Can I get a shout from all my glass half empty people?
I didn’t shout. Because I am not one. From the day I was born (July 2, 1994), I have been a glass half full person. I didn’t try. I was born this way.
I have A LOT of feelings. Those closest to me DEFINITELY know this about me. Really, acquaintances and even random strangers probably know this about me. My feelings are pretty out in the open for the world to see. I’m EXPRESSIVE (either laughing or crying 99% of the time). If we’re talking Myers-Briggs, I couldn’t BE any more of an F (feeler). I have high highs and low lows, and I find myself thanking God for this on good days and bad days. I love my feelings. I joke that I’ll live forever because of all the stress and toxins I release from crying so often!
But what I want to make clear is that if sadness or discouragement hits for long periods of time, if I see more dark than light, or if I have more bad days than good ones, it feels quite out of character. In a prolonged season of sadness or discouragement, on top of dealing with a lot of feelings, I also experience somewhat of an existential crisis that I’m not my typical glass half full self!
I am about to share with you a time this held true. The month of my World Race I am about to share with you felt chaotic amidst order. For a good portion of the World Race, I felt like I could fit each month in a nicely packaged little box. I could hand you a neat little summary of what God taught me and did in me.
Then Myanmar happened.
Let me paint a picture for you. We’re about five months into the World Race and we just switched teams for the first time, which means I had to separate from the people I started the race with and honestly one of the most loving, safest, but also growth provoking groups of people I’ve ever belonged to – SHOUT OUT TO MY FIRST TEAM, GOD’S MAGNOLIAS. ALSO, I just became a team leader! Which in my eyes means I’m now responsible for the physical, emotional, and spiritual health of not only myself but also five other human beings! Plus, I need to make sure we bond and STAY ALIVE and that I stay on top of all the logistical stuff. Oh and I need to keep our host happy, but also keep my team happy, and figure out whose expectations were right because everyone’s expectations were different and someone had to be right, right? I also thought that as the team leader, it was my responsibility to volunteer for every single thing nobody volunteered for or didn’t seem to want to do. That’s a lot of pressure. (This wasn’t the official team leader description- I made it up myself.)
We spent our first two weeks as a team in Thailand, where my team couldn’t leave Bangkok, because one of the girls on our team had Dengue fever and we needed to be near the hospital since she had to go almost every day. Half of my team was sick in Thailand, including myself- it’s honestly the sickest I ever remember being in my life. It was an ATL (Ask the Lord) month, so we didn’t have any assigned host or ministry and decided our ministry would be talking with others staying in our hostel. A few of my teammates and I got to have dinner with a guy who was an atheist and talk to him about Jesus, which was super cool!
Then we traveled to Myanmar, which took THREE DAYS and was the longest, craziest travel day we had on the World Race. It could literally be a blog post in and of itself- in fact, some of my squadmates made it one! But the part of our travels that is important for you to know is that I, this new team leader who took on too much ASSUMED responsibility and cared way too much about making my entire team perfectly happy, was woken up at the end of the three days of travel, at 3am, on a bus we’d been on for however many hours, told we had arrived at our final stop in Myanmar, and was asked where we were going. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. I didn’t know where we were going! Sure, I had been in contact with our host and planned as much as I could, but I hadn’t been informed of the detail that we were arriving at 3am, which made things much more complicated as I didn’t think it was appropriate to call our host and wake them up in the middle of the night, especially when we didn’t even know exactly where we were, while others on my team, understandably so, didn’t want to sleep on the ground outside of a bus station. Which is exactly what we did.
Sounds simple enough, right? Make a decision, disappoint some people, some others are fine with it. Everything turned out fine, so no big deal, right? But it was a big deal to me. And so was every other little decision I made throughout the course of the month that I felt like disappointed my team. My teammates were walking through struggles of their own and half of them came to me at different points in the month and told me they didn’t feel loved well on our team, which is probably the most painful thing someone could say to me, because I care about those around me knowing they are loved more than anything. I thought I dealt with my deep rooted struggle of people pleasing the first few months of the World Race, but it hadn’t been put to the test yet. And when it was, I found that there were things buried deep within me I never knew were there.
