When I woke up Tuesday morning, I was hit with a large wave of morning person syndrome – a part of me that hadn’t come out yet in Albania. It took every ounce of effort to choose joy and kindness when other people tried to talk to me and ask questions about what to do at the kindergarten that day. We had spent the day before at a beach on the Adriatic Sea, but I had decided to wait until after we painted to shower in the afternoon. The whole morning, I was constantly bothered by how dry and chalky my skin was getting from the sea salt. Not to mention, my hair had turned into a lion’s mane of grease and saltwater explosion. I just kept repeating to myself… you get to shower this afternoon, you get to shower this afternoon.
Finally, it was time. I rushed away to begin the shower I had been dreaming of all day. I stepped into the shower for about thirty seconds and watched as the stream of water raining out of the showerhead slowly turned into a teeny, tiny trickle.
Fun fact about the place we live in Albania, our water tank is only so big and only gets filled at certain times of the day. When 12 girls try to do dishes, laundry, and shower, the water disappears pretty quickly.
I stood under the showerhead for a little while with my wet but unwashed hair and watched as little drops of water fell onto my nose just hoping that maybe the water would miraculously return. I accepted my defeat but couldn’t decide if I should start laughing or crying as I moved on with my day.
My next plan for the afternoon was to sit in my favorite coffee shop and spend some much needed quality time with Jesus. I sat down with my crazy mop of sea-smelling hair expecting to be there for maybe an hour, if even that. Two and half hours later, I understood why my shower was cut so short. The Lord had important things to tell me, and he needed my whole afternoon to do so.
I felt the Lord drawing me to Luke 14: 28-33. This passage talks about the cost of discipleship and how you can’t be a disciple unless you give up your whole life. Then in verse 29 it says,
“For which of you, desiring to build a tower, does not first sit down and count the cost, whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation is not able to finish, all who see it begin to mock him.”
The Lord reminded me of a conversation I had at Launch with some of my leadership team where I admitted that I was really good at starting all kinds of projects, but not following through and finishing those projects. I have pages of paintings I started and never got to, various piles of notecard attempts at memorizing scripture or foreign languages, journals full of beginnings of stories and poems I always meant to come back to, and bins full of materials to start new projects.
I always jump into building new towers without first counting the cost. It only takes a second for me to get distracted by new towers or to give up when I realize that a tower is going to cost more than I thought. I could definitely recognize how this passage related to a patterned behavior in my life, but I kept pressing because I didn’t understand where in my life I was giving up on a tower in Albania.
That’s when the Lord brought me to another passage about the cost of following Jesus – Luke 9: 61-62
“Yet another said, ‘I will follow you, Lord, but let me first say farewell to those at my home.’ Jesus said to him, ‘No one who puts his hand to the plow and looks back is fit for the kingdom of God.’”
I still didn’t understand. I haven’t really been struggling with homesickness, in fact, I have barely been contacting people at home at all (sorry mom, I still love you). The part about the plow just kept sticking out to me, and God asked me to describe the process of transplanting my jade plants. Sorry, excuse me? What in the world do my jade plants have to do with anything right now? Totally confused, I started writing out everything I knew about my precious plants at home.
Just before I left for the Race I decided I needed to split my Jade plant Felix. He was large, healthy, thriving, and overflowing in his vintage coffee pot. I wanted Felix to continue thriving, but I knew pretty soon he was going to get stuck in the pot and stop growing because his roots had no more room to expand. So, I took giant Felix and split him into four new little friends. When you make a Jade transplant, you cut a branch off the stem, and then you have to leave the cutting out of any water or dirt for at least a week until the cutting forms a callous. The callous prevents the new transplant from soaking up too much bacteria from its new environment, so it’s very important. Leaving the cutting out feels risky and backwards because you are forcing the plant to rely only on the nutrients stored within the leaves for the next week or so. Once the callous forms, the hardest part isn’t even over. The transplant goes into dirt now, but it can still take at least two weeks for roots to start forming and for the transplant to take up any new nutrients from water again.
I wrote all this information out and felt Jesus telling me I needed to form a callous before roots could grow. A callous? Normally a callous is not a word you want to describe yourself. A callous comes after working hard and blisters. Forming a callous did not make sense to me right now.
I started searching for meaning and started to replay my experiences over the past few weeks in Albania. All the times I felt I had failed or made a mistake were marked with fear. All the times I felt I had made an impact were marked with pushing past that initial fear and pressing into the Lord. When I was being honest with myself, there were more times I had given in to fear than times I pushed past. Then, all the pieces started to fall into place and everything was making sense…
I started the Race with the goal of pushing past my fears and acting out in boldness to speak the words of Jesus even when it was hard. Like usual though, I didn’t count my costs before building this tower of boldness. When I realized how hard it was to push past my fear, I left my tower of boldness half-finished and reverted back to my old, fearful ways just like I’ve always done in the past. Jesus is not calling me to put my hand on the plow of the World Race and turn back to my old ways though. He’s calling me to form a callous like a jade plant, knowing that the hardest parts are yet to come, but to hold on until my roots of my new identity start to form.
