“Go ahead, make my day.”
Sometimes my relationship with God too closely compares to this famous Harry Callahan quote.
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My struggle lately has moved from one internal issue to the next.
For those here to simply read what i did this month in ministry, you can skip ahead to the part with the bold “What we did for ministry this month” part. I think there’s a picture, so you can’t miss it.
For the rest of you, i have a lot of blah to share.
As it says in the title, the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Lets start with the ugly.
Ugly looks like me being consumed inside with “grown up” thoughts – some of them (for example) about being annoyed with different peoples immaturity, and my innability to actually address these immaturities because of either the need to give them grace (room to grow on prior feedback issues), or because of my own immaturity (innability to process in real time aka when the moments actually happening and thus unable to face the people and tell them after the moments passed), or timing (not knowing if its an issue to even bring up and not knowing the time to bring it up if i should…).
– disagreeing with people, but hhaving the feeling that i am unable to say i disagree.
…How to just share my experience without having a victim mentality about it…
Still trying to figure that out.
Ugly.
Like termites inside the meaty parts of my brain thoughts that just won’t end…
The bad.
Issues like this and other points of conflict (how i hate conflict) have made it hard for me to feel like being on the race is right or productive.
That’s a really bad feeling to have when you’re actually on the race and you know you need to get your head back into a healthy space but your petty and immature and even at times righteous anger make you feel like holding onto it all and staying in the ugly space…
The good.
The good part is i am able to still function and do ministry well, and even fight through to eventual resolutions.
I also have some very gracious and loving teammates that still put up with and forgive me when i’m a little snappy, grumpy, silent, moody, or passive agressively joking.
I also have some pretty awesome squad leaders who still call me out to better things and challenge me to be me – despite how much me is making it difficult for me….
– yeah. I’m a little confused and i wrote that.
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I tell you all this just to let you know that, yes, real me is on this race, and for all you peeps that always say, “You’re such a positive person Carolyn!” – you’d be silenced by the feedback i get more often than not which is, “Carolyn, you’re really negative a lot of the time.”
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This is me.
The good, the bad, and the ugly.
Leadership really presses us to be vulnerable and share, and… sometimes it’s hard to know what that means:
When i say what i’m actually thinking (the negative) then i get feedback (to be positive). I’ve felt like “Do they actually want to know me?” Cause sometimes i feel like when i be real, then it comes back to bite me.
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One super positive thing i’ve gotten from this race so far is a different mindset in the face of unpleasantness.
When hard stuff used to happen to me, i used to have two responses:
1. Oh, what did i do – or what am i doing wrong that i need to change so God will stop this bad consequence of my lifestyle?
2. God’s allowing this, but God please stop allowing it!
This now looks like:
I don’t like this (whatever it is that’s happening), and i might feel anger or sadness or something, and i start asking myself, “why do i feel angry?” Or “why do i feel sad?” and then i spend time mentally digging to the core of what’s really going on in me.
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Something my friend challenged me to do is rewrite the psalms in/with my own words. So that’s something else that i’m doing. Its called the Psalms Project – so thats why youre getting a few of them in your inbox. I’m not sending you all of the ones that i am writing. But theyre here on my blog if you want to read them.
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So enough about internal me.
What did we do this month in ministry?
What was that like?
What did i like?
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blink..blink..
i look over at the clock above the door.
6 fourtish…i close my eyes. Its warm and snuggly in my sleeping bag. The floor is hard. I roll over.
Tori is already up.
i can hear her getting dressed.
i quickly climb out of my sleepingbag and stuff it into my bag, and get dress.
Tori’s already outside by this time, and the roosters making himself heard.
I quickly wash my face.
the bathroom is a square cement room in the back room of the church next to the kitchen (which is a single simple gas burner, a wood table, a wood shelf, and a fridge – the pots hang on the cement wall on hooks). The bathroom has three nozzles with blue pipes. A big black bucket of water sits beside the porceline “urinal” in the floor aka squatie pottie. A bungee cord holds the toilet paper roll and a plastic bag for our used tissue.
Theres a shelf for our hand soap and shampoos and other toiletries as well as a little mirror in a mini green plastic shelf beside it for more of the same.
I wipe my face on my shirt and reenter the church.
i hang my washcloth on the window above my bag.
I slide the knife thru the slats in the front door and knock the latch loose. I replace the knife next to the door.
