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Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work
and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for – in order
to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house
you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it.
– Ellen Goodman
My normal
used to look like the above statement, more or less. I took public transportation to work and I
paid rent instead of a mortgage. The way
Ms. Goodman puts it makes “normal” seem more like the “absurd” it is.
I rotate
the same 7 shirts and 7 shorts/skirts; I’ve not worn my jeans in this 90%
humidity since I arrived in the Philippines. I shower at night before going to bed and wake up sticky. I wake up, pray with my family (Dunamis), eat
breakfast.
I’ve
never had such a perfect commute. Sometimes I stay in to minister to my family by overseeing team
finances, or to join in intercessory prayer. Other times ministry outside the family and clan is just steps
away: the Children’s Home, Cuatro
Christian School, or just up the street. And church on Sunday – the closest one is right next door.
The house
I stay in is never vacant, though sometimes, I wish it were. It would make it much easier to have hours of
alone time with God. My normal used to
be spending some nights in an empty apartment where I had a room of my own and
fiddling away the time I wasn’t somewhere else with someone else doing
something.
How long
does it normally take for someone to create a sidewalk through a muddy cut
through? It took a bunch of us roughly
four days.
How long
does it normally take for children to trust an adult? It took months, a couple years maybe, before
the kids at ULC were comfortable with me as a staffer. Here, it only took a couple days before they
started asking about me. They instantly
recognize me, and greet me with an enthusiastic “Ate Sara!” like I’m their
favorite.
They
speak Tagalog and I speak English; yet that never stops them from talking to me
and I don’t hesitate to tell them, “I don’t understand.” And that’s completely normal.
Would you
normally see me, petite and looking half my age, hauling precious, heavy
cargo? Yet here I am holding babies and
hoisting and twirling kids around.
never my best subject yet I’ve been asked to serve my family as the finance
person. That puzzled me – and maybe some
of you friends from home –a lot. I am a
person of words – I talk too much, write too much, enjoy word games and am
highly proficient in Microsoft Word.
But now I
crunch numbers on a calculator, enter them in Excel spreadsheets, and try to do
fancy sounding things like “budget analysis” which I think actually means just
making sure we never spend more than we have and save whenever we can. It seems like the only writing I do these
days are writing receipts for expenses like trike fares. Instead of tracking changes in a document,
I’m trying to track every sentimo and piso we spend and dividing by 46 to make
sure we’re still under budget.
Speaking
of transportation, it’s normal to fill various vehicles – trikes, taxi cabs,
jeepneys, whatever’s got wheels – over capacity. It hasn’t taken long for me to look back and think how weird it is for one person to drive 4-5 passenger cars alone.
I used to
relate with “normal” as defined above by Ms. Goodman. But God wants to redefine me, and now
everything I thought was normal is actually quite absurd, and what was strange
and weird is now familiar and. . . normal.
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