Little Gidding

With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this

     Calling

In its own way, teaching gives me joy. Often I'm a good teacher. Sometimes I'm abysmal, and sometimes I'm just okay, but I am good at my job the majority of the time. And that is satisfying. But despite this success, I still feel empty. I am so awkward about seeing my students outside of class, or talking with them about things unrelated to class. I want them to know I care about them, I want to love them, but . . . wanting something isn't the same as doing something.

I'm reading through Acts and it is part of the reason for the heaviness that feels perpetually on my heart. I want what they have. Their singular devotion to building the Church by spreading the gospel. When all that time they spent with Jesus just clicks and the Holy Spirit kicks them into gear, and they are helping people and healing people and introducing people to Truth. 

A condition of complete simplicity

(Costing not less than everything)

It is an unending ache on my heart these days that I am not made of stern enough stuff to follow Jesus. I have tried to give everything, and I have failed. I give lip service to loving others but I just can't do it. Sometimes I don't even want to. I wonder if I am a bit like Simon the sorcerer, who believed, but to whom Peter says, "I see that you are full of bitterness and captive to sin."

But what can I do? Though I am much afraid of living by "cheap grace" and even more fearful of the challenges of following Jesus, I am terrified of life without Him. What can I do but clench the few strands of assurance I have with all my might, whispering, "Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for He who promised is faithful."

And all shall be well and

All manner of thing shall be well

Flu Season

There was this one time my sister got proposed to on the train. That's a great story.

I'll give you the Cliff Notes. We were in Kazakhstan, traveling from our city to the capital, and we took the afternoon train, which is always pretty crowded. We ended up sitting with a former student of one of our friends who heard us speaking English. So he had three hours to figure out my sister is as sweet as she is adorable! But it only took him one hour. The remaining two hours I spent trying to alleviate some of her discomfort and make awkward conversation.

So naturally the topic I chose was death. The poor guy was baffled by my reasoning. He thought I was crazy to prefer a place I'd never been to (that might not even be real or might not let me in!) life on earth. For him it was a morbid way to live, embracing mortality and not living in active avoidance of the things that could do you in.

But the way I see it, when I'm lying there waiting to die, I'm not going to be thinking, "If only I hadn't sat on that concrete, if only I'd worn warmer clothes." Or, to contextualize the example for the western perspective, I'm not going to blame my demise on all the times I microwaved my meals in plastic or ate GMOs or got a vaccine with who knows what kind of preservatives. I won't be regretting the foods I should have avoided or the treatments I shouldn't have gotten. I'll be regretting watching TV instead of investing in people. I'll be regretting the times I closed in when I should have reached out.

You can try and duck the things that are bad for you: smoking, red meat, carcinogens and free radicals. You can eat clean and go homeopathic, and yeah, you might even be healthier for it. But death is still going to come.

I'm not saying it's silly to care about the industrialization of food or the ingredients in our medications, cos it's not. I'm glad people care about that. And I'm not saying you shouldn't care about your health and your safety, because you should. Honor Him with your body.

What I am saying is that we try to stay healthy not to health's own end, but to be of service. You can't visit shut-ins if you're home with a fever. You can't mow your neighbor's lawn if you're heaving over the toilet. Our priority is people. And if we live to serve people in Jesus's name, does it matter what kills us?

For me, admittedly speaking with the naiveté of a relatively healthy youth, I don't care what's going to kill me. Risk a little.

All this to say, it's time to get your flu vaccine, folks.

But a sojourner

I've been a law student for a week now, so I know just enough law to start obnoxiously analyzing the law's application to my personal life. One question that's been keeping me up most nights is the haunting inquiry of my domicile. Am I domiciled here? In Rhode Island? In Kazakhstan?

What I gather from the Gordon case is that in order to change one's domicile one must be 1) physically present in that place, and 2) intending to stay in that place indefinitely. Given that Gordon  was currently present in Idaho and had no immediate plans to leave, it was ruled that she could be considered a citizen of Idaho.

If you can't prove you're a domiciliary in the place where you currently are, your domicile is the last place you did satisfy conditions for domiciliary, even if you're not living there anymore. 