Quietly i slip out, and into my shoes – relatching the door.
And climb over the short wood gate.
Tori and i head off down the road.
i, with a large thorny branch over my shoulder.
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Tall horsetails and bamboos lining the road wave idly in little gusts of wind. There is a kind of morning haze that hangs in the air. And the still glaze of morning sunlight falling on and through strange trees –
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We keep walking.
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Each house is surrounded by different sized and textured property.
One house is close to the road and gated. Its grey and glass and could be found in LA.
Another is half like a village hut, fenced in with long bamboo poles. The yard is full of huge cement vats…some have water in them.
A laundry line sports bright and dark, new and worn clothing…
Theres a few chickens pecking away minding their own business….and a rooster warily watching us as he struts around.
And banana trees…
we are past that now and passing a banana tree farm.
Then a marshy place on the left and a large water tower on the right…and then the rice field brown and harvest cropped…
And then the dog starts to bark.
This is why i carry the stick.
Sometimes the dogs from around the village run after us down the road.
Then i gather up my courage – like the skirts of dresses i hate to wear – turn, and run at them yelling at the top of my lungs until they turn and head back the way they came.
I cannot take the lips back to eyeballs growling and barking….especially when we are simple passing by.
I crack my stick a few times on the road and the dog stops running and simply mutters a few cautious barks.
We keep walking.
Twenty minutes later, having finished the last of the walk across a muddy and filled with pot holes road, we arrive at our hosts small coffee shop.
Tori and i spend the next 30 minutes reading our devotionals, her drinking strong cappaccino, and checking up on any emails or replies to posts.
Sometimes she stares off somewhere with the morning sunlight streaming through her; her eyes like two green jewels in her face…
i snap some pictures, trying to capture the feeling…
Then we have to head back to start our morning of ministry.
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Its starting to warm up when we get back.
“Alright guys, lets start!”
Start means shoveling sand into or on something until your back is burning and you want to drop down, but you cant so you dont.
We start doing it, and we joke and laugh with eachother to make it go by easily.
If we aren’t moving the sand, we are moving gravel. One is not better or worse than the other. They still produce the same strain.
We stop when Chai comes,
He wants us to do something else for a while.
We follow him down the uneven steps and he asks us to move sand around – so we do.
Some of us move, some of us help tie bamboo into rebar like formations.
We dump sand onto that until its even and then he starts making a baby volcano with sand weve piled where directed to do so.
He breaks open a few bags of cement and starts cutting the pile like slices of cake.
Cut, pull, cut, pull….
until the pile looks evenly mixed. Then he creates another volcano form and we dump water -and then gravel around it, and into it.
And the cutting restarts. Cut, pull, cut, pull…
Mix mix mix, we start scooping it up and dumping it over the rebarred area. We take over his mixing and he moves on to smooth out the cement.
We work through until suddenly somebody is there, PeidMei – or sometimes a few ladies from the village – they always come bearing snacks for us. By snacks i mean lunch. Its always something delicious!
We are forced to stop with giggles and words in Thai that we don’t understand. We all sit around and eat. Most of the food is so good that we don’t know when or if we can stop. Would it even be polite? – while theres still food to eat.
We finish stuffed and satisfied.
We laugh and have random conversation – translated by Chai to PeidMei or whoever has come.
By then, we are all ready for showers which we may or may not have time for.
If we do, we take a shower. If we don’t we change.
I am in charge of the English lesson planning for the afternoon.
Today i will print lyric sheets to teach them a song.
I open my computer and finally find the file, save it to my thumbdrive, and after stowing my computer and selecting an appropriate stick from my stash, i head hot and already sweating down the road to the copiers.
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It takes a while to get there, sometimes i stop at a field for a few seconds just to enjoy its beauty and let it sink in: where i actually am and how i feel.
Then i keep walking.
My legs are getting tired of walking, and the ground feels so hard.
Finally i reach the copy shop.
I smile and greet the copy guy, he knows my face and greets me back, “Swaddee-kah!”
I make my hand gestures, speaking english he doesn’t know, but he gets the unofficial sign language.
I sit down at his computer, and edit and print. It doesnt take long. I pay my penny per page print charge and head off again.
We will all meet at the coffee shop to go over todays lesson before walking over to the kids house to commence our english class ministry.
