No Bows
Hey readers! Sawasdee Kha (hello) from Thailand! I wanted to write a little review of my holiday season and what God has been teaching me. I titled this blog no bows because this holiday season seemed to have no bows… literally and figuratively.
My time throughout Christmas and New Years was quite a different holiday experience than ever before. Christmas Eve and Christmas morning were spent in a Cambodian hospital from a lingering intestinal infection. New Years Eve was spent with an eye infection. My time right after the holidays in both Bangkok and Chiang Mai, Thailand were filled with a not so urgent but still irritating cough/cold. And throughout this holiday season, we opened a few simple gifts, but nothing elaborate enough o be fully wrapped, presented, or tied up in a bow. It felt like in a time when I desperately wanted life to go as I had imagined, planned, and idealized during the holidays… it did not. And what is challenging is that I still cannot look back and figure out a purpose for this. I am not quite sure what I learned.
I have been reflecting on my desire for closure and for experiences to be ideal and wrapped up with a nice bow of purpose. But what I learned during this holiday season was that even the holidays don’t always come with bows. Desiring closure and idealizing experiences is a part of the human experience. Especially in a time of pain or discomfort, we want control and closure. I am being challenged (once again) to grow the muscle of seeing God’s goodness through the change in plans that occur through life. So through this holiday season, I did not want to be sick, I did not want all the plans to change. I hated it because I had no control.
Perhaps this frustration with the holiday season was rooted in a desire for a bow. For closure. A desire for the ideal. A desire for finality, understanding, certainty, clarity, and ultimately control. (lol it’s kinda all the same I feel like)
So maybe the bigger question of this blog is- what do you do when you cannot understand the purpose of something?
First, from a recent podcast, I have learned about the human desire for closure. We desire answers and understanding. We are addicted to certainty and cannot tolerate the unknown. Life is ambiguous and we hate it. The speaker in this podcast even risks to state that the idea of closure is a complete myth. On this Earth, we do not get to acquire full understanding of everything. I speculate that maybe the root of all of this is simply a desire to be God himself. To be the all knowing. This podcast laid out that perhaps the more we desperately strive to find the answers, the purpose, and the meaning in something that is difficult to understand… the harder it will be. Perhaps the more we search for our own understanding of something, the more we rely on ourselves. Then, we cut out the need for faith in our lives, and doubt can creep in. Jesus does not promise certainty. He just promises to be with us.
https://thedeconstructionists.com/ep-66-dr-pauline-boss-ambiguous-loss/
Next, let’s take the Christmas story (shoutout to HPUMC). Many of us see the Christmas story as a sweet story with a nice bow to wrap it all up called the birth of Jesus. Well, it is important to remember the journey that occurred to bring the son of God into the world. Mary and Joseph went through some confusing, ambiguous, and challenging experiences. The couple had to travel to the city of Bethlehem during the final stages of the pregnancy. When it came time for the baby to be born, they couldn’t find a place to give birth. Finally, because there was no where to go, they had to give birth to their son in a place with animals. Throughout much of this story, I bet Mary and Joseph had a lot of questions. I bet they wanted to find purpose and meaning in their difficult circumstances. But the main point of the Christmas story is that Jesus came. He promised to be with us and so He came. http://hydeparkumc.org/sermon-archive/
Lastly, I have been thinking a lot about the Christian church’s dependence on certainty these days. We so often praise God for when we can understand what He is doing. We give thanks for when we can connect the dots and make meaning of our lives. We sing worship songs about his simplicity, direction and clear love, but do we ever sing songs praising Him for His mystery, His wonder, or the uncertainty that faith requires stepping into? What if we praised God for all the things we do not have answers to? What if we praised God for all that we cannot even fathom about Him? We praise for all that we are certain in, but can we follow in faith within the uncertainty? Perhaps we should begin to praise Him for all that we don’t know, because with this begins an understanding that He is much much much bigger than us. He is mysterious in power. With this, we are reminded that there is a separation between God and man. We are human. We are not God. With this awareness, we are forced to face our humanness and we are pulled into closer dependence on Him.
So here I am in Thailand, halfway into my sixth month on the World Race. The ministry we are working with this month is a school called Fang Chanu. It just so happens that these few weeks we are here are quite obviously an unideal time to be here. During the first week here, the school was taking mid term exams so we sat in the classrooms to watch the students while they took their tests. This week, each class has a field trip that we are not able to attend because of the school budget. We do not seem to be needed all that much to teach English. So I am here asking, from a very human and Western perspective, how is this productive and what is the purpose? And this is where the faith within uncertainty is required. And as much as I am asking Him for purpose and understanding, all He promises is to be with us.
So to the question that I posed earlier in this blog…what do you do when you cannot understand the purpose of something… I guess my answer would be to remember that He is always with us.
Honestly, sometimes I don’t feel fully satisfied with the simple answer that God is with us. I realllllly like to figure out the answers to things. It’s great that God is with us, but how about that purpose? However, to illustrate the exact message in this blog, I will choose not the lean on my own answers, but I will submit to Him (Proverbs 3:5-6).
This is one of my most unorganized blogs yet. To be honest, I do not know exactly what I took from being sick over the holidays or how we are helping this school in Thailand. Maybe it is to introduce this idea of craving closure. Or maybe it is to remind me that I cannot lean on my own understanding.
…But I want to leave this final message a little “messy.” I do not want to feed this dependence on perfect closure and understanding. I want to keep the mystery. I want to raise the faith level that is required when we encounter these sometimes unanswerable questions. What I could say for a closing might be to encourage you all to take a situation that you do not understand in your own life. Do not to let your mind attach to a simple answer to this situation. I encourage you to sit in the uncomfortable space of not knowing the answer ~ and invite faith in.
So perhaps the “purpose” of this blog is to encourage you to leave the gift unwrapped. Just leave it there with no paper, no folded edges, no gift tags, and (you guessed it) no bows… and just let it be. Be with God.
– Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight. Proverbs 3:5-6
– “Where is your faith?” he asked his disciples. In fear and amazement they asked one another, “Who is this? He commands even the winds and the water, and they obey him.” Luke 8:25
