work it out and I find it important to teach them the value of this independence.  Plus I like to pay bills without a 1-yr old pressing the big blue power button on the computer.

So to make a long story short, after realizing they had been too angelic for too long, I poked my head in to find an empty room.  Surveying the room and our apartment, I knew before my evaluation that (a) they had not escaped on their own and (b) they were not abducted by some bad man in dark clothes with a ski mask @ 9:00 on a Tuesday morning.  I knew a refugee took them.  I just knew it.  Crying babies heard through an open window in our community is a wide open invitation to *help*.  Knowing this didn't relieve my panic, so when I walked out of my door and saw them across the way in my neighbor's apartment with huge smiles as they sat on their couch eating bananas and watching TV in Arabic, I was pretty stern in my stance of "You cannot come in my house and take my babies".
Them: "They were crying!!!"
Me:  "Yes, but you can not come into my house and take my babies" (thinking: "If whimpering is a big deal you would call the police if you saw how we do time-outs!")
Them: (picking up on my unhappy face and serious tone) "Oh, this is a problem for you?"
Me: "Yes, big problem.  I am not happy.  You scared me, I didn't know where my babies were!"
Them: (Clearly understanding now) "Oooohhhhh, sorry sorry sorry (insert lots of Arabic), no problem now, sorry sorry sorry..." (more Arabic and patting their hearts showing me they feel bad)... this goes on for some time

Anyway, the wife didn't know that the husband and daughter rescued my children that morning, and what did she do that afternoon?  Swooped Dani (14-months) off the patio while she was playing.  A little African girl was playing inside with Levi and said, "Ummm Kelli, that lady is taking Dani".  TWICE in ONE DAY!  This time there was no rescue, just a desire to get some grandbaby time.  Like borrowing a mop and assuming I know she'll return it when done.

So, the big question... what is God showing me?  To get GPS chips in my kids.  Just kidding.  Kind of.  He is showing me a few things.
* I still have no idea what community is... No clue. 
* "Neighbor" in the bible is translated "friend" in the Hebrew, and I still live like I have neighbors.... not close friends who are personally involved in my family life, and definitely not the kind of friends from other cultures who intervene in your life when you need *help*. 
* Am I opening up to the community?  Or just living here?  Are we really truly here with our hearts?  God is revealing an absence of heart within us. 
* Spending time with home-sick friends so they can receive love from my babies is something that makes their hearts overflow.  I need to do it more.
* Is "Independent Play" reasonable in a cross-cultural setting?  What does that portray to my neighbors as I hang laundry in the other room while my babies are isolated and whining in another room?  If I foster the importance of independence, am I setting them up for success in an American setting but predisposing them to a mindset (and a heart!) contrary to that of the rest of the world?  Hmmmm.... heavy stuff to ponder as a mom...
* Boundaries is something they need to learn.  Taking babies from homes and patios without telling the parent is something they can go to jail for in this country.  They understood.  And in a shame-based culture, they were very uncomfortable to see me unhappy with them.

It was a valuable lesson all the way around.

Disclaimer: For any of you who still feel uncomfortable about the baby-napping incident(s), I will keep my door locked during Independent Play... if we keep that going!  :)

Knee-Lift Reactions?

We all know how it goes when a doc taps your kneecap and up flies the bottom half of your leg. Not a thought enters your head, no time lapses between the tap and the reaction, and it’s as if you have no say.  There’s no pondering, or negotiating, or waiting to see if your leg will react.  It’s immediate and absolute, and your input wasn't part of the equation.

My pastor Jeff Jackson recently sent out an email challenging us to watch a youtube video of Pastor David Platt interviewing a young missionary to Uganda named Katie Davis.  After almost 45 minutes of hearing awe-inspiring/downright crazy stories of a young, single girl having spent a lot of time and heartache in the bush of Uganda, he asked if she thought what she was doing (adopting 14 orphans and she’s younger than 25!!) was radical.  She said NO.  She said it is seen as abnormal, but it shouldn’t be.  Through a grin that was overflowing from the springs of her heart she said that it was a natural response to what God had done for her.  She said, “How could I not?”. 

