If you know me even 14% well, you know I love coffee.
If you know surgery even 1%, you know it’s a journey.
Long story short:
I got to journey with some great coffee this month.
Coffee is just dang good. Give me a french press or a filter with some dark roast and watch me come alive. Coffee breeds community and relationship. I love coffee. I love talking over coffee. I love reading with coffee. I love thinking under the influence of coffee. All the things coffee.
January in Vietnam we had the joy of working at a coffee shop. This is what I call living the dream. Working at this coffee shop, The Master’s Cup, has been one of my favorite jobs on the Race.
The Master’s Cup is an English-speaking coffee shop in Ho Chi Minh City. Downstairs is a pretty typical Saigon caf, but upstairs is where the beauty and uniqueness of Master’s Cup unfurls. There are two conversation rooms upstairs. These rooms have a simple premise: speaking English.
The formula =
native English speaking staff + Vietnamese customers wanting to improve their English + coffee
Boom. One great equation. I worked the night shift at Master’s Cup each day from 5-10pm alongside my teammates Derek and Zack. Oh yeah, I forgot to say – I got a new team. I like it a lot. It’s good. Anyhow. We drank coffee and had great conversations each day. That’s it. It was completely wonderful. Completely!
The customers typically have a pretty high caliber of English so it wasn’t like speaking at toddlers, it was conversing with friends. In the conversation room we talked about any and everything. We covered the shallow, the deep, the risky, the basic, the sensitive, the hilarious, the awkward, the local, the global, the delicious, the disgusting. Master’s Cup has created its own culture. The regulars at the caf have formed a family, and it’s a truly beautiful thing to be part of.
During the day, we would hang out with the regulars outside of Master’s Cup. They are the greatest friends I’ve made on the Race. These people have my heart. They would take us out for Vietnamese food (HOLLER) and show us the ins and outs of Ho Chi Minh City by zipping us around on their motorbikes. These relationships got rich. Relationships are the building blocks of the Kingdom. Lots of building this month.
Here’s some street octopus eating with ma girl, Belle:
and henna tattoos with the ever-talented Tran:
and one of many wonderful meals with Ban, a man with one of the biggest hearts I know:
and zipping around on one of Saigon’s 8 million motorbikes:
So, that’s the coffee part of the month. Coffee, conversations, friends, adventures, building.
Now for surgery. Once upon a December, I was maintaining my fingernails in Cambodia. Well. I got a little too ambitious in cuticle care & trimmed too far back on my thumb. Usually no big deal, right? Usually. But in Cambodia? All bets are off.
From that mishap I got a strand of staph infection (cute) that got a little out of control over the next few weeks. Things got weird. It created this mutant abscess on my thumb, which my stubborn self thought would be fine and heal naturally if I kept it clean and took antibiotics, but that wasn’t the case… because Cambodia.
I gave in and got it checked out at the hospital when we had been in Vietnam for a few weeks. My doctor (from Spain!) took a look at it and made that knowing eye contact with me that what the heck were you thinking by waiting this long eye contact. Whoops. When he said the word surgery my stomach kinda dropped. How does a tiny cuticle mishap elicit an actual operation? But they can call anything surgery, I thought, so it‘ll probably be like a 15-minute quick fix. Great. Ha… nope.
I went in the next week expecting just a speedy little jaunt with the Argentinian surgeon, but then they gave me a gown and heavy painkillers and all the big-kid surgery things. Oh, this is real.
He cut the infection out of my thumb. It was deep. Thankfully, it didn’t quite reach my bone, which would have been very bad. The infection reached my nail matrix, which is the source of growth. Because the source was damaged, they don’t think a nail will ever grow back. Fun story for the grandkids, right?
He sewed my thumb back together, then the playful Filipino nurses got me out of there and wrapped up about an hour after we started. For the next two weeks I wore this dressing wrapped around my thumb. The dressing made me have a permanent thumbs-up (not to be confused with gig ’em) so it was easy to answer questions non-verbally with a yes. It was pretty sexy, super subtle and let me do everything as I desired to. Wait, no – none of those last things are true. It was some of the worst pain I’ve experienced & it was ridiculous to me that a freaking cuticle was the start of it. A cuticle.
Now 6 weeks later, I’m super. My thumb nail is completely gone as of March 1st. I figured if I’m never going to have a thumbnail again, I’ll just leave it in February 2014. It looks kinda funny, but I can still throw up the go frogs and maybe now I’ll get 10% discount on manicures, so I’m cool with it all.
ps i have some super gnarly photos of my thumb guts. let me know if you’re interested.
This whole shebang goes to show what an ignored tiny, no-big-deal glitch can turn into… like sin. That little tendency that, when unattended or undermined, gets to be a real issue. Soul stuff. That little something that festers and needs operation. That something that causes pain and wakes you up in the middle of the night. That something that is so blatant to everyone else, but they’re not sure if they should ask the awkwardly obvious ohhh, what happened there?
I’ve been dealing with that, too. The soul stuff. Specifically, the fight for where my affirmation comes from.
It started as a little tendency to feel fulfilled from one little thing. Not a bad thing, but not Jesus. Then boom. Before I knew it, that one little blemish was infected. It became something it never should have been it grew, got more disgusting, and it became part of me. The infection spread from my lips into my head, pierced my heart and even ran through my feet. This infection denatured the way I thought, spoke, loved and walked.
Even though I didn’t want to, I placed hope and expectation on this infection thinking it would fulfill me, but that just invited it spread more. Why do I think I would get joy from an infection? Gross. It is so twisted. In the Philippines the Lord had to act and operate to take it out of my life. It hurt. Surgery hurts. It felt like the operation took for-stinking-ever.
But He’s a good surgeon. I trust Him, especially with soul stuff. It may have taken through Vietnam to finally heal, but I say hallelujah that I got to feel my soul and my thumb heal together. God’s comedic timing.
Through both operations my anthem has been in Christ Alone. That hymn drips with truth. Just listen. It packs multiple punches. I wouldn’t let myself sing it for a long time ‘til I could genuinely mean it. I do. He’s where my hope is found, He’s firm through the fiercest, He’s all in all. I have to be cool with ceasing my strivings and letting Him command. I love that no pow’r of hell, no scheme of man could ever pluck me from His hand. That gets me all giddy inside.
Gosh, so much happened in Vietnam. I’m so not done with Vietnam. That’s a promise I’m willing to keep. A month later my tummy still drops when I think about it. I’m homesick for my friendships there. The country is crazy beautiful and dynamic and I have so many reasons to go back. It’s full of some of my favorite moments on the Race. If anyone ever wants to backpack from HCMC to Hanoi, count me in & Vietnamese coffee will be my treat the whole time, I promise.
Cheers to being able to say I got injured in ‘Nam for the rest of my life,
Darcie
