Once again, I’ve been wanting to share with you more stories of what ministry looks like on the Race. Sure, some days are beautiful, joyful, satisfying, fulfilling. But the World Race is just life, and not every day of life or of the Race is a happy one. I’m finding, though, that sometimes, if I’m willing, Jesus will show me His fingerprints all over even the days when all I want to do is scream or cry. So here are two stories of the bad days, and of Jesus’ fingerprints.
Malawi, Month 5
I woke up in the mother of all bad moods.
Actually, I didn’t wake up. I was woken up by one of my teammates poking her head through the tent door and sweetly letting me know it was time to get out of bed. Even if she hadn’t, it would have been impossible to sleep much longer. It was 8:00 am, so naturally our large Malawian crusade crew had been up and about–loudly–for at least two hours. It didn’t matter that we’d all crawled into bed after 2:00 am the night before; they were awake, their tent packed away, cheerful and talkative and ready for the day.
Grumpy and irritable, I took my time rolling up my sleeping bag and pad. Outside, I could hear my teammates wondering aloud, “Where’s Alice?” I felt a sense of urgency; though no one had told us official plans for the morning, last Saturday we’d breakfasted at 8:00 and been out and about doing door-to-door evangelism by 9:00. By that assumed schedule, I was very late.
I stumbled out of the tent in stony silence, searching for my shoes so I wouldn’t have to step in the red dirt with bare feet. I was greeted with a gorgeous day: a cloudless cerulean sky stretched over the idyllic panorama of rolling hills and verdant cornfields. But the beauty of our setting made no impact on my mood; I focused instead on the large crowd of children gathered a few yards away, staring in rapt fascination at every move we Americans made, and got angrier still.
I said nothing as I sat down to our breakfast of bread and jam, and my teammates knew better than to address me. Though the staring children annoyed me, at least they kept their distance and sat down to watch us in silence. Our hosts, however, excited to spend the day with us, were eager to chat and hang out with us one-on-one as soon as we finished eating. Thinking we were waiting to leave for some form of ministry in a matter of minutes, I didn’t pull out my Bible to spend time with Jesus. Instead, I spent the next half hour looking for ways to avoid talking to people–a real challenge. I was tired and annoyed to have been dragged out of bed, and as it became increasingly clear that we weren’t actually going anywhere for the foreseeable future, I became even more frustrated that my sleep had been unnecessarily curtailed. My anger made me curt with everyone around me, which in turn made me upset at myself for being so short-tempered and unreasonably moody. I was irritated at our hosts for wanting to have profound conversation–or any conversation–less than an hour after I’d dragged myself out of bed, and I was irritated at myself for being unloving and wanting to avoid our hosts. I ended up skulking around our pickup truck, trying to stand close enough to people to look like I was sort of sociable (and more importantly, stay in the shade) while staying far enough away from any particular individual to avoid being addressed.
“What’s that girl eating?” Anna asked one of our hosts. The children had either gotten used to our strange presence or bored of our inactivity and had dispersed to entertain themselves. One girl was picking something out of a small brown object and eating it.
“Oh!” Blessings, one of our hosts, exclaimed, and he hurried over to her and held out his hand. She gathered some of the brown balls she had collected in her skirt and gave them to him. “Come here!” he said, waving at Anna and me, then turning to look around for a good place to take this mysterious treasure. Anna followed him over to a clear patch of dirt with a small cluster of stones, and I trailed behind warily.
Blessings found a flat stone and placed it in front of him, then picked up a fist-sized rock. He steadied one of the spheres, about the size of a large marble, on the stone, then gave it a solid pound with the rock in his hand. It cracked along the side, and he picked it up and pulled the brown shell into two pieces, revealing a white center. “Macadamia nuts!” he said, gently working the white nut out of its casing and handing it to Anna to eat.
Anna picked up a whole nut to try cracking it herself, and after watching her crush a couple nuts into shattered pieces, I took up another rock and bent down to join her. Cracking the nuts, I soon found, was a delicate art. Hit them too gently and they would simply roll onto the ground unblemished, but pound them too hard and they would be crushed, fit only for the nearby chickens to peck. It took lots of practice and a solid-but-not-too-heavy thwack to crack them just right so that the thick shells could be peeled away and a whole, unbroken macadamia nut could be removed.
The children, seeing our interest in the macadamia nuts, came running to deliver the fistfuls of nuts they had collected. Soon, we had a sizable pile waiting to be cracked. Then the villagers noticed our little nut-cracking party, and one woman came out of her house with a large pot full of nuts. With over a hundred nuts on every side, we now had no shortage. The nut cracking drew the attention of Team HULK and our hosts as well, and slowly teammates and hosts drifted over to take turns pounding macadamia nuts and, when they were lucky, eating them too.