So what about me? I am currently present in Massachusetts the majority of the time. I have an apartment here. I work here. (So I have MA tax withheld from my paycheck!) I go to school here. But most of my belongings are at my parents' home in RI. My doctors are in RI. My church is in RI. My physical presence seems somewhat split between the two states. Hm.

And then there's the issue of intent to stay in definitely. I will definitely be staying here for the next three years, all year round. But after graduation, who's to say what will happen! It is my hope that I will stay "in the area," but as to whether that constitutes Rhode Island or Boston remains to be seen. I'd be happy with either. Further, I'm conscious of the reality that the future is indeterminable, and faith may draw me back abroad or to the most unexpected of places state-side.So would it really be accurate to say I plan to stay in Massachusetts indefinitely? I may stay, but then, I may not.

Mostly this just makes me feel very insecure and out of control of my future. When I was in Karaganda, anything was fair game. Even before I left Pasadena I was considering the possibility of staying in KZ for an additional year, with the potential for staying maybe longer, if the Spirit led, as they say. Would KZ count as my last domicile, given that I was physically present (no trips home!) and was intending to stay indefinitely, up until my decision to attend law school? The law deals mostly with intent, but the issue here is that, by grace, my intent is not bent towards staying or going, but rather towards following. My intent is definite devotion. Anywhere I domicile, I am but a sojourner.

An (amusing?) addendum:

The class wherein this issue was discussed left me in stitches due to an interesting lexical choice made by our professor and followed by the students, which revealed their unfamiliarity with missiological terminology. The appellate from our case was a Mormon, and considering embarking on some cross-cultural faith work upon graduation. Her intent to go or stay was thus discussed:

"Her goal was to get married or do a missionary." -- "Potentially she could do a missionary in Idaho." -- "But what if all the missionaries are in Africa? She would have to go there to do a missionary." 

It's okay, judge me, I'm immature.

Got class?

I love my neighborhood. I love what Bostonians say about my neighborhood, "Aw yeah, gang problems there some years back but a lot of families now." I love the unpretentious, it-is-what-it-is vibe, where businesses don't worry about looking trendy, they just do what they do. I love that in my two weeks of living here I've gotten more Spanish listening practice than I did in a whole year of living next door to a Mexican. I love that even though it looks kind of groady on the outside, on the inside it's a woven community, where people stop to chat with the mailmen and gossip hanging out their windows. 

Nevertheless, I feel a little bit like I stick out. Maybe I've grown discriminatory in my old age, or maybe I'm just more aware of incongruence after spending a year being the obviously odd one out, but when I see people "like me" in my neighborhood, I notice them because they're different. They're yuppies or they're students. They're dressed business casual, they carry some kind of work bag, often they'll have coffee in their hand. I feel self-conscious because I know I look like they look, with my sun dresses and backpack and travel mug. And if they stick out, I must also stick out. 

My neighborhood isn't the only place I stick out, though. Working downtown has its advantages, even if it means dodging tourists on the street and battling the onslaught of suits on the sidewalk when work lets out. But I didn't realize how little I fit in with this part of town until I went to a glasses boutique on Newbury Street. I gawked a bit when I greeted the receptionist and later the optometrist, both women impeccably dressed, with fastidious makeup/manicures/accessories and flawless personal appearance. 

My vanity flaring, I suddenly felt acutely aware of my scuffed up shoes, my pilled-fabric dress, my free college sunglasses, my bare and sweat-shining face, my six-dollar purse. In that moment I realized how indulgent I was being: I am not the kind of person who can afford to buy designer eyeglasses. I shamed myself for my foolishness in operating outside of my means when there were needy people on every corner asking me to notice them. I wondered briefly, fleetingly, what these women thought of me in all my shlumpiness. Did they wonder what I was doing there like I also was wondering what I was doing there?

I've always thought of myself as rich, and I think I'm accurate in saying that. I must be rich. I've traveled abroad, I've gone to college, I live in one of the more expensive cities in the United States, I'm getting a graduate degree. I may not have a lot of money in my bank account at the moment, but I have resources and opportunities. And that's more than most people have. So it was strange, very strange to me, walking out of the shop on Newbury Street, to feel like a stranger in this upper-crust part of town. 

