("Thuki Thuki" is Tamil for “Lifted Up”)
I flew into Kuala Lumpur last Sunday morning. As the plane descended, I saw miles of trees, covering the hills until it looked like one great green ocean. The LORD whispered to me that this month would be different. It would be a beginning. The cage I’d felt so keenly in Vietnam opened up. Something in me lifted, took flight. It seemed my heart had finally decided to return to me, to become again something wild and untamed and free.
Sometimes I think my heart is very much like the sea.
We spent a few days as the squad. The squad leaders announced that this month would be our “Manistry – Womanistry” Month, which means that the men and women are completely separated. I laughed. On Talitha Koum, every month is Womanistry. This is normal for us. Our TK girls and the three wonderful women from Team Plunge were combined into one superwomen team: TKP! (You have to say it with some swag, people.)
The men went north to do the manly things that we women could only wonder at. I imagined them in war paint, carrying machetes, hunting their dinner in the wild, unknowable jungle, while we stayed behind to work in the city.
Half of the girls packed up and left for Penang, the Pearl of the Orient, the beautiful island in the middle of the Andaman Sea. I imagined them walking the beaches, making friends with locals and playing sand volleyball, while we stayed behind to work in the city.
My wild, untameable, and recently freed heart saw the cage doors swinging closed again. Not even a little piece of me desired another month of city life. I longed for trees and a place to watch the sky. I was jealous.
Especially when we walked into our ministry site and realized that this would be our living situation:
Twelve girls in one room is the definition of no personal space.
My mattress is the one over by the wall. Can’t tell the difference between mine and the next girl’s? That’s okay. Neither can we. The beautiful girl waving at you is Kearston, of Team Plunge.
That closet is shared by six of our eight girls. This is why the WR tells you to pack light.
Especially when Kenra assigned us our specific ministry for the month and I realized I wouldn’t be leaving the house hardly at all. Instead, I’d be spending my evenings doing this:
This is what the Night Shift looks like.
These are Sharon, Catherine, Angeline, Jaqueline and Reetha. Every night, we write essays, practice multiplication tables, and read stories. In the afternoon, we go to the park or play board games if it’s raining.
At first glance, this looks like the perfect recipe for making an introvert go completely bananas in thirty days or less. Honestly, it probably could have. No, it probably should have. But let me tell you the story these pictures really show. Look again:
This is what it looks like to live in community.
You learn to give grace for the girls’ five a.m. wake-up calls, for stepped on pillows and “borrowed” electronics.
You pray over each person in your household, by name, every single morning.
You can’t go anywhere without bumping into, knocking over or disrupting someone’s life and you LOVE the closeness of it.
You go to a church that is TRI-LINGUAL (English, Tamil and Bahasa) and learn to sing in all three.
You instantly respond to anyone calling for “Sister”, even if there are seven other white girls in hearing vicinity.
You give the hard feedback.
You have spontaneous, two-hour prophetic worship sessions with your teammates.
You have your first honest-to-goodness breakdown in over a year.
You eat fish curry until it comes out of your ears, and never say no to second helpings.
You spend more time around a kitchen table than you do anywhere else.
You drink no less than eight cups of tea every day because you plan on making full use of the kettle before you leave.
You don’t hesitate to put on whatever the girls hand you, because you know it makes them happy to see you dressed like them.
You read their Bahasa novels out loud, not caring if they laugh at your accent because you’re happy just to see them laugh.
You write a blog at midnight with at least one girl sleeping in your lap because she didn’t want you to be lonely while you wrote.
You fall asleep with the soles of your feet pressed against those of an eight-year old Malay girl who teaches you more Bahasa than you teach her English.
You decide to speak peace into a household at war.
You fall in love again, with big, dark eyes and a scar on a right knee that’s the same-same as yours.
You feel freer in a room of twelve than you did in your own bedroom back home.
You let your wildness come out in tickle-fights.
You un-tame your heart.
You love relationally, relentlessly, recklessly.
You just give.
And somehow, in the middle of all the crazy, you remember why you decided to do this World Race thing in the first place.
It was to see miracles.
Oh and Daddy, I found my Shalom place. There are trees and I get to watch the sky. Here it is:
“The one who refreshes others will himself be refreshed…” –Proverbs 11:25