Nowadays we see a girl like Katie Davis and place her in an elite group of Christians that God has called in an extreme way and equipped with a special power to accomplish the radical things He asks her to do.  What we should see is another run of the mill Christian taking God at His word.  What we should see is a God worth sacrificing everything for.  We should see the God who can now reach abandoned children, befriend widows and feed the hungry.  We should see a woman so serious about her God that the woman in the story is a mere afterthought.  I’m sure Katie Davis wants to be seen that way.  But instead, we glorify the girl and think, “I could never do that”.  But her response is, “In light of what God has done for me, how could I NOT?”.

Enter in uncomfortable part of the blog…

If our spiritual “nerve-endings” in our “knees” were working, there wouldn’t be any more orphans left in our counties to adopt.  There wouldn’t be widows without a strong sense of family and love and acceptance. The sick would be prayed for.  The hungry would be fed.  The needy would be clothed.  The people in our lives would know, without a doubt, that we love them more than we love ourselves, our time, and our possessions; and we would show them that on a regular and practical basis.  We would live on little so we could give much. We would over-love regardless of the cost.  We would do all of the simple things that Jesus modeled and we would do it immediately and absolutely.  Because how could we not??  In light of all He's done for us, how could we not?

I called this post “knee-lift reactions”.  Instead of a knee-jerk, it seems like we often lift our knees slowly and steadily, inch by inch when we feel good and ready (myself included!).  Orphans are loose cannons that might have negative effects on our children... and talk about adoption being expensive!!  Widows… who even thinks about widows??  I know I don’t!  The sick?  They have hospitals.  The hungry?  Food shelters.  The needy?  Goodwill.  The homeless?  They’ll use the money for beer.  Or better yet, they got themselves into their situation… if I help them I will just be re-enforcing their choices.   We have reasoned God out of the picture completely, and the scariest part is, we've done it without even knowing it.

But what if we just reacted out of an inability to do otherwise?  What if our own comfort, time, money, or lives were so far removed from the equation?  After all, it is the love of our own selves that keeps us from showing the love of God.  If we took ourselves out of the picture, and focused solely on God, all of our lives would look like Katie Davis' in some form.  I'm not saying we should all fly to Africa on a one-way ticket, but David Platt put it beautifully by saying that God demands a blank check from us the moment we decide to bare His name.  It's not being radical, it's being obedient.  It shouldn't be extreme, it should be normal.  The underlying foundation of her life is an involuntary response to the saving grace of Jesus.  It's pure and simple.  It's a knee-jerk reaction, not a knee-lift with a step here and a step there.  It's immediate and absolute.  And it's out of a heart that says, "It hardly seems like enough God, but here ya go".  May WE be those people who when tapped, we react.  May we throw our comfort and desires at His feet, and exchange them for depths of fulfillment we wouldn't even dream possible.  

God ripped our rug

     We used to have a rug.  It was so pretty.  It was a big, sturdy rug.  We liked it so much that we moved from house to house with it.   We got it as a joint present to each other right after being married, and when we moved from our first house in California we brought it to Arizona, and then we put it in our last house as well.  Wherever we have gone, we have joyfully carted it along.  It was a big, pretty rug... and we wouldn't dare consider living without it. 

     This was no ordinary rug.  It wasn't what was on the design that made it special.  It wasn't the warmth on your feet, or the decor it brought to the room.  As our children grew it wasn't the comfort it brought to their crawling knees or toddling toes.  No... it was much more amazing than all of that.  It was underneath the rug that made it so special.  This rug had special power to take away our problems, to eliminate our stresses, and to bandage up the hurts.  It made the past seem perfect, the present satisfying, and the future exciting.  There was one rule though... you can put whatever you want under the rug, but you cannot take anything out.  

     This system was obviously working wonderfully, and why wouldn't it?!?  I mean, who wouldn't want a magical rug that could hide anything uncomfortable or unhealthy?  Sweep it under and just move on with the day!  Talk about ideal.  Well it wasn't until we moved into Serrano Village that things started to change (how many times have I said that?!).  We realized soon after arriving that our magical rug got ripped during the move in a few different places.  We tried to put the couch over one tear and the coffee table over another... but there wasn't enough covering that would reverse the damage and replenish the "magic".  Furthermore, when we lifted up the corner to put something under it, some of what we swept underneath came out of a rip!  UGH!!  After a few months of trying to work with this broken rug, we finally realized our efforts were in vain. 