In my neighborhood there are a handful of immigration law offices or resource centers for foreigners. I see these peeling signs in the dingy windows and I smile with optimism that there may one day be a place for me in one such establishment. And I know it's not the most lucrative of futures, but I am not concerned with upward mobility. I am not concerned with carving a comfortable and stable existence for myself. I assert (oh so naively!) that the security afforded by money is a farce, and I will not put my eggs in a financial basket. (Proverbially-speaking.) 

Living simply sounds like a good idea when you're cozied up in a nice apartment, eating Ben & Jerry's, with a dependable gameplan for how your bills are going to get paid. I clearly don't know what I'm talking about. I'm a privileged and inexperienced yuppie who doesn't know what she's saying. If I knew what I was really saying I probably wouldn't be saying it. Living simply is significantly less attractive to people who have no other choice but to live this way. But I have to remind myself what is important to me, I have to keep my eye on the prize. I am too easily distracted by nice things (like designer eyeglasses . . .), but my heart longs for those things that will never pass away.

Impact > intent

My sister keeps laughing at me, but I have to take sexual harassment training before starting law school. I've periodically had to take this also for working for a government home care agency, so it makes me wonder why it wasn't required for working at the computer store or for university or even at my current job as an English teacher, given that these are both highly cooperative team environments. 

The premise underpinning this training is this: you may be engaging in inappropriate behaviors without even knowing it. There's this subtle judgment running through the whole seminar, that the viewer may believe they're not a perpetrator of sexual harassment, but the viewer is deluding herself, and therefore is a major part of the problem.

And I get that, because why is sexual harrassment such a prevalent problem unless it is, to an extent, condoned by the culture at large?

Inappropriate things were said at my university all the time. If it wasn't dirty jokes in the back room at my campus job, it was ignorant and insensitive things said in group projects or class discussions. Sexual harassment is regularly depicted in the movies, not condoned but not condemned. I think of Bumper tapping Fat Amy's chest with his "Riff Off" trophy; clearly unwelcome behavior, normalized by its appearance in pop culture. Is it an overreaction that my gut feeling here is that that's not okay?

So I initially rolled my eyes as I tucked into this training, but it seems to have accomplished its objective. I'm successfully indoctrinated. 

One thing that particularly surprised me is the principle that impact of an action matters more than the intent behind the action. The guy who slapped my butt at work wasn't intending to make me uncomfortable, the students who showed graphic content for their class presentation were only trying to make a point by way of negative example, and I didn't feel harassed in these instances. It was easy to take them in the spirit that they were meant. But if I had've been offended, if it had've upset me, I would have been perfectly justified in confronting the issue. Because, according to this training, impact matters more than intent. 

This is wigging me out.

Mostly I'm wondering if this can be a guiding principle for Christian behavior, too. I know how often I seek refuge in my intentions. I absolve myself from so much by pleading that my motives were pure. And yes, man looks on the outward appearance, but God looks on the heart. He wants our intentions to be the best, He wants our actions to be motivated by love. Having our hearts oriented in the right direction is always the first step.

But what about when our actions aren't taken the way that our hearts meant them? 

My gut feeling is that Jesus would agree with this principle, this idea of impact trumping intent. It messed me up when I read the passage about meat sacrificed to idols more closely. Paul writes, "For if someone with a weak conscience sees you eating in an idol’s temple, won’t that person be emboldened to eat what is sacrificed to idols? . . . When you sin against them in this way and wound their weak conscience, you sin against Christ." As a lover of liberty, it offended me to be instructed to restrict my own freedom to protect the (erroneous!) convictions of another, but in the very next chapter Paul goes on to talk about unity in the body, describing how we are responsible for building our brothers and sisters up. 

If I use my freedom without consideration for what it will cause my brothers and sisters to do, I'm sinning. I'm valuing truth over love. I'm putting intentions over impact.

