I’ve been holding onto this blog for a while. I wrote it in Transnistria and it is definitely the most personal thing I’ve posted. Well, here goes.
To preface this month’s “picture blog” I need to explain that this month was hard. Hands down the hardest month thus far, and yes, I’m even including the Cambodia FBI evacuation.
The only way I can think to describe it is gray.
I felt like I was living under the weight of at least 3 bags packed with brick upon brick upon brick. Color and happiness and joy and light could not lift the weight. I could cry every second and barely held it together. I could objectively recognize moments as happy, experiences as good and maybe I could even put my burden down for a second or a few moments, but, somehow, they always ended up right back where they started. And as if feeling this way wasn’t hard enough, I beat myself up about it. The internal barrage went like this:
“Oh my gosh, you’re being such baby. Everyone else is holding it together. Everyone else wants to be here. You don’t see them crying about wanting to go home. What are you crying about anyway, things here are good. You have running water, a bed, hot showers, good food. You love your team, there are beautiful trees and flowers here. Sure construction is hard but it’s rewarding and sure, the city is a little weird, like being in a depressing time warp, but it’s interesting. Doesn’t the Bible say to “rejoice in the Lord always”? Aren’t you a Racer, who signed up for 11 months of growth and change? Aren’t you a Christian? What’s wrong with you?”
What’s wrong with you?
What’s WRONG with you?
WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU?
So I lived this way, with this phrase echoing in my head, bouncing back and forth like a shout uttered in a giant cavern.
All month long I tried countless remedies to try to fix myself: just pray more, be thankful more, be intentional more, more, more, more. Yet the weight stayed just as heavy and just as squarely on my back.
I’m crying out, “Jesus, Jesus, I’m going to drown!!” and my flailing hysterics prevent him from wrapping his arms around me, petting my hair and saying, “Shhh, child, I am your Savior. I’ve got this.” And He doesn’t necessarily take the bad feelings away. But He’s there.
The cutting words I was speaking over myself, I believed were the exact same words God was saying. I was putting words of disappointment, reprimand and orders in God’s mouth, but He told me over and over again that His real words were a song, a song of love and acceptance and compassion. He spoke this to me through thoughts, the smell of flowers on the breeze, the cotton swirling like snow flakes, a friend’s embrace. However, knowing intellectually what is true and believing it is two different things. My challenge this month is to combat the lies with the truth, combat “all the flaming arrows of the evil one” with the Sword of the Spirit. And no matter how much the enemy tries to tell me that I’m broken, I’m messed up, I’m wrong for feeling the things that I do, I refuse to believe. Because my Savior, my King, my Refuge catches every tear that falls and knows just what I’m walking through. He knows the wilderness well.
“Then Jesus was lead by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil” Matthew 4:1
So, to be honest, I’m still walking through this wilderness. But there are good moments and friends and my Savior fighting for me. It will be ok. I am more than a conqueror.
And now for the word pictures from Transnistria and Moldova.
Walking through the market with our newly met Romanian-speaking, Nicaraguan-American tour guide. Rows and rows and piles and piles of fruit, nuts and vegetables. Water bottles full of house wine that tastes like Welches with a kick. And the cheese palace. It’s really just a small, fast food-restaurant size building, painted bright orange and pink, lined on the inside by two long counters and a center aisle, entrance to exit. Sitting along the counters are mostly women, mostly middle-aged, with their scarves and gold teeth. And sitting in front of them are their precious wares, pure white cheese. As you pass by, each woman offers her knife to you and though Melissa tells us it’s all the same cheese, just different cows, of course I take the samples they offer. And, it sounds gross, but you really can taste the difference from cow to cow, kind of like the difference between Galas and Red Delicious. One woman in particular is especially insistent and she waves us over with her golden smile and invites us in with her sweet, wrinkly face. As we walk out, after waving goodbye I breathe in deep the smell of milk and cheese and cow and sweet and hard work and simple lives. Not too bad.
It’s the time of night where the dark is hovering, waiting to descend. Where features are indeterminable but you still can tell who’s sitting across from you. And everyone has a dark blue tint to them. The air is cool, like swimming in the tennis club pool and the wind blows as though it has somewhere to be. The big tree on the property over bends back and forth, cheering the wind on to victory, waving its leafy pom poms with poise and ecstatic purpose. I’m sitting in a circle of chairs with my team, my newly formed team mind you, having just completed rounds of Big Booty. We’ve transitioned to the slightly more serious segment of tonight’s show: feedback. As I listen to my teammates share their thoughts and feelings concerning this month, I feel gratitude rise in my chest like a freed balloon rising to meet the sky. Gratitude for their honesty and vulnerability. Gratitude for their commitment to the Race and to this team, when putting it in neutral and coasting on through could be so easily justified. Gratitude for each specific spirit present and all that they are and bring to this now bubbling team stew. Some I’ve been on teams with, some I’ve bared my should to, some I’ve spent hardly any time with at all, but that doesn’t seem to matter to me. I’m grateful for each one and the journey we are taking together, the last leg of a long, bitter sweet, 11 month journey.
Sent from my iPad
