Before I left for The World Race, I got to spend a few hours one-on-one with my Grandma, and she gave me some advice that she’d picked up on a trip to China a few years back. She recalled a few members of her tour group who just couldn’t enjoy themselves because it was cold, and squatty potties are inconvenient, and jetlag is just exhausting, etc.
Her advice to me was this:
don’t be so distracted by your cold feet that you forget to see the Great Wall.
Now, I’m not going to China (not even for my Challenge: Asia month, we don’t have visas, we’re really not going), but I definitely know what she meant. In Nepal alone, there have been plenty of opportunities for “cold feet:”
Our house is made of mud and bamboo, and every step I take produces a small cloud of dust, which then just becomes part of the air that I breathe, which is already smoky because the rest of the world doesn’t send their trash to dumps, they just burn it. All night. Every night. Two members of our host family speak English: one is in Kathmandu (about 6-10 hours by bus) for a wedding, the other is 8 years old. There are more mosquitoes than I can count at all hours of the day, and the other night I took a video of a gecko eating a moth the size of its head right above my bed. Somewhere off in the distance (not far enough off), there is a man who does some kind of chanting or singing or something through a bullhorn daily at midnight, 4am, 5am, 7am, and 9pm. Sometimes sporadically at other hours (in the middle of the night, of course), but he never misses those hours, and consequently, neither do I. Our shower is cold, the days are hot and dusty, I can’t pronounce any of the food I eat but I don’t think I need to since it doesn’t stay in my stomach long. My bed is my sleeping pad inside my teammate’s tent on top of a wooden table right next to a wooden bench covered with a comforter to make something slightly larger than a twin-sized bed. I share this awkward tent-hanging-off-a-table situation with one of my teammates.
I just read that to my team leader and asked him what I’m missing if I’m trying to find the proverbial “cold feet” of Nepal. His response was a scoff followed by, “so many things.”
I don’t want to give anyone the wrong idea so I’m going to say right here that Team WALDO is LOVING Nepal. There are just a lot of things that could be “cold feet,” if you know what I mean.
If you were present for history or geography class ever, or if you’ve ever watched Jeopardy, or if you were not raised under a rock, you probably know that the Great Wall of China is, in fact, not in southern Nepal; so to follow suite, I’ll go ahead and spell out the “Great Wall” part of this analogy: It’s Jesus, and He’s wearing many, many beautiful faces this month.
The other day for ministry, we walked through rice fields for an hour before we stopped to rest under a beautiful giant tree and then continued to a small house in a village to worship with local believers. The Great Wall was watching 15 Nepali Christians sing praises to our Father before serving us tea and biscuits. I need to mention that this house was literally a roof over a dirt floor, but they somehow produced enough tea and biscuits to feed my team of 6 and the pastor we’re working with. The Great Wall was having to accept the intolerable compliment of being served everything those villagers had to give us and being unable to give anything in return but my time.
The next day, we walked across a river bank that was mostly sand, but was bordered streams about 8 feet across on either side. The cold feet could have been taking off my shoes and hiking up my skirt to wade through some water and then trench through sand for 20 minutes only to wade through more water and then strap up my chacos again…but, let’s be honest, a year ago I was sitting in a cubicle (or wheeling my chair in and out of cubicles trying to lighten the mood because November in Nothern Virginia in an office building, I learned, is not always exciting).
The Great Wall: On my way to ministry in Nepal the other day, I had to take off my shoes and hike up my skirt to wade through a clear stream and traipse across a dry riverbed of gorgeous, fine sand; and it was just part of the commute! When we got there, Great Wall: we were applauded by the entire school as they ushered us in and then we got to watch songs and dances that the children had prepared for us.
It gets better, Great Wall: We were asked to teach them a song and we decided on The Victory Chant. As my Team Leader screamed verses louder, the kids repeated them louder, and soon we had about 200 Nepali children screaming “Hail Jesus, You’re my King” at the top of their lungs! Great Wall: It wasn’t a Christian school, it was a government funded public elementary school, and we got to go preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ as a school assembly.
Honestly, I don’t even feel my cold feet. My mud-and-bamboo hut is precious to me; it’s the first place the Team WALDO has lived alone! Our squatty potty this month is fantastic, it has a shower that we can stand up in (granted, it’s cold, but we can stand AND there’s enough water pressure to actually rinse shampoo out of all of my hair, and it’s luxurious). I’m genuinely delighted here by this place and by these people and by the INSANE things God is showing me (really, truly, miraculous-style insanity. Blog coming on that, I promise). Jesus has taken such a firm grip on my heart that I sort of feel like even if I tried to look down at my feet to decide whether or not they’re a little cold, He’d throw the Great Wall somewhere between my chin and my ankles just to keep my eyes fixed on Him.