I feel pretty free: to listen to top 40 music, to wear skirts that fall above my fingers hanging at my sides, to drink beer, to disregard both Calvinism and Arminianism, to use colorful language, to speak in church unconscious of my gender, to vote the way I do, to shop the way I do, to eat the way I do. I assume that I have a lot of stuff wrong, and I trust that He is showing me, piece by piece, the difference between the opinions I hold in arrogance and the convictions grounded in His truth. 

My intention is not to offend the consciences of believers who fall opposite my own convictions. My intention is not to persuade them to my way of seeing things. My goal, or rather, my weak but strengthening ambition is to give grace rather than judgment, and count others as more important than myself. (Their "rightness" or "wrongness" aside.) And yet, despite my noble (though admittedly inconsistent) aspirations, I still make people feel judged. I still manage to discourage or offend with my flippant approach in areas where I feel free. In freely doing what I feel is "right," I tell others who feel my actions are "wrong" that it's okay to do things that are "wrong." Oblivious in my freedom, I am baffled (and even angry!) when my great intentions get warped into a negative impact.

To connect the dots for you, I am the frat boy making obscene jokes from the back of the classroom and feeling misunderstood when I get written up for it. I am the person all my "judge not" posts are directed at. I am seeing, little by little, just how much judgment and not grace is part of my worldview. I am the harasser who doesn't realize her behavior is making people uncomfortable. I am hiding behind the intent of my actions rather than owning their impact. I have camped on the side of true, not love, but it's funny, because truth needs no warriors, and love is really short on ambassadors. 

It's a really scary thing, to take on responsibility for how another person perceives the things you say or do. But that's the beauty of grace, isn't it? This heavy responsibility rests on the cross, and not on our shoulders. We can't bear the weight of how our sins and wrongs impact other people, but this is grace, to be responsible but not culpable, to be freed and forgiven so that we may be part of the gospel of reconciliation. There's no one better than Jesus. 

(Caveat: in sexual harassment training, the bright line is the reasonable person standard, and I think that can be adopted with respect to believers, too. Some things are just silly. And carrying guilt for things you are not responsible for can be incredibly damaging. That's a topic unto its own.)

Confessions of a wuss

It has long been a fatal flaw of mine how easily downtrodden I am by failure, or the simple disappointments of living. I don't have a lot of what the psychologists call resilience. I think maybe neuroticism runs in the genes. And lately, more than ever, I can't shake (transcend?) this self-assessment. That teenaged angst is back. And today especially, I feel like a basket case. For whatever reason, today I am overcome by dread, by fear, by defeatism. When I came home I crawled into bed and let the tears I've been holding back all day just sneak out of the corners of my eyes. Today I'm longing for wholeness but feeling so decidedly crooked. I feel as though I can see the tunnel looming ahead. I feel the warning, to hunker down, to take cover, to anchor myself, like a rheumatism lending those first aches before the rain comes. (And, I mean, that's the kind of thinking I keep freaking myself out with.) 

But the dull defeat of today unwittingly gave me a wish list, or maybe more appropriately, two fervent requests, things that I want so very much, with new realness and sincerity. 

The first? Gimme grace. Though I feel like a pansy for being overwhelmed in a life that is just so great right now, the reality is that I am overwhelmed. I'm going through a lot of change, and change is stressful, and there's grace for experiencing that. I'm back from a year in a new culture that changed something inside me. I'm starting a new job and a new school in a beloved but still mostly new city. I'm carving out a new routine and looking for new housing. Is it all great? Yes, I cannot suffer you with a complaint, it is all such a huge privilege. It's not that I'm justified in feeling stressed and overwhelmed. But I do feel that way. Does that make me a wuss, okay, maybe, totally. But so what? I'm a wuss. I am. It's okay. There's grace for that.

Which brings me to the more significant point: gimme Jesus. Though my pride howls, my regenerated heart rejoices in the steady revealing of my weakness. Because I am reminded, oh precious and painful reminder, that I need Jesus. I need Him. I want Him. I want Him so much more than when I feel whole and capable and together. In my wussiness I frantically root around for someone to bail me out, and who is there but Jesus? And oh fickle heart, what joy I have to know that wanting, that panicked and desperate desire for the only One who loves me so unwaveringly. The storm that rumbled around me today crept into every moment, and so in every moment there also was my life-line: Jesus, You are near, thank You for being near.