In Myanmar, I began to face my insides. I began to face some deep rooted pain. I came face to face with a wound I previously hardly realized was there, let alone how deep it was. I wrote a letter to a loved one that may always be one of the most painful letters I’ve ever written. I came face to face with my own pain and what felt like all the pain of the world. It was in Myanmar that I began to face all the homelessness, the poverty, and the darkness I had been seeing around the world. It was in Myanmar that I began to face that I didn’t know how to convey some of what I was seeing, feeling, and experiencing to those at home in the United States and how I may have been coming off to some of you through social media and my lack of blogging. I toyed with the idea of writing a blog titled “The Things I Don’t Post On Facebook” but I never did find the words to describe what it was like seeing lines and lines of chairs on the street in Thailand with women wearing lingerie casually lounging in them, some eating snacks I would have at a movie night with friends, just waiting around for someone to purchase them for sex. I never found the words to describe what it was like walking across the border to Myanmar seeing so many homeless children, even newborns, who were terribly worn, dehydrated, and potentially high on drugs, lining our path and begging us for money. Or in Indonesia when a woman followed my team to a coffee shop, then sat with us for a bit before breaking down and sobbing and telling us her family beats her and men force her to have sex with them. And I’m saying all of this too casually, because these are PEOPLE we’re talking about. Human beings. Created by and in the image of the One True God. And I want to honor them. But how? This was my struggle while I was in the midst of my World Race choosing what to share with those of you back home and how to share it.
There is so much joy and beauty in the world, but there is also so much pain and I had to face it.
My thoughts felt violent. I was looking back on my journal from Myanmar recently and one entry is just the date and the word “confusion.” It felt like chaos. I released anger that I didn’t know had been living in the depths of my heart and mind. And it was scary when it came out. Sometimes I was alone. Sometimes a friend was with me. My friend Kayce was with me the time it happened the worst and she’s still my friend. My friend Katie sat across from me and supported me when I was in tears almost every day, all the while she was facing a great loss in her own life. She also stood up for me in a way I had never experienced, and I will always remember that moment. What I just described is community.
Katie also let me borrow her mentor, which is unbelievably selfless, and her mentor told me, “When something rises to the surface, begin rejoicing. Instead of saying, ‘what the heck is this?’ and pushing it down, let it bubble up … Deal with what He pulls up in you…” So, of course, all these things inside me were coming up on purpose, because they couldn’t stay. Though at the time, I felt like a failure and wished I could cut this month right out of my World Race.
I never thought it would, but there came a day when I looked back and only saw good. There were so many good, funny times in Myanmar. I actually planned to list them until this blog post became so long, but trust me- there really are good, funny moments I treasure from Myanmar. Don’t get me wrong- I still see the pain. I see the frustration and anger and tears. I see myself rolling out of bed early so many of the mornings to call my best friend on the other side of the world, so I could be refreshed by our friendship and find light in her wisdom. I see myself walking alone through the city, wrestling with my own pain and darkness and honestly what felt like the pain and darkness of the entire world. I see myself believing the lie it was my job to eliminate all the pain I was seeing and feeling.
But now I look back and see that God is the giver of life, not me. His light brings life and healing to the darkest places in the world and in our hearts. God used this season to remove things buried deep within me that couldn’t stay. He was sifting through my insides and removing what shouldn’t be there. What couldn’t be there. And that was as painful, humbling, and worth it as it sounds.
The same friend I would roll out of bed in the mornings to call when I was in Myanmar recently reminded me that life is like a tapestry. You look at one side of it, one little piece, from one perspective and it looks all messed up and chaotic. Nothing seems to fit together or make sense. There are strings hanging. It’s ugly. But you flip it over, and really it’s one big picture. It all fits together. And it’s beautiful.
(I’m not going to say any names but the friend is REBEKAH ROSENBERG. I couldn’t be more thankful for her.)
This blog post is a call to myself and to others to remember there’s a big picture and cutting out a part of the tapestry or a season of our lives would leave a hole in the big picture, a piece missing, a story unfinished. I used to wish my time in Myanmar didn’t exist. I wanted to cut it right out of my World Race and my life. But now I see how perfectly it fits.
To those of us in the midst of a painful season- when we are caught up in our own pain and the pain of this world, God has the answers, even to the questions we don’t have words to ask. I pray someday we’ll see this piece fits in the big picture, and for today, we trust it truly does fit.
I watched a beautiful vlog while I was in Myanmar, by a sweet person named Sophia Loux, and I’ll leave you with her words- the bits and pieces of her vlog that stuck out to me most that I strung together in my journal. “In so many of the circumstances in our life, we judge who God is by what we experience and it’s just not reality. What we do and what we experience does not change who God is.
God, Your kindness and Your goodness does not depend on my experience. I don’t need to understand why this happened to understand that You are kind and that You are faithful and that I love You.”