I remained crouched over my stone as people gathered around to join, silently venting my irritability on each nut that I tried to crack. The simple, clear, mindless task calmed me down, and as I got better at breaking the shells without crushing the soft flesh inside, my anger slowly slipped away. Conversation about the nuances of macadamia nut cracking bubbled up around me, and our common task allowed me to be present in the discussion without actually taking part myself. Though it was still too early in the morning for me to talk, I no longer felt like I was avoiding our hosts, nor did I feel angry at myself for doing so.
And as rocks beat, nuts cracked, chickens pecked and people laughed, I began to silently praise Jesus. He saw my bad mood and met me right where I was, giving me the beautiful, perfect gift of a hundred macadamia nuts and transforming my attitude and my day.
* * *
Cambodia, Month 10
I was having a great travel day. I got to sit next to sweet friends on the bus, eat delicious Cambodian stir-fry for lunch, laugh at the fact that we saw almost all of King Kong, minus the last twenty minutes, and only the first half of Apocalypto. Then I took a nap.
In the middle of my nap, the bus arrived in Phnom Penh, and my day never recovered.
Despite my half-awake irritation at having my nap interrupted, I tried to be cheerful as we rode in a tuk-tuk from the bus station to the ferry. I stumbled blearily after my teammates as we boarded the ferry, my pack making me top-heavy and off-balance. As I weaved my way towards the stairs, my leg brushed against the exhaust pipe of a motorcycle, burning my skin. I bit back tears as I sat down on a bench and examined the damage.
Our host met us in a large tuk-tuk and drove us to our home for the month. He showed us our sleeping area and we set up our pads and did some basic organizing of our living space. I was overwhelmed by the process and not sure whether I felt thankful for the amenities we do have this month (far more comforts than I was expecting) or disappointed in how rustic it is (our homes in Malaysia and Thailand were World Race luxury) or glad to be challenged (sacrifice of comfort is what I signed up for, after all). I was sure, however, that I was only a couple steps away from tears, and I couldn’t wait to curl up on my freshly blown-up sleeping pad, have a good cry and get back to my nap. When we finished setting up, I tried to focus and pay attention as we sat down and listened to our host’s introduction, but I drifted in and out, caught up in my own thoughts and in holding back the inexplicable waterworks.
Then he told us that our ministry for the month would be teaching English on weekday evenings … starting now.
“Are you ready to go?” he asked.
Ready to go? No, I wasn’t ready to go anywhere. This was our travel day, and I wasn’t expecting to start ministry until tomorrow. Ready to go? Far from it. But we were going. Team LIGHThouse gathered in a circle to pray, then piled back into the tuk-tuk and trundled off down the road.
We were split across three locations to teach, two groups of two and one group of three. I was in the group of three, which was further divided across two classes. After ten months on the Race, I’ve learned to appreciate strength in numbers. A team of seven can tag-team any activity–English classes, children’s ministry, presentations, seminars, anything–pretty well, leaning more heavily on those who are stronger at any given moment and allowing teammates who are “out of it” to shoulder less of the load. One “out of it” teammate teaching a class solo, and impromptu to boot, is never a good place to be. Though I felt bad for leaving one of my teammates alone, I made sure to put myself in the pair teaching together.
I did pretty well through the first half of the class, muddling through the vague instructions of the textbook we’d been given and making up activities as best I could. But as we came towards the end of our time I could feel myself tiring, my ideas fading, my engagement waning. Unfortunately, when our first class was done, the three of us reconvened for a second class. With no textbook to guide us, we played Hangman. Within minutes, I found myself standing off to the side, observing without speaking or contributing any ideas.
And then, on the other side of our teaching space, I saw our host. He beckoned to me, and I followed him into a small room with an empty shelving unit and a couple of large cardboard boxes.
“A family of Americans moved away last week, and they donated all these books. Will you help me put them on this shelf?”
Disclaimer: I LOVE BOOKS. I learned in month one in Haiti that when everyone else on my team wants to scream at the thought of one more minute organizing a library, I could happily spend hours more sorting through the books, categorizing them and alphabetizing them on the shelves. Though opportunities to organize books have been rare on the Race, I’ve jumped on them at every chance I’ve gotten.
As I sifted through children’s books, novels, cookbooks and magazines, sorting them and arranging them on the shelves, I savored the sight of familiar names and titles: Sharon Creech. Michael Connelly. Goodnight, Moon. I relished the presence of books and the simple, straightforward nature of the task, a task for which I was more than qualified with no preparation at all. As I turned over the titles and set them in their place, I let the process calm me down, soothing the lingering press of tears. And when English class finished and my two co-teachers came in wondering where I’d been for the past forty-five minutes, I was refreshed, reenergized, grinning at having gotten to do such a life-giving ministry.
Out of three options, I randomly ended up at the class with an empty bookshelf. Out of three options, I was the one fading, dysfunctional teammate selected to do a separate job. And out of all the days of our month in Cambodia, out of all of the days on the Race, Jesus picked this one to give me bookshelves. Once again, He met me right where I was: in the middle of my exhaustion, when I was overwhelmed, worn out, beating myself up for being unhelpful, and close to tears, He gave me the beautiful, perfect gift of His presence in an empty shelf and a box of books.