Lying in bed with the tears leaking out sucks, honestly. I don't like being a wuss, I don't like being neurotic, I don't being so easily buffeted but things that are so insignificant compared to real suffering. I don't like this frailty. I don't like this grim anticipation of a stormy season. But as real as this angst and stress is, so is the trust that it cannot overcome me. I need not fear. For when I am my own worst enemy, His faithfulness will not cease. 

Trouble is always on the horizon, if we're not already in the thick of it. Maybe I'm cynical, or maybe it's true. But, dare I bless the trouble? Dare I thank Him for the angst that has me clinging to Him? As Keith Green sings, "Up comes the strongest wind that He sends to blow me back into his arms again." And so there is peace in the calm before the storm, not that the angst won't ache and not that the darkness won't be difficult, but in the promise that my weakness doesn't change the fact that He loves me and He fights for me and He will never ever leave me.

Gimme more of that Jesus. 

Poetry and blogging are totally different though

Hello blog. Why am I still here? For years I've blogged with consistency about nothing in particular, and for what? I don't think of this blog as a creative outlet; I think of it more like therapy, catharsis, my way of pursuing humility in community, as weird as that sounds. But this still reveals the reality that much of what I post here, in a public forum, is deeply personal. And in this respect it is similar to art: personal expression shared with the masses.

I've been thinking about this because of brief snatches of a conversation I overheard between my sister and my friend. She was talking about her fears of sharing her music with me, familiar as she is with my excellent taste (WINK).

"Oh, don't worry," my friend encouraged her, and offered by way of comparison, "Hayley's writing is just mediocre."

And I think what he meant was not so much that I don't say much that's worth saying, but I think he described the biggest pitfall of my blogging, namely, that it's not for anyone else. My writing is self-indulgent; I am decadent in the way I gratify myself through my writing. In more blunt terms, it's selfish. I write for me. My writing is mediocre because its goal is not constructive, I just write, and for what? If I felt any pressure or motivation to write for anyone else, I probably wouldn't write. 

Sure, I hope others are edified by the clumsy way I process reality, and I hope that my struggles to understand faith are an encouragement to others, but I would be dishonest if I claimed this was the reason I blog here. 

But maybe it should be? 

I've been considering this after being spectator to an unexpected conversation inside Grolier Poetry Book Shop between my friend and the artist manning the shop. They compared notes on who they liked, who they didn't like (they disagreed on Billy Collins), and who their "gateway" poets were. During the course of the conversation Elizabeth remarked, "I like poetry that whacks me, that shows me what it is I don't see." And speaking of some poet guy (so many names, guys, I was so out of my depth) Michael said, "I find he really thinks about the reader, like his work is really user-friendly." 

And as a novice when it comes to consuming poetry, I appreciate poets who are conscious of how their art will be experienced, who don't rest on intentions but make their work accessible to the pedestrian reader, who make it clear what they want their work to do for you. And I also like art that lends me awareness, that transfers experience from the artist to the observer, one showing another what each was previously unaware of. It's edifying, and I'm such a junkie for stuff that has that kind of purpose to it.

Apparently, according to this conversation I witnessed, there is a lot of poetry like this! Isn't it wonderful that there are poets like that out there? And not all art ought to be like that; art's variety is its impetus. But I marvel at the thoughtfulness of it, perhaps because my "work" is entirely the opposite of thoughtful, and it seems to me to be a very noble way of creating art, particularly poetry, a medium so well-suited to explaining unexplainable things.

When it comes to art, I instinctively know what I like. And like I said, this blog isn't art and it isn't meant to be anything close. I'm not on that level. It would be silly to aspire to it. But cannot the same spirit be applied here? The servanthood latent in that thoughtfulness and intentionality that artists bring to their crafts, can't I apply that to my self-indulgent bit o' blog? Can I consciously curate my little place on the internet that serves and edifies others even in my own self-expression? (And shouldn't that be the goal of all my words anyway?) 