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i stop at the seven eleven convenience store to buy a 50 cent sprite, and keep walking.
the heat feels like standing over an open oven.
the traffic wizzes by in wierd directions. Drivers sit on the right. It still makes me cringe a little bit, when i have to cross the street, and my head automatically rotates the “wrong” way – and i have to go against my gut instinct and look the opposite way.
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i arrive at the coffee shop, the air conditioning is sickeningly cool. Bah greets me with a wide smile. I greet him back with a matching smile.
I sit down and let the moment sink in. I have a little time before we will start.
Today we are going to study a chapter of Acts together before our lesson time.
I read the chapter and write down a few highlights.
Everyone finally arrives, and Jenny gathers us and opens up our time with prayer. Then we read and talk about the chapter. Today i hold myself back from sharing to give other people room to share.
People share what i was thinking – so it was good that i waited.
Then we move onto our lesson time.
“So, today we’re going to teach them Lucky by Jason Mraz. I have the lyrics here and i’ve taken out some of the words. I want them to work on listening, so this is a listening exercise. We’re going to listen 3 times. The first time i want them to listen for the first sound of the missing word and write down the letter that makes that sound…”
I go through my ideas. I ask if anyone has a game idea for our last 20 minutes together.
Questions? Everyone is good.
We gather all our stuff and head off down the road.
Another road crossing…we make it. Pass a few low run down abandoned looking shops (which aren’t abandoned). We turn into a side street with fenced in houses close together with various foliage. It could easily be a neighborhood in a latino part of LA.
A dog wearing a sweater runs out of a driveway near the end of the road and barks at us. “Hey Doyt!” A few other dogs ruin out and wag their tails happily. A few girls in school uniform clutching notebooks wave at us. We wave back.
We arrive at PeidMei’s house and enter the front yard. Already students are setting up plastic lawn chairs in a circle. They greet us happily. We sit down and start talking to the students.
“Where’s Neick?”
“He,…(they talk to eachother in Thai)..he at coffee shop help Sombum!”
“Ok, where’s Taiwan?”
“I here!” A hand waves at me across the circle.
“Oh, woops!”
Finally everyone is here.
We start.
After they all hear and write down the missing words we sing it together. Then we break off with our students.
I head over to the chesspark like tables made of ceramic tile and cement.
“Hey Taiwan! How are you today? Good? Ok? Bad?” I turn my thumb gesturing which means good, ok, bad.
“Ok!” He nods.
“Why was today ok?”
“I play soccer!”
“Aw! Nice,”
We go over the song, correct any mistaken words. Clarifying any non understood words, making sentences to use words in everyday life. We draw pictures to explain, or use handmotions, or talk thru circumstances to draw out meanings that are hard to grasp.
We laugh a lot.
In the background all my teammates are doing likewise.
Time’s almost over. No game today.
Two days a week we eat here with the students, but not today.
“See you later!” We wave goodbye and walk away into the dusk. “Bye! Bye!” The students wave us down the road.
We break off in pairs, some head back home to eat already purchased food. Some head off to try out a restaurant, and i and Cristina head off to Lotus (the local grocery store) to buy some groceries.
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We walk home in the dark, my stick over my shoulder, every once in a while a baby scorpion on the road or a few crickets jumping past.
We talk about stuff.
The dog without fail barks and i reply with a roar.
We follow the roads curve to the right, past the forest with the large leaves, past the marshy area, around the corner where the tall bamboo bends over the road and the banana trees russle in the dark.
We keep going.
Until we get home.
We lock the gate.
We latch the door when we enter to greetings of, “Ten minutes till team time guys.”
We get our ramyen and sit in our place in the circle like seating arrangement.
We listen to and give eachother feedback.
Its Tori’s day.
We listen to music and write whatever poetry it evokes.
We finish team time, and Jax goes to take a shower. A cold bucket shower.
Everyone does “their thing”.
We all eventually are in bed, – two in their tents (great bug nets) and one in her hammock bug net on the floor but strung between two chairs and a ceiling beam to give it body, the rest of us on the floor in our sleepingbags – Cristina on her sleeping pad; and someone asks for the light to be turned off.
I oblige.
I change in the dark, pull my sleeping bag from my bag, climb in and open my kindle app on my phone to read for a bit.
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blink…blink…
i roll over and look at the clock. 6:37 am.
i close my eyes and rub my face.
Another day.
Same schedule.