     When we began this process in the Village with hundreds of refugees, we knew it would be a little about what happened because of us and a lot about what happened inside of us.  In this episode of our journey, God ripped our rug.  He is good, so he ripped our rug.  He is loving and deeply involved in our personal, day to day lives... so He ripped our rug.  On one hand I'm experiencing God in a sweet and gentle way, letting me work through things and know Him deeper so we can go further down this road.  But on the other hand, He is showing me that He is still GOD.  He is still righteous.  He is still the judge.  He is holy and He doesn't share my heart with unhealthy habits that sacrifice integrity for comfort.  He is God, and I'm glad He ripped our rug.  See ya rug, you were never as pretty as I made you seem, and I need you far less than I ever believed...

PAUSE!!!

Surrendering is sometimes very un-fun.  Yes, un-fun.  Yesterday I was sitting on my patio while the babies were sleeping and the chorus of a song came into my head that says, "In joyous surrender, with our eyes fixed on you..." and it actually made me shake my head 'no'.  Since I'm talking to God again (we had a dark spell for about a week) I told Him that at this juncture in life I reject the notion of surrender being joyous.  Right now it just sucks.  It's raw, uncomfortable, scary and affronting.  How else to say it besides simply un-fun.

Can real surrender be joyous?  Can we hold things precious and sacred to us and open those hands as an offering to God with joy?  If you can't does that make it less of an offering?  Does it matter if it's through tears and doubt and fear?  

Often in life we take something that is unfavorable and contrast it with something favorable.  Yes it's a hard season because _________, but at least we still have __________.  Generally both of these things are physical, which is normal because the most obvious trials or blessings are things that we can see.  But what happens when you've given the tangibles away?  What happens when you have trouble filling in the positive blank when you just look around at the reality of life.  The second blank ceases to be a something and is FORCED to become a someone.  We get Him.  We are forced to receive Him more fully, lean on Him more dependently, and seek Him like He really is here. 

This season has taught me that it's okay to question and it's okay to distrust God (did she really just say that?).  He can handle it.  And He knew that I would get here.  It would be ludicrous to leave my kids with someone I heard was a really neat guy who adopted all kinds of orphans, helped people recover from deadly diseases and went to sit with the elderly to read them stories and say, "Since I've heard you are such an awesome person, here are my kids... I'll just leave you guys alone!  Do with them whatever you see fit, you don't even need to ask me.  Good or bad, I'll just adjust, because I know you are right".  That would be silly in the physical realm of life... so why is it so bad to say PAUSE! in the spiritual realm when we just aren't comfortable?

So here I stand... paused.  I'm hand in hand with my God and we are halfway across the bridge.  We aren't looking behind or ahead, just pausing and taking in the beautiful landscape around us.  To the right is everything I've given Him, and if we keep walking left it's giving Him more.  It's my kids, it's our safety, it's whatever He sees fit.  He is quietly telling me things about Himself, loving on me and not judging me, telling me stories of times past, and confirming the reality that He dwells with me all of the time.  He is telling me often that He loves me unlike a love I have known.  He is letting me walk if I want to, and sit when I need to.  He is soft and sweet, understanding and patient.  He is my God whom I will follow to the other side, when I know Him more deeply and trust Him more fully.  And He is okay with that.  He is my God. 

Oh, to be Spaghetti!!

I was once told of a word picture to describe the differences between men and women's brains. Men have waffle brains, women have spaghetti brains. Men have compartments and can function efficiently within each segment regardless of what's happening in the others (to a degree of course). Women on the other hand are completely interwoven, like noodles, and if something is happening on noodle number four it's happening on noodle 79. I've been seeing this waffle vs. spaghetti idea play out in the different cultures here... and as we live life in the Village, I realized that as always it's an 'us versus them' thing and yet again we are the odd-balls. So in this addition, we are the waffles and they are the spaghetti.

As Americans, we are masters at compartmentalizing our lives. We call it "switching gears", so in keeping our waffle analogy, this means hopping over the wall of thin bread into the next waffle square. The sqaures are anything in your life... work, family, goals/vision, parenting, friendships, church, relationship with God, finances, neighbors, etc, etc. Think about your own life and how many different squares you have, and if they are truly related to one another. I find that some of my squares can (and do) exist completely independent from the others, although that is changing rapidly!

