“Now it is a strange thing but things that are good to have and days that are good to spend are soon told about and not much to listen to; while things that are uncomfortable and palpitating, and even gruesome, may make a good tale and take a deal of telling anyway.” –The Hobbit, or as I like to call it, The Book That Got Me Through Botswana
The following is something that I began writing in Cambodia, my tenth of eleven months, about my time there. I never finished and never posted, but as I’ve been back and begun sharing my experiences with stateside friends, this month and all it held keep coming up. It was the hardest of the race – perhaps even of my life – and is one that I continue to unpack, finding the silver linings, the glimmers of truth and hope, as I do.
I left any place I’d ever called home for a year for Jesus and missions and service, and ten months in I quit praying.
I’ve never really been one for stillness. I prefer a busy schedule and I like my rest to be the active kind. I’m not great at creating space, but over the last ten months, and some months leading up to the race, I’ve practiced space and silence and stillness exponentially more than ever before.
I have always been an early riser and find nothing more sacred than the quiet and the soft light of the early morning; the light of day meeting the dark of night. These months I have risen earlier and used my hours of first light for sitting in more stillness and silence than ever before. I’ve come to draw from those holy moments throughout my day in new depths, to more eagerly seek them, and to not be so quickly satisfied, allowing minutes to grow into hours. Prayer – moments of communion with the One who made and sustains and from whom all things I need in this world flow – became my everything. I’ve grown in my ability to be still and to listen; to seek and discern truth; to fight for the ones I love dearly and to fight to dearly love the ones I don’t find easy or natural to love.
But, somewhere between April and May, Thailand and Cambodia, I stopped. I felt I had to stop. Somewhere between walking willingly into the dark, sinister things this world holds and in turn seeing new depths of darkness within myself; somewhere between questions of “how can I pray for freedom from something for so long and not find it?” and the subsequent question, “if even that is seemingly impossible, how ever is freedom and light for this exponentially more bound and oppressed people possible?” my hope began to fade, dwindle, and nearly disappear. After months of giving my heart and soul to people and places but hardly ever sticking around to see the fruit of that, I grew weary of convincing myself and too frustrated to believe the truth that my role was but to play a small part in a much bigger story. Between war-torn villages and vulnerable women and children, cynicism crept in. Hard realities that I previously knew only through glossy National Geographic photos and pages in books gained faces and names and real stories; characters and strangers became people I’d talked with, hugged, shared a meal or a drink with. The quick, cliche, heard-them-a-thousand-times answers weren’t enough to right the wrongs I saw. It began to seem impossible that the weight of the Light and Truth that I thought I knew so fully could ever outweigh the darkness surrounding me.
So I quit praying. I still rose early, but mostly because of the loud cow residing near my tent and as an escape from gripping nightmares. I rose early and used my own feeble strength to fight potent bitterness and consuming cynicism, uncharacteristic of the one who borders on radical positivity and unwavering hope I’m used to being. Shame over being an inadequate, doubting, un-praying missionary set in, driving me into further hopelessness and hurt.
Then one afternoon – one sweltering, humid, fly-filled, sunburnt fish-scented afternoon – light began to leak into the places in my heart that I’d allowed to grow darker than ever before. It did not flood in; there was no dazzling display. It did not eradicate every doubt as perhaps I hoped it might or even come close to entirely overcoming the darkness I’d become engulfed in. It was only a glimmer, perhaps just a flicker; a reminder that all of it is worth the fight. It was a whisper of assurance that the truths I held so dear for so long were indeed true, even here.
All I had come to know as true – that victory is already won, that I, in all my failures and doubts, am counted enough by grace, that even the worst of things can be used for the greatest of goods – remained true. Despite what I saw before me, despite crushing feelings of defeat and helplessness, Truth remained Truth.
The incomprehensible goodness that was easy to believe as I breathed crisp mountain air atop the Balkans remained true and real in the war-ravaged village of Cambodia.
The unconditional love extended to me at my worst and weakest remained extended to the American and European men I saw purchasing young Thai women for pleasure they believed themselves entitled to.
The unfailing faithfulness of the Lord and his unending enough-ness I’d come to know across experiences as vast as the distance I’d traveled were enough even for what was before me now.
And with that first flicker of hope came just enough courage to believe and just enough freedom to breathe.
I traded hours of prayer for moment after moment after moment of simply breathing.
Breathe in. “By grace alone.” Breathe out. “I belong to you, Lord.”
Breathe in. “Help me trust.” Breathe out. “You are good.”
Breathe in. “Cause me to see.” Breathe out. “Your light in me.”
Breathe in. “Use me to be.” Breath out. “Your light in this place.”
Breathe in, breathe out; in every breath, consciously depending on the One who gives life; depending like my ability to hope depended on it, because like never before it really, truly did.Breath by breath, things began to change. Not the things around me – no those will take far longer to change in visible ways – but the things within. Hope began to again make home in my heart, and what had been selfish anger transformed into compassion that drew me to action or prayer where action wasn’t yet possible.
As I quit praying and began breathing I began to know wholeheartedly what so much of the world has known for so long: that when found unable to cause great change in the face of unimaginable injustice and oppression, I am always able, at the very least, to allow the Lord to change me – to turn despair to hope, doubt into unwavering faith, and bitterness and selfishness into ever-deepening unconditional love. I am not made to fix it all, to heal, or to revolutionize. I am only made to fiercely press into the Lord; to all the transforming of my own heart he wants to do, and to then become that small glimmer of light breaking into the dark.