Jesus shows me new way to follow Him all the time. And He is desirous for every part of me to be devoted to Him.

FAQ on Teaching in Karaganda

How was it?

The only word that works to describe it is privilege. In the sense that, it was entirely a blessing and it was entirely undeserved. Extended exposure to a different culture gave me an appreciation of the culture that shaped me; it grew in me a patriotism I didn't know I had. The hospitality and warmth we received was baffling; with openness people welcomed us into their lives. I went to this frozen land to serve others, but abundantly I was served. It's funny how these things get turned around. 

Do you speak the language?

Usually I respond, "Я не могу говорить по-русски, потому что я была плохо учился." We took Russian lessons once a week, and . . . yeah. Everyone did their part to help us practice, from strangers at the bus stop to students outside of class, but at the end of the day it was my job to speak English, so, that's what I spoke. So I'm still a beginning in Russian, but I can say a reasonable number of things. And I know some basic phrases in Kazakh. I'm planning to continue studying Russian in the fall.

What was the food like?

Kazakh food is all about the meat. Russian food has a lot of dill and mayonnaise. The Russian definition of salad is very different from the American one: green leafy vegetables are almost entirely absent and brings to mind 1960's cold potluck dishes. GMOs are a hot topic in Kazakhstan, and I think that explains the cabbages bigger than my head and carrots as thick as my arm. It was also great to live in a place where very little of the food was industrialized and for the most part was farm-to-table. I came to really love the cuisine, and now I definitely eat sausage more than I ever did before. I learned how to make lipioshka, plov, and borcht, all really tasty. I'm also an even bigger fan of some more atypical proteins like duck, rabbit, mutton, horse, and dog.

What was the culture like?

The wonderfully reassuring thing about crossing cultures is that people are people, anywhere you go. You will always have basic humanity in common with others. And because I lived in a city and worked with people who had a lot of exposure to foreigners, the cultural divide did not loom as wide as it could have. I noticed mostly little things: the habit of greeting others when entering and leaving a room, the social acceptance of snot rockets, the phenomenon of Russian lines, the scapegoating of exposure to cold temperatures for illness, Kazakh courtesy and hospitality, and grocery store etiquette. Most of all I loved the emphasis and priority placed on community and relationships, on knowing people deeply and growing together through time.

Do you miss it?

At first, no. Not at all. Sure, my heart flip-flopped when I thought of the dear souls I might never see again, and I sighed a little when I watched my students' lives on social media, but I was too contented with being home to possibly want to go back. Now that I've settled back into life in the USA, and am confronting scary things like law school and moving out and The Future, I want to be back in Karaganda so bad. I miss being able to take public transportation everywhere, or grab a cheap taxi where the buses didn't go. I miss discovering new cafes and marveling at a developing country exerting its economy. I miss eavesdropping on conversations around me and rejoicing when I understood snatched phrases. And I miss teaching, a lot, the preparing of lessons and watching my students relish their linguistic acrobatics.

How have you changed?

This is the hardest question for me to answer. I ask it shyly of my family and they don't know how to answer it either. The shift is subtle, and difficult to describe. I was shown in new depths many of my weaknesses over the year, and in cowardice I avoided confronting them. That has changed my soul somehow, but in ways that have yet to finish playing out. I gained some bad habits, sure, and picked up some new recipes, but more substantially, I think I've become more comfortable with uncomfortable social situations. This is the result of exposure therapy: when you're a foreigner your life is one long uncomfortable social situation, and so I've acclimated to it.

What did you learn?

Reflecting on the past year always leaves me wanting to impress upon anyone who will listen this exhortation: just go. I am the opposite of an extraordinary person. I am not brave. I am not wise. I was not the ideal person for this job. I am completely and entirely average. And yet . . . I had an amazing year. I had the opportunity to be a cultural ambassador, to teach eager students a useful skill, to speak the truth about Jesus to people who had never known a follower of His. Just go. These privileges did not come to me because I deserved them, but because in His grace He freely gave them to me. If I learned anything this past year is that His grace never runs out. He gives it so abundantly you can never reach the end of it. And you can't encounter that grace and walk away unchanged.