The spaghetti-types would be everyone except us... as always :). Their lives are giant plates of noodles, the sticky kind that you can't pull apart and it looks more like a confusing clump than individual strands. Everything connects, everyone is part of this messy plate, and they don't know anything different, and I asume they have no desire to (well... maybe the youngsters being raised here, but that's another post entirely). The idea is that everything flows into everything else, and this big hot mess is the beauty of having all things in common and owning the true identity of group or community.

I submit to you that their God, gods, religions, idealogies - whatever you want to say - is the sauce. It is poured over everything, and the entire plate is saturated by it. Their faith and gods are at every turn, under all they do, and covering each move. We tend to live our spiritual lives more like a waffle topping plopped onto the middle that may or may not spill over into each square. Our work, school, finances, even relationships can be untouched by this and it can just stay in the section of church and maybe a quarter of our finances and relationships. It's an interesting concept, and it has probed me to really live like my kids and nieghbors and money and husband and church are not only connected but saturated by Jesus. Oh Jesus, fill up these squares, every single one!!!

Love the sidewalk, Hate the sidewalk

We have a love/hate thing with our sidewalk.  To most people it's just a normal sidewalk, but to us it's a long skinny barrier the divides two very different worlds. 

This is an extremely unique setting in many ways, but one way is how suddenly the world as you knew it changes over to something unfamiliar and occasionally overwhelming.  When people normally enter cultures so opposite to their own, a car ride plus a long flight (or flights) plus another long car ride usually provide some much needed time to turn one switch off and another switch on.  We have about a 2 second hump to drive across and our parallel universe switch is now forced on.  

On the south side of the sidewalk lies the America that we all know and love.  Trust me when I say, we love America.  We love that we can still eat all of our favorite foods, shop at the grocery stores we are familiar with, get anything that we want or need, order something online and it arrives a few days later, receive regular mail, drive on roads that don't make us crazy (relatively speaking), communicate clearly, worship freely, visit all of our friends and family with relative ease, see baseball games, get babysitters... on and on.  We love that we can go to the bank, the grocery store, Target and stop for food all in one afternoon.  Ya know, America!  Easy, familiar, convenient and extremely efficient.

And then there's the north side.  This world, where we spend much of our time, is completely opposite.  I wish by reading words you could imagine the feel of life here, but there's much that is lost without actually seeing it, walking it, and yes, smelling it :).  My family is visiting for Thanksgiving and when my parents pulled in to the complex my mom said very slowly, "It's like a completely different world" as the sea of children parted ways in the street to let the car pass.  My sister sat on our patio and asked question after question for almost a full hour.  It takes a lot of time to process just how different the world is on this side of the sidewalk.  

It's not a complex with refugees, it's a refugee complex.  It's literally like another country.  But instead of one culture and language, there are 15 totally different cultures and languages.  As in other countries, accomplishing the small tasks of life is ssss-lllll-oooooo-wwwww here.  To go do laundry takes a long, long time.  Many times walking to throw the clothes in turns into an invitation to have some tea or fruit in someone's home, and a 10 minute trip turns into an entire afternoon... and the laundry hasn't even been switched yet.  All of life is that way here, any task outside of this apartment needs to be multiplied by 26 to correctly estimate when that task will be complete.  Okay, maybe by 4 or 8, but you get the point. 

As culturally sensitive as I think I am, nothing spells "American" more than being yanked out of a white middle-class suburban neighborhood and dropped in the midst of a life that is slow, relational above all else, slow, all things in common, slow, neighbors = family, slow, and you always must be ready for company... and I mean always.  There's no structure, little convenience, and things like problem solving or being proactive are foreign concepts.  This, for an American, is enough to buy a one-way ticket on a slow boat to China.  Well truthfully that's only the case a small percentage of the time.  More often than not, I find myself longing to be home in the village when I'm out and about being a productive American.  I love the security, the unspoken love, the ability to feel warmth down in my heart just by looking at people smile at us, the fact that my babies are learning that people are more important than time or a checklist.  There are beautiful qualities that I'm jealous for and comforted by on the north side of the sidewalk.

We would both agree that the hardest part of our new lives is that we have to transition so quickly between worlds, that we have to constantly turn our switch on and off depending on which side of the sidewalk we are on.  We do not have the luxury of being thousands of miles away from home to detach completely from the comforts and mindset of America, we must learn to adapt and function successfully in both.  This is a tough feat.

